Latin American Literature Commons^™

Research Guide To Womanist Literature: Historical, Anticolonial, And Fictional Perspectives, Apoliana Da Conceicao Dos Santos

FIRE Fund Bibliographies

This bibliography was compiled for both research and teaching purposes, organized into three thematic categories reflecting a hemispheric, anticolonial, and womanist approach to knowledge production. The collection centers Black, Afro-Latin American, and feminist voices, offering alternative epistemologies that challenge Eurocentric, patriarchal, and colonial frameworks commonly reproduced in academic syllabi. It invites professors and students across disciplines to engage with scholarship and storytelling that foreground women's histories, theories, and creative expressions.

The first category, Historical Womanist Literature, examines testimonies, resistance, kinship, and survival of Black women under slavery and colonial rule across the Atlantic world, drawing extensively from histories of gendered …

The Call Of Cucurrucucú, Rachel Olivia Blair

Dissertations and Theses

This is a site of geologic excavation; where charged voices like porous monoliths and forked-tongue shapeshifters call out in fragmented polyphony. What lies broken or misshapen, what can be pieced back together.

What is purity when the body that is being inherited is drowning in murky waters.

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 …

"Quiero Ser Hombre": Grito De Libertad Y Afirmación Feminista En La Obra De Carmen De Burgos Y Julia De Burgos, Lizely M. Lopez Cordero

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

A las escritoras Carmen de Burgos (España) y Julia de Burgos (Puerto Rico) las separa un mar, las clases sociales y el tiempo. Aunque ambas escritoras comparten un apellido que está lejos de parentesco alguno, el denominador común que las une es la transgresión. Una transgresión definida por su desafío a las normas sociales impuestas a la mujer y por penetrar esos espacios que les eran vedados, mediante su producción literaria y el activismo social y político. Las muestras claras de estos actos de transgresión y subversión quedan reflejadas en la última obra de Carmen de Burgos, Quiero vivir mi …

Poesía Mapuche Y Vasca Como Herramienta De Resistencia Cotidiana, Paula Ruiz Santamaría

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation examines the work of contemporary Mapuche poets Adriana Pinda, Maribel Mora Curriao and Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, alongside Basque poets Leire Bilbao and Miren Agur Meabe, who write partially or entirely in their native languages— Mapudungun and Basque— as a form of resistance against the historical and ongoing imposition of Spanish. Through their poetry, these poets defend their identities and cultural heritage, invoking their matrilineal lineage to remember and heal. They also subvert traditional Catholic prayers by modifying them into invocations to Goddesses, casting spells of liberation of the female body, denouncing patriarchal violence and recreating alternative worlds. Their …

Remedios Varo: Peregrinaciones, Julia Condes

Honors Undergraduate Theses

At the time of her death, the artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963) left behind over 500 works of art, the majority of which were created in her adopted country of Mexico. Known for her meticulously crafted fantastical paintings, Varo underwent exile and displacement due to first the Spanish Civil War, and later World War II, which led her to relocate to Mexico, where she would create prolifically for the remainder of her life. This paper will examine the effect of those experiences on the artist and the work she produced, attesting to Varo’s ability to translate complex emotions regarding the human …

El Pasado Está Enfrente: Descifrando La Importancia De Las Perspectivas Femeninas A Través De Tiempo En “Mujer Negra” Y Nostalgia De La Luz, Catherine Van Wey

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Las perspectivas de las mujeres han sido frecuentemente ignoradas o censuradas a lo largo de la historia, aunque las mujeres son la base de la sociedad. Eso no quiere decir que las perspectivas femeninas no existan o no puedan encontrarse en el pasado. Según la teoría del punto de vista feminista (Feminist Standpoint Theory), lo cual es detallado en muchos de los argumentos escritos por teoristas Rita Segato y Maria Lugones, las experiencias y conocimientos de las mujeres son esenciales para entender la sociedad. Esta teoría sostiene que las mujeres, debido a su posición marginada en la sociedad, tienen ideas …

2024 Conference Program, Georgia Southern University

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

2024 Conference Program

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 …

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 …

Narrar El Final De Los Tiempos: Misantropía Y Liberación En Dos “Cuentos Atómicos” Del Salvadoreño Álvaro Menen Desleal (1960s), David Díaz Arias

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

El presente artículo analiza una parte de la obra de ciencia ficción del salvadoreño Álvaro Menen Desleal. Para eso, se concentra en uno de los temas que, aunque no dominante, sí es abordado de forma crítica y sagaz por parte de ese autor: el exterminio de la humanidad a partir de una hecatombe nuclear. Así, se estudian dos cuentos publicados por Menen Desleal en 1969 y que forman parte de su premiado texto Una cuerda de nylon y oro y otros cuentos maravillosos. Los cuentos son el que le da nombre a esa antología de relatos y “Hacer el …

Análisis De La Mujer: Revista Mensual De Literatura Y Variedades, La Primera Revista Ecuatoriana Escrita Por Mujeres (1905-1906), María Alejandra González Pástor

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The first magazine written by women in Ecuador is a time machine that allows knowing firsthand the thinking of women in the early twentieth century. It is also a catalyst to promote writing and searching for female identity. La Mujer: Revista Mensual de Literatura y Variedades is an unprecedented project conceived by the first Ecuadorian journalist, Zoila Ugarte. She was a multifaceted woman with feminist ideas who encouraged a group of women to express their ideas through literature and journalism.

This research analyzes the literary texts and articles of the magazine from a gender perspective and addresses historical aspects of …

Gender Violence In La Casa De La Belleza By Melba Escobar, Melinda Peacock

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

During the last decade, there has been a revolution in Colombian literature. Whereas previous literature dealt with women within gender stereotypes, now there are more authors who write from a feminine perspective. One of them is Melba Escobar, author of La casa de la belleza. This novel tells the stories of Karen Valdés, a single mother and beautician who, after being raped, suffers symptoms of a mental illness; Sabrina Guzmán, an adolescent whom her boyfriend drugs, rapes, and murders; and Lucía Ramelli, whose ex-husband not only was unfaithful to her, but also took credit for the books that she …

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 …

Articulación Y Desarticulación Opresora En Dos Novelas: Una Lectura Abigarrada De La Genara De Rosina Conde Y La Giganta De Patricia Laurent Kullick, Angélica Rey Acevedo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

La presente investigación tiene por objetivo interpretar a las novelas La Genara de Rosina Conde y La giganta de Patricia Laurent Kullick como relatos explicativos donde tienen lugar una praxis de intelectualidad orgánica, de quehacer anti-hegemónico; feminista, de quehacer anti-opresor; y ch’ixi, de quehacer anti-colonizador. Busco una lectura crítica para identificar claves del posicionamiento de ambas novelas respecto a discursos hegemónicos que producen relaciones sociales de opresión.

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 …

We: Women In A Traditional (Zapotec) World, Ida Day

Modern Languages Faculty Research

This chapter focuses on the female roles and relationships in Natalia Toledo Paz’s bilingual collection of poems, Ca gunaa gubidxa, ca gunaa guiiba’ risaca/Mujeres de sol, mujeres de oro (2002). The author sets her poems in a world, where all the themes and plots are performed by women. Natalia is the daughter of Francisco Toledo, a prominent Mexican painter, sculptor, and graphic artist, and Olga de Paz, a Zapotec weaver and hammock maker. In 2004, she was awarded a prestigious Nezahualcóyotl Prize for Indigenous-Language Literature. Her bilingual works (Zapotec/Spanish) have been recognized in numerous anthologies all over the world and …

First-Person Politics: Strategies Of Latin/X American Women To Change The Neoliberal Requirements For Empowerment And Inclusion One Share, Like, Subscribe At A Time, Marlee Northcutt

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This project investigates the strategies of Latin/x American women who have used their voices and influence in the media to break barriers, enter spaces that have excluded them, and advocate for changes so that young girls like them do not have to face these same limitations. Chapter One investigates politicians who, from their political power positions, interweave personal stories with their accomplishments to provide role models for these careers. Chapter Two identifies actors who combine their personal stories with activist causes to alter representation in TV and film. The YouTubers in Chapter Three bolster a rhetoric of empowerment to encourage …

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 …

Ciudad, Movimiento Y Transformación: "23 Segundos" En Dos Tiempos, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

En este trabajo se realiza una lectura del film uruguayo 23 Segundos (2014, dirigido por Dimitry Rudakov). Un punto de entrada al mismo nos remite a los conceptos de acción/inacción, desde donde la intriga toma cuerpo y comienza a formarse. A partir de esto, se focaliza en el personaje principal de Emiliano, y en su recorrido por Montevideo, recorrido que se transforma a lo largo de la película en una forma de adquisición de conocimiento sobre sí mismo y los demás. Esto lo lleva ultimamente a un cambio de vida, a la superación de la alienación y la rutina. Es …

2021 Seccll Conference Program, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Conference program for the 2021 SECCLL.

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 …

María Teresa Ramírez Nieva: La Griot De Los Ancestros Y Las Ancestras, Catalina Rojas

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

María Teresa Ramírez Nieva: La Griot de los Ancestros y las Ancestras

La poesía de María Teresa Ramírez es una poesía de resistencia y cimarronaje, de reafirmación de la vida y la libertad, de “recuperación y defensa de los territorios ancestrales” que han sido históricamente amenazados y usurpados en un Pacífico colombiano de abandono, guerra territorial, desplazamiento y muerte. Es a través de sus obras La noche de mi piel (1988), Flor de Palenque (2008), Abalenga (2008), Mabungú Triunfo (2013), Mabungú Triunfo: Cosmogonía Africana Tomo II (2016), como se eleva la voz poética de la ancestralidad Pacífica alrededor de la …

Beyond "Viuda De": Practical Approaches To Promoting Mexican Books Printed At Women-Owned Businesses, Taylor Leigh, Colleen Barrett

Library Presentations

Women print shop owners have existed for much longer than most people realize; the first examples in Mexico date to the seventeenth century. Unfortunately, these texts are not always clearly described in a way that is findable beyond searching “viuda de.” Though many title-pages describe their businesses in terms of being a widow of their husband, these business owners deserve credit for their entrepreneurial efforts and should be findable in their own right. This poster would highlight the strategies and steps taken by a Hispanic Studies Librarian and a Rare Books Librarian to better promote these types of works held …

The Validity Of Online Learning And Teaching Of A Spanish Using An Online Delivery Mode, Rosalind Arthur

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

Incorporating Online learning as an optional delivery mode of instruction in tertiary institutions with traditional campuses has been the trend in recent years. The question is whether it should be offered universally or with some discrimination. The presenter teaches Spanish at an HBCU which has been offering some general education courses online during the summer.

Needless to say, while online programs are lucrative, it behooves the instructors and institutions to ascertain the viability of the product in terms of the learning needs of the target population. Must enrollment into these courses be open to all or be vetted in order …

El Asadito Y El Cumple: Personajes Y Espacio Como Formas De Significado, Mariana Pensa

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

El asadito y El cumple: personajes y espacio como formas de significado

En este ensayo se realiza una aproximación a los filmes El asadito (2000) y El cumple (2002) ambos dirigidos por el cineasta argentino Gustavo Postiglioni. Nos detendremos especialmente en la función connotadora del espacio y los personajes en los dos filmes, que remite tanto a una atmósfera espacial sofocante como a personajes alienados, anclados en una innacción existencial.

Observaremos cómo se va construyendo la tensión, expresando así la radiografía de un grupo de personajes que tienen una memoria común, y que se constituyen en síntomas y a la …

Conference Program 2020, Seccll Conference

South East Coastal Conference on Languages & Literatures (SECCLL)

SECCLL Conference Program for 2020

Místicas Y Disidentes: Feminismo Teresiano En La Literatura Latinoamericana Del Siglo Xx, Almudena Vidorreta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation addresses for the first time a gender-based approach to the understanding of Spanish mystic Saint Teresa’s role as a symbol of feminism, language identity and creative writing theorization in 20^th-century Latin American literature. Saint Teresa (1515-1582) was not only a model in her role as an intellectual for authors such as Delmira Agustini (1886-1914), Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979), Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), Juana de Ibarborou (1892-1979), Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921), Dulce María Loynaz (1902-1997), Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993), Mercedes García Tudurí (1904-1997) y Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), among others, but also a literary referent for those who …

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 …

Science Under The Microscope And Legality On Trial: How Female Authors In Latin America Confront And Challenge The Patriarchal Control Of Science And Legality In The Representation Of Women, Anna Bellum

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of works by eight Latin American female authors in order to explore how they represent the process of the social construction of women’s identities and roles in the male-dominated social, institutional, familial, and personal spaces that force women into particular positions of subordination. This analysis will focus, in particular, on how women writers represent the hegemonic systems of legality and science in order to highlight their role in the reproduction of values, practices, and institutions that maintain male control and female exploitation.

Each of the authors I analyze addresses the construction of women’s …