Latin American Languages and Societies Commons^™

Lecturas Ecoculturales Del Caribe Hispánico Y Francés Y Del Brasil, Mariana Herring

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

In this dissertation, we analyze a selection of works, both literary and filmic, in order to explore how they connect ecological realities with the social, economic and cultural realms. Through the analysis of novels, biographies and films by Caribbean and Brazilian authors, this analysis will focus, in particular, on how these works show the impact of the imposition of the plantation, the modernization discourse, the ongoing colonial experience, and the dismissal of traditional and local knowledge and practices, on ecological problems in the past and in the present. By ecological, we do refer to the interconnectedness between the human and …

The Heartman: The Impact Of Its Evolution On The Barbadian Cultural Landscape, Kelsia Kellman

Theses - ALL

The Heartman: The Impact of its Evolution on the Barbadian Cultural Landscape, examines the impact of cultural evolution on the Barbadian cultural landscape, using the folkloric belief of the Heartman as the point of focus. This thesis seeks through the analysis of newspaper articles, novels, graphic novels, short stories, and informal interviews to provide the historical and cultural backgrounds of Barbados, and to provide insight into the evolution that has taken place within society and how it is reflected within the minds of the Barbadian populace. In other words, how has the evolution of the Heartman affected the ways in …

An Exploration Of Self-Identity Experiences Within The Lives Of Afro-Caribbean Women Undergraduate College Students: A Feminist Phenomenological Study, Shana J. Gelin

Dissertations - ALL

The purpose of this feminist phenomenological dissertation was to explore the self-identity experiences of Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students. In doing so, self-identity experiences, ethnic marginalization, and counseling experiences were explored for six participants. Data was collected and analyzed using Simone De Beauvoir's feminist framework of self-discovery/ rediscovery where two semi-structured interviews were conducted for each participant. This study resulted in six individual profiles illuminating the voices of each participant as well as collective themes. Findings from this study show that Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students filter their self-identity experiences through their ethnicity; meaning that participants understand other pieces of …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Forgotten Immigrant Voices: West Indian Immigrant Experiences And Attitudes Towards Contemporary Immigration, Danielle Cross

Honors Scholar Theses

Scholarly work and media coverage both point to the negative effect that the rhetoric and policy of former US President Donald Trump had on the lived experience and wellbeing of immigrant groups explicitly targeted by it (i.e., the “Trump effect”). Typically, the focus has been on Muslim and Latino immigrants as well as those less-explicitly targeted but still affected by Trump-era policies, such as temporary workers. This thesis explores whether Black immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, a group notably missing from the literature of “Trump effects” on immigrant experiences, experienced similar attitudinal or practical effects as a result of contemporary …

Church State Relations: Religiopolitics In Chile And Uruguay In The 21st Century, Calley Overton

Honors Theses

This paper addresses the issue of Church-state relations in the last twenty years with special respect to Latin America, specifically in Chile and Uruguay. In my project, I will be looking at the presidential administrations of Chilean presidents Michelle Bachelet and Sebastian Piñera and Uruguayan president Tabaré Vázquez. I will use newspaper articles from El Pais (Uruguay) and El Mercurio (Chile) to examine whether political affiliation or country history determines the activism of the Catholic Church in these countries. I argue that country history has a greater influence on the role of the Catholic Church in a country’s politics than …

Gender Nonconformity In Mexico: A Study Of Community And Isolation In Carmín Tropical, Maddox Arnold

Honors College Theses

As media representation of minority communities becomes more common, it is important to consider how such representation reflects the real-life experience of the communities in question. Rigoberto Pérezcano’s 2014 film Carmín Tropical offers a clear view of the gender nonconforming experience in Mexico. Although Mexico remains one of the deadliest countries for transgender people, over the last decade many states have introduced legislation to advance the rights of the transgender and gender nonconforming community. This places Mexico in a unique position as the country finds itself balancing between violence and progress. Carmín Tropical tells the story of Mabel, a muxe …

Body Image Perceptions Reflected In Social Media: A Guatemalan Instagram Study, Sarah Harris

Honors Theses

Guatemala has faced a long battle with colonialism, civil war, and an ensuing, rapid urbanization. Still today, the country exhibits high levels of malnourishment while also facing an ascending obesity epidemic. This project seeks to explore how the obesity epidemic has changed body image perceptions in the region. Through the use of social media accounts on Instagram, I aim to analyze how Guatemalan influencers use their platform to explore notions of varying body image perceptions in a country where food is culturally significant, malnutrition has plagued many communities, and obesity is growing in prevalence daily. This thesis aims to answer …

Building For A New National Body: The Architecture Of Manuel Amábilis And Neomaya Modernity, Emily A. Cocco

Theses and Dissertations

In the history of architecture following the Mexican revolution, Yucatecan architect Manuel Amábilis (1889-1966) has often been passed over in favor of discussions of architects working in the nation’s cultural and political center, Mexico City, many of whom engaged in neocolonial and functionalist modern style to envision a modern Mexico transformed by the revolution. This omission is short-sighted, since Amábilis’s Maya revivalist architecture provides an iteration of postrevolutionary Mexican architecture that visually and ideologically manifests the socialist and proindingenous aims of the revolution while imagining a paradigm of modern nationalism that was not rooted in Western ideals. Amábilis’ neomaya architecture, …

I Still Love You, Despite Everything, Amy Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice seeks to reconcile the family—be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Addressing ancestral conflict, the complications of US/Cuba relations and my physical and cultural distance from the island I hail from, my work offers another world for communing with those you cannot physically reach.

Formations Of The Mayan Diaspora In Guatemala And The Us: Land, Migration, And Linguistic Ideologies As The Markers Of Diasporic Separation., Daniel Antipov

Theses and Dissertations

This work examines the phenomenon of diaspora formation among the indigenous Guatemalan population as a major identity marker in the new Guatemalan immigrants in the US. This work provides: definition of diaspora, its historical frames, juxtaposition of the self and the Other, and separation and differentiation of the indigenous languages

Cultural Memory Conflicted In Post-Conflict Peru: Constructing Heroes And Villains La Hora Final And La Casa Rosada, Reed Peets

Honors Theses

Building on this same theoretical platform, this project uses two critically-acclaimed contemporary cinematic representations of the internal armed conflict—La hora final and La casa rosada—as reflections of the ways in which the Peruvian cultural products of today are leveraged to reorchestrate collective understandings of the past.

Patteson, Joseph. Drugs, Violence And Latin America: Global Psychotropy And Culture. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 249 Pp. Isbn 9783-0306-8924-7, Brandon Bisbey

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Innovadores Guaymíes: Un Estudio De Caso De Emprendedores En Una Sociedad De Menor Complejidad Socioeconómica., Milton R.A. Machuca-Gálvez Phd, Mlis, John R. Bort Phd

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Traducción al castellano de la disertación doctoral Guaymí Innovators: A Case Study of Entrepreneurs in a Small Scale Society de John R. Bort, presentada al Departamento de Antropología y la Escuela de Postgrado de la Universidad de Oregón, junio de 1976. Traducción de Milton Machuca-Gálvez, PhD, MLIS.

Se enfoca en el cambio socioeconómico en los indígenas guaymí del occidente de Panamá. Principalmente en cómo los guaymíes reaccionan a las cambiantes circunstancias económicas de su entorno. La mayor parte de los datos utilizados se obtuvieron mediante observación participante junto con materiales del censo que sirvieron para complementar el trabajo de campo. …

A Quest For Dignity: Colored Women’S Anti-Slavery Resistance In The Eighteenth Century British Jamaica And The Reconceptualization Of Human Rights, Yuwei (Ada) Liu

Of Life and History

The public conception of the Human Rights struggle was a European originated post-WWII campaign, advocated by the white organization through the top-down executing system on the non-European country. Nonetheless, by historicized Human Rights struggle, I found that the concept of rights and the ways to reclaiming them evolved under the effects of time, culture, gender, class, and race. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, enslaved and fugitive black women of Jamaica continually asserted their humanities in the face of institutional exploitation through the day to day resistance, black communal and family solidarity, and organized revolts. This argument builds upon …

Historical Underpinnings And Consequent Effects Of Labor Exploitation Of Mexican And Central Americans In The United States, Andrew Elkins

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Undergraduate Honors Theses

The experience immigrants have today working and living in the southern United States is defined by systems that have developed out of lingering racist attitudes and reactions toward these individuals. The flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border has a long history, and it is characterized by patterns that have continued from early guest worker programs to the present-day flow of migrants, both legal and undocumented. Also continually present is the racialization of these migrants, which has often forced them to work and live as marginalized members of American society. This project will explore the establishment of Mexican American citizen …

The Work Of La Via Campesina Regarding The Intersection Of Land Occupation And Food Sovereignty, Josephine Drydale

International and Global Studies Undergraduate Honors Theses

La Via Campesina (LVC), a global movement that supports small and local farmers and their communities, is one of the world’s largest food and agricultural rights movements and advocates for agricultural rights in terms of land, ecology, human rights, and more. LVC is known for its establishment of food sovereignty, defined as the right to control one’s production and consumption of food. This new concept placed them on the map, accompanied by their aggressive editorial and advocacy work against ideals they view as neoliberal and food policies that benefit large food moguls while disenfranchising the small farmer. The concept of …

Writing For Research In Brazilian Schools: The Landless Workers Movement's Education Of The Countryside, Ana Maria Doll Ghelere Portas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This thesis, “Writing for Research in Brazilian Schools: The Landless Workers Movement’s Education of the Countryside,” examines pedagogical practices of rural areas in Brazil. More specifically, I analyze writing practices of high school students in public schools co-governed by the state and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), a grassroots social movement that has fought for agrarian reform in Brazil for over 40 years. I analyze research papers developed in the social movement's research program: autobiographies written by students in their first year of high school and research papers written in the two final years. My analysis looks for connections between …

Family Disruptions And Maternal Health In Covid Times, Donna Maldonado

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

AbstractPrenatal and postpartum women of the border region of El Paso-Ciudad Juarez have been experiencing multiple forms of family disruption due to the twenty-month border closure in an attempt to contain the COVID pandemic, partners having to find jobs far away from home because of economic concerns, and fear of familial disruption due to the threat of deportation of partners or family members. The purpose of the study is to explore the perceived effects of these types of family disruptions and how they are shaping maternal health in COVID times. This project included the analysis of fifteen interviews with pregnant …

Del Arbolito Una Cuadra Al Lago (One Block Away From The Little Tree), Tania Romero

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Del Arbolito Una Cuadra Al Lago (One Block Away From The Little Tree) is a an autoethnographic collection of bilingual/Spanglish short fiction, documentary prose, photography archive, and flash fiction. The work is rooted in my own Central American immigrant experience living in the United States and incorporates a variety of self-exploratory themes including the remnants of post-memory and transgenerational trauma, fractured cultural identity formation, geographical displacement, and the complexities of ideological ambiguities that result from crossing borders. The first half of the collection (Part I and II) is an immigration travelogue complimented with archival family photographs that trace fleeting childhood …

Zapatista Maya Literacies And Decolonial Civic Pedagogies, Juan Moisés García-Rentería

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Zapatista Maya Literacies and Decolonial Civic Pedagogies evaluates an educational outreach project led by an Indigenous grass roots mobilization in the high plateau of central México, the Zapatista movement. Using retrospective narrative inquiry and theoretically informed perspectives, this dissertation shows that the program of the Zapatista escuelita, Spanish for “little school,” is rooted in the Maya educational paradigm of nojptesel-p’ijubtasel, a cultural and political process of socialization at the heart of contemporary Maya peasant families. The research focus of this study offers rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies two interrelated points of insight tied to the overall Maya conception of the …

Student Centered Language Teaching: A Focus On Student Identity, Rachel Mano

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This portfolio is a compilation of essays that describe what the writer has come to see as essential topics in second language acquisition. It begins with a professional environment piece, and then a teaching philosophy statement focused on student identity and interaction in the classroom. This is followed by an essay on observations of teaching. The next two sections focus on pragmatic resistance among advanced learners and the importance of preparing learners for peer interaction. The portfolio concludes with an annotated bibliography outlining the main concepts associated with Communicative Language Teaching, a method that is commonly employed in second language …

Barriers To Public Health In Latino American Indigenous Communities, Wilzave Quiles Guzman

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

This paper focuses on barriers to public health in Latino American Indigenous communities. Indigenous people throughout the world are at a public health disadvantage due to a lack of clearly defined practices within the decision-making processes to plan, evaluate, and control finances from governmental and non-governmental entities in charge of managing health services. I argue that political, social, and institutional changes are still needed to achieve health equity in Indigenous communities and that these changes should go beyond implementing a universal health care program. I must recognize improvements made by many Latino American countries like Brazil, which prepared a plan …

Nominal Incorporation In Shiwilu (Kawapanan): Nouns, Classifiers And The Deceased Marker =Ku’, Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Shiwilu is a good representative of the Andes-Amazonia transitional zone, in that it exhibits a mixture of phonological and grammatical traits that are typical of the languages of these two regions (Valenzuela 2015, 2018). The present article addresses a phenomenon that is common in Amazonian languages but absent in the Central Andean families Quechuan and Aymaran: nominal incorporation (Dixon and Aikhenvald 1999: 10; Adelaar with Muysken 2004; Aikhen- vald 2017: 296). In this work, ‘nominal incorporation’ is a cover term to designate the process of inserting into the verb a noun, a classifier, or the deceased marker =ku’."

Lo Afrocubano: Exploring Afro-Cuban Culture In Music, Literature, & Art, Pre- & Post-Cuban Revolution, Grace Maffucci

World Languages and Cultures Student Scholarship

Grace Maffucci ’22
Majors: Music Performance and Spanish
Faculty Mentor: Dr. Monica Simal, Foreign Language Studies

After the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1886, Black Cubans struggled for equality and a place in a White-dominated society. The twentieth century brought about a deeper exploration of Afro-Cuban culture and identity through several forms of art. Despite the promise of racial equality guaranteed by Fidel Castro at the dawn of the Cuban Revolution, conversations about racial identity were silenced. This study delves into the music, literature, and art of twentieth century Afro-Cuban artists, notably poet Nicolás Guillén, painter Wilfredo Lam, and …

Assessing Happiness: An Evaluation Of The Latin American Paradox In The United States, Daniel J. Maisch

Honors Projects

Abstract: This research project investigates an array of pecuniary and non-pecuniary factors and their effect on happiness trends within the United States’ Latino population. Happiness Economics is a new field of economic study coined in the 1970s by Richard Easterlin. This new field of study laid the foundation for further research and, ultimately, led to the discovery of the Latin American Paradox. The Latin American Paradox identifies high levels of happiness amongst Latinos within Latin America and the United States, with low levels of economic prosperity. This study uses Mental Health data from IPUMS Health Survey to investigate the different …

Nationless States And Stateless Beings: The Politics Of Identity And Citizenship In Claudio Mir’S Mondongo Scam And Cheech Marin’S Born In East L.A., Rebecca A. Barnes

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

In the colloquial sense of the term, the word citizen refers to an individual who belongs to a nation, either by birthright or by naturalization. Therefore, citizenship denotes a political and a social belonging, an ideological home, and, in most cases, a strong foundation for the development of one’s personal identity. However, since nations are inherently artificial structures, made only tangible in the present day by a few centuries of recorded history, a philosophical approach to the term citizen complicates this definition. Based off critics including Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Fernando Ortiz, and Jacques Derrida, this essay seeks to explore …

La Contribución De La Ópera Bufa Manita En El Suelo De Carpentier Y García Caturla En El Debate Primitivista De Principios Del Siglo Xx, Anna M. Martija Perez

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

The present work is an approach to Manita en el suelo, the only opera bufa that Alejo Carpentier created in collaboration with the Cuban musician Alejandro García Caturla. The genuine friendship that united Carpentier and Caturla was the result of their identification not only in their love for music, but also an accentuated interest in all things primitive, together with a deep sense of social justice. At the same time, they are also united by respect for the African heritage and the recognition that it should have in the history of Cuba. In Manita en el suelo, Carpentier …

O Ventre Como Espaço De Resistência Em Maria Firmina Dos Reis E Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, Jessica Luana Bueno Dos Santos Ms.

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

The issue of violence against reproductive capacity and the right to motherhood in the context of the African diaspora in Brazil and Puerto Rico was systematically placed in the background, especially in the literary field, as was the case with the attitudes of resistance practiced against such violence. Considering this reality, this thesis compares two texts that approach such violence from a place of resistance, evidencing practices of insubordination common to such contexts: “A escrava” (1887) by Maria Firmina dos Reis (1822-1917) and “Matronas” (2012) by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (1970). Specifically, this study examines and compares the representational strategies used …

Las Voces Desde La Liminalidad Sino-Peruana: –Una Lectura Comparativa De Mongolia Y La Vida No Es Una Tómbola–, Jing Tan

LSU Master's Theses

Chinese immigrants first arrived in Peru in the mid-19th Century. Since then, the Sino-Peruvian community has lived through myriad vicissitudes. Today, despite its indisputable influence in Peru’s history, it is still largely invisible in society, just as the concept of an Asian Latin American identity remains elusive in the national consciousness. In the literary and academic world, the scarcity of a voice highlighting Chinese legacies in Peruvian literature is echoed by the dearth of such a voice in the criticism regarding works by Sino-Peruvian writers about Sino-Peruvian experiences.

This comparative analysis engages with two novels that evince deep parallelism with …