Latin American Literature Commons^™

Voices In The Borderlands: Reimagining Identity, Cultural Belonging, And Dystopian Spaces In Anzaldúa’S Borderlands And Viramontes’S “The Cariboo Café”, Oralia G. Ramos

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Helena María Viramontes’ short story “The Cariboo Café” (1985) portray marginalized individuals navigating liminal spaces of identity, oppression, and survival. Borderlands/La Frontera and “The Cariboo Café” show how systematic violence and displacement shatter the self, pushing characters to navigate trauma in a dystopian space. Sonya, Macky, the café owner, and the grieving mother represent Anzaldúa’s concepts of borderland subjectivity, betrayal, and spectral haunting.

Sonya and Macky, two undocumented children, represent Anzaldúa’s borderlands subjects and reside in a state of nepantla, an in-between space of cultural dislocation. The café owner …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

The Wild Dark Or, La Oscuridad Salvaje: Illuminating Identity Through Failure, Worley B. Gierhart

Undergraduate Theses

This thesis, "The Wild Dark or, La oscuridad salvaje: Illuminating Identity Through Failure," explores how the narrative power of darkness can serve as a catalyst for profound self-discovery, particularly in the aftermath of significant failure. Drawing upon literary analysis and the author's personal experience of shifting academic paths, the study examines how confronting metaphorical darkness allows for a critical rebuilding of identity and self-concept. The play referenced in the title, "The Wild Dark or, La oscuridad salvaje," serves as a central point of analysis, investigating the interplay of theme, setting, and scenario in depicting this transformative process. By engaging with …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

El Único Pecado De Chepita Rodriguez, Maria G. Vielma

Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal

Cuento.

Burn The Sympathy, Gabino Noriega Iii

Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal

Poem

Christ Child Bearing The Instruments Of The Passion Technical Study And Treatment Of A Painting On Copper From The Viceroyalty Of Peru, Daniela González-Pruitt

Art Conservation Master's Projects

Christ Child Bearing the Instruments of the Passion (acc.# 228017) is a 17^th century Peruvian Viceregal painting on copper belonging to the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. The painting depicts the Christ Child on a flower laid path as he carries the instruments of the passion also known as the Arma Christi Paintings executed on copper convey new and challenging preservation issues based on their materials and techniques.. The work had been heavily restored and exhibited several condition issues, including significant overpaint and broad losses. The painting was photographed using multimodal imaging techniques as well as reflectance …

Islas De Resistencia: Pensamiento Archipielágico En Las Poéticas Canarias Y Caribeñas Del Siglo Xxi, Laura García García

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

This dissertation explores contemporary literary manifestations in the Canary Islands and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, with a stronger focus on the islands of Tenerife and Puerto Rico. Through an archipelagic approach, this study delves into the analysis of Los lenguas cortadas (2020) by Cirilo Leal, Boat People (2005) by Mayra Santos-Febres, Panza de burro (2020) by Andrea Abreu and PR3 Aguirre (2018) by Marta Aponte Alsina. The analysis states that these literary works build alternative forms of affective archives of archipelagic memory. In this sense, the objects of study participate into a sort of “poetics of resistance,” resignifying racial, ethnic, and …

Marvelous Ordinariness: Re-Engaging With Realism’S Social Function, Miranda Ochoa Natera

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

Against Romanticism, European literary realism of the 19th century aimed to provide an objective representation of reality through mimesis that could capture the truth in an objective way. Yet, its positivist approach severely narrowed down the complexity of truth, reality, and the mundane by wrongfully drawing the universal from the particular. A new way of engaging with realist literature from any time period, called Marvelous Ordinariness, rearranges this triad in ways that expand our understanding of our own and other realities portrayed. Using Alejo Carpentier’s description of “lo real maravilloso,” Marvelous Ordinariness unfolds in three layers that resemble Carl Jung’s …

Cuento De Todas Las Cosas, Mariana Romo-Carmona

Publications and Research

"Este cuento breve tal vez cae en el antiguo género de lo real maravilloso o, lo que se conoce en inglés como especulativo. Explora los efectos de la homofobia, el exilio, la enajenación, a través de personajes en un parque encantado, que puede ser el Parque Central en la ciudad de Nueva York." from the editor, Bilingual Review

This short story was translated into English and published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Vol. 57, No. 2, Dec. 2024, issue 109

Ships In Houston, Nadia Villafuerte, Julie Ann Ward

Undiscovered Americas

Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with …

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling Of Transnational Insurgencies In 1960-70s Us And Mexico, Tania Libertad Balderas

English Language and Literature ETDs

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico emphasizes how the narratives from the Mexican Insurgency, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the leftist faction of the Chicana/o Movement in the 1960s and 1970s articulate intersecting notions of resistance, liberation, and transnational solidarity. The comparative analysis of the testimonial novel Las mujeres del alba (2019) by Chihuahuan novelist Carlos Montemayor, the autobiographies Lakota Woman (1991) and Ohitika Woman (1993) by Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta writer and AIM militant Mary Brave Bird (formerly Crow Dog), and the memoirs and plays by the San Diego-based group Teatro de las Chicanas, collected …

Archivo Y Memoria: Una Mirada A Tres Historias De Mujeres Esclavizadas En El Virreinato De La Nueva Granada De Finales Del Siglo Xviii, Luisa Carolina Julio Gomez

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Colonial documents preserve information that allows us to know the local Andean history of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. These manuscripts reveal forms of violence that shaped the subjectivities of the time and the resistance of oppressed women. This dissertation examines the effects of slavery and the response of three enslaved women to that colonial violence. This analysis seeks to better understand and make visible how the intersection between racism and patriarchy impacted the lives of three racialized women in the colonial context.

This dissertation focuses on the experiences, struggles, and resistance of three women present in the manuscripts consigned …

Questions Of Canon In Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" Comics, Martin Dolan

Binghamton University Undergraduate Journal

While questions of misrepresentation are starting to be addressed in academia — acknowledging racial, cultural, gender, and artistic diversity — there is still much work to be done to close the gap between the literary canon and what contemporary literature actually looks like. These efforts have been a step in the right direction, but representation of unconventional literatures is often spotty, boiling down entire literary scenes into one book. This is especially true for those that offer formal or structural challenges – including multilingual and graphic narratives that don’t easily fit into a canonical “box.”

Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, serialized …

The Beehive, The Favela, The Castle, And The Ministry: Race And Modern Architecture In Rio De Janeiro, 1811–1945, Luisa Valle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation deploys a multidisciplinary and decolonial framework to investigate the architecture of cortiços, the Favela Hill, the Castelo Hill, and the Ministry of Education and Public Health (MES) building as constitutive of the history of modernization and modernity in the Centro (city center) of Rio de Janeiro, 1811-1945. The first three chapters investigate the distinct geographies, formal and material qualities, and populations of cortiços, the Favela Hill, and the Castelo Hill, as well as their racialization and essentialization by the “unsanitary” and “degenerate” labels bestowed upon these landscapes by the state. Traditional narratives and practices of modern architecture and …

Decolonizing Female Archetypes: Creating An Oppositional Consciousness In Contemporary Chicana And Iraqi Women’S Fiction, Semah Salih Hussein

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In dominant imperialist discourses, women, such as Iraqi women and Chicanas, have been marginalized in political, social and economic structures and have been manipulated to maintain imperialist exploitation and processes. They have been frozen within certain archetypal configurations. Iraqi women have been misrepresented as victims of their culture and traditions, and Chicanas have been represented in derogatory terms or excluded from mainstream hierarchies of representation. This study examines some counternarratives and oppositional subjectivities/ consciousnesses provided by Iraqi and Chicana women writers through their utilization of the legacy of a number of fictional and historical female figures. The primary texts analyzed …

Latinx On The Rise Mentoring Program’S Impact On Graduating Student’S Professional Integration Past Undergraduate Studies, Lucero Martinez-Salas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mentoring programs are implemented to create a space for skill and information transmission between a mentor and mentee. Mentoring programs are typically implemented in an academic setting with professors or peers acting as a mentor and students as mentees. Based on the under-representation of Latinx students in higher education and further career paths, mentoring with this population could be positively impactful to their student experience. This thesis focuses on the Latinx on the Rise mentoring program and the experience of the mentees with a focus on the Latinx student experience. Implications for implementation of such programs and their impact will …

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 …

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 …

El Laboratorio Cinegráfico De Pedro Pietri, Rojo Robles Mejias

Publications and Research

En su relato “Lost in the Museum of Natural History” Pedro Pietri se inserta en la narración como personaje y como fuente de historias inspiradas en la violencia de los géneros del western, los biker films y los melodramas. Esta aproximación a la experimentación literaria, la alteración sensorial y fílmica escenifica una crisis en la enunciación y la representación que hecha luces sobre las relaciones entre las desigualdades sociales, la violencia y la subjetividad.

Marina Y Cleopatra En El Escenario Teatral, Jon Paul Lawton

World Languages and Cultures Student Papers and Posters

Cleopatra and Doña Marina come from distinct time periods in world history— respectively, the declining Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and the age of the Spanish conquest. Literature has been inspired by these historical figures, creating various interpretations of this Egyptian queen and Aztec translator. Fundamentally, these two personalities share similarities: both women fall in love with foreign invaders and harness influence in the political arena of their times. For this, they must rectify their romantic desires with loyalty for their home countries. The plays Todos los gatos son pardos by Carlos Fuentes and Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare reveal …

Mordor En El Caribe: Releyendo The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao (2007) Desde El Afrofuturismo, Juan A. Suárez Ontaneda

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Abstract: Oscar, el personaje principal de la novela The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) de Junot Díaz, nunca se identifica como un hombre negro, pero sí como un morlock, o como un orco. Sus comentarios raciales vienen de la ciencia ficción, como cuando se compara con los morlocks de H. G. Wells, o de la fantasía, como cuando se compara con los orcos de Tolkien. Este artículo propone una relectura de la novela de Junot Díaz desde el afrofuturismo. El afrofuturismo es una corriente literaria y artística que postula imaginar el futuro y reescribir el pasado de las …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

Seeking Asylum In A Modern Society: Global Responses To Latin American Migration, Rebecca Dickinson

Senior Honors Projects

The United States is no stranger to asylum seekers and refugees. The most famous seaport in the country houses a 305-foot-tall statue of a woman bearing a torch with words from the poem The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus etched at her feet: “‘Give me your tired, your poor, /Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”^[1] The Statue of Liberty is a symbolic representation of open arms to immigrants from all walks of life. But if everyone is welcome, why do so few actually gain entrance?

US interventionism policies in the 20th century have defined the lives of millions …

Comparing African Cultural Retention And Its Effect On Racial Attitudes In The Music And National Identities Of Cuba And The United States, Lucie Turkel

Honors Scholar Theses

This project investigates to what extent the African roots of popular music in Cuba and the United States are acknowledged and examines if this level of cultural acknowledgement has any influence on the postcolonial social, cultural, and economic treatment of African Americans and Afro-Cubans. Does a greater and/or more widespread acceptance of African cultural retention and overall African heritage in a country’s national identity help alleviate racism in that country? Using primary sources from Cuban and American music and cultural periodicals, economic statistics, and political and cultural histories, I have determined that Cuba has a higher level of African cultural …

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

"There Was Also The Music": A Literary Analysis Of Puerto Rican Identity In The Works Of Sandra Maria Esteves And Judith Ortiz Cofer, Keyla A. Robles

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Puerto Rican culture often includes music as a method of expressing cultural identity. For instance, music has been considered a symbol of resistance, identity, and performative culture for many Puerto Ricans. This thesis will heavily rely on the involvement of Afro-Latin music in literature to determine ways that Puertorriqueñidad can be defined. To do this, I will examine how Puerto Rican writers present their identity in their works to define what it means to be Puerto Rican. These writers include the poet Sandra María Esteves and author Judith Ortiz Cofer. Throughout their literary works, they express several connections to their …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Una Isla, Dos Literaturas: Contrapunteo De La Literatura De La Isla Y La Diáspora Dominicanas (1965–2018), Jose L. Peralta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Una isla, dos literaturas.

Contrapunteo de la literatura de la isla y la diáspora dominicanas (1965-2018)

by

Jose Luis Peralta Genao

Advisor: Carlos Riobó

The literary works written by Dominican Diaspora as well as the ones written in the island have been dealing with a very complicated phenomena grown as the result of Dominican massive emigration of twenty century, namely the definition of dominicaness (dominicanidad). In the search of a broader notion of this concept the idea of being Dominican gets build and transforms in different Dominican literary spaces. By searching national discursive elements that construct that Dominican identities in …

Revisiting Juchitán: Witnessing An Indigenous Mexico Within The Latin American Archive, Michelle G. De La Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout archives of photographic collections, as one discovers the focused, artistic selective process of images that become part of a photographer’s collection, one must venture further and ask: will these choices be decisively remembered by an individual or collective audience or actively be dismissed, misunderstood, and denied presence? For my master’s thesis, I will be analyzing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s photobook, Juchitán de las Mujeres, a photo-collection of the women-empowered indigenous society in Oaxaca, Mexico which erupted during Latin American photography’s prime in the 20th century, turning away from a deeply exoticized past and towards a celebration of Hispanism as …