Latin American Studies Commons^™

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 …

Community And Idolatry: San Francisco Cajonos, Yalalag, And Betaza Through The Criminal Court Of Villa Alta, 1700-1704, Jessica Mitchell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The trials of San Francisco Cajonos and Betaza and Yalálag heard in Villa Alta’s criminal court depict many important facets of life in Colonial Oaxaca, and they especially paint the picture of community, how it was defined and how it operated in reality. Looking specifically at these two rich examples in Villa Alta’s criminal court, at the time, idolatry – native religion, rituals, and devotions defined by Catholics as idolatrous -- helped shape the lines of community and defined who belonged in which space. It also highlights how betrayal and revenge were construed by a community and the response for …

Still Dreaming Of You: Selena's Discourse With And Continuing Impact On American Musical Culture, Hannah Lastra

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Selena Quintanilla Perez continues to circulate in popular culture, including MAC cosmetic lines, a Netflix series, and podcasts. As a result, her cultural influence continues to be passed on and shared with future generations. This thesis focuses on three aspects of Selena and Selena y Los Dinos: Selena’s music, Selena’s performance aesthetic, and Selena’s fandom today. Chapter 1 focuses on Selena y Los Dinos’ American musical influences, particularly studying the songs “Enamorada de ti,” “Missing my Baby,” and “Fotos y Recuerdos” and the presence of American genres of new jack swing, R&B, and rock within them. Chapter 2 focuses on …

La Voz Spring 2021, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Conference Brings Cuba Scholars to UConn
• Performance Art in the Crossfire
• An Evening with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• Jesús Ramos-Kittrell Wins AAUP Teaching Innovation Award
• Alumni Contribute to State Latinx History Curriculum Initiative
• New Study: School Employees Help Farmworker Families Access Health Care

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 …

Pedagogies Of Latin American Independence: An English-Speaking Analysis, Abigail Townend

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay………………………………3

II. Primary Documents and Headnotes………..20

III. Textbook Critique……………………………...36

IV. New Textbook Entry…………………………..40

V. Bibliography…………………………………....43

La Voz Winter 2021, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue you will find:

• MA Student Researches Takeover in Providence Schools
• Indigenous Language Survival in Colombian Amazon
• "Rise of the Latinx Vote"
• La Colectiva Virtual Conversation
• Mark Healey Wins SCHARP Award

In The Belly Of The Beast: The Legacy Of Puerto Rican Women In The Development Of Anti- Imperialist Feminism, Grace Amato

Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectionality Studies Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

Deported Veterans: The Unintended Consequences Of “Good Moral Character”, Jonathan Deras

Master's Theses

The purpose of this research is to argue that U.S. immigration policy, specifically the 1996 IIRIRA (also known as IIRAIRA), needs to change regarding the legal treatment of immigrant U.S. military veteran deportees due to the following concepts. The first concept is to articulate how the criminalization of immigration, and how the military system intersects to facilitate the Deportation of U.S veterans. A key concept in this analysis is the standard of “good moral character” set by the U.S. government that enlistees need to meet to be accepted into the military; this standard is also used against immigrant veterans during …

Her Story: Ecuadorian Women In New York City, Benjamin Chambers

Capstones

My Capstone Project is an 80-photo reportage about women of Ecuadorian origin living in New York City, including text and video elements. The project is broken down into a general introduction; four photo stories each with captions and story text; and two videos. The project is entitled:

HER STORY: ECUADORIAN WOMEN IN NEW YORK CITY

https://www.chambersphotojournalist.com/capstone/

Black Dancers And Musicians Performing Afro-Christian Identity In Early Modern Spain And Portugal, Miguel A. Valerio

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

This article discusses several early modern Spanish and Portuguese texts that describe Afro-Iberians’ festive and confraternal practices in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. While scholars have contended that the early modern Iberian states and church used conversion and confraternities, or lay Catholic brotherhoods, to integrate Afrodescendants to Iberian society, by linking Afro-Iberians’ festive practices to their confraternities, the article contends that these texts underscore how Afrodescendants adapted their African cosmologies and festive customs in the diaspora, rather than totally assimilate to Iberian culture. The article also triangulates Afrodescendants’ festive practices in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, suggesting that Afrodescendants …

A Post-Occidental Ontology Of Desire And Subjective Return In Gregorio Martínez's Crónica De Músicos Y Diablos, Elizabeth Vargas

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

How can this inherent force facilitate the parallel development of material and subjective production? Can we rely on desire and the subject's loss of the self to the environment as ways to think about freedom and slavery today? Before addressing these questions through Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of desire and returns, I shall introduce a summary of the novel Crónica de músicos y diablos by Gregorio Martínez (1991). I then contextualize Martínez-Navarro's literary connections and his role in ongoing economic trends that make authors agents of thematic deterritorializations, a process that led Martínez-Navarro to be part of a tension with …

Mestizaje/Hybridity (Mesti-Bridity) As Struggle, Contest And Subversion In Plácido (1982) By Gerardo Fulleda León, Darrelstan Fitzwarren Ferguson

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

The major objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the author, Gerardo Fulleda León, problematises the concept of hybridity in his 1989 dramatic work, Plácido. It aims to identify the different ways in which race, class, nationhood, and even gender, all come to figure nineteenth-century Cuba as a hybrid state enduring struggle and contest. It uses Homi K. Bhabha's understanding of hybridity as a "third space" that constantly dialogues and clashes with its constituent selves, alongside Peter Wade's similar reasoning of the term as precisely a process of "struggle and contest". It finds that Fulleda …

Doing Latinidad While Black: Afro-Latino Identity And Belonging, Vianny Jasmin Nolasco

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study centers on the experiences of Afro-Latinos and how the racialization of Latino as a distinctly ‘brown’ identity—thereby excluding Blackness—shapes their identity and sense of belonging within Latino communities and spaces. Through in-depth interviews with eight Afro-Latinos, and using West and Fenstermaker’s (1995) work, ‘Doing Difference’, I find that the invisibility of Blackness, being categorized as Black, and therefore not Latino, and the negative meanings attached to Blackness may make it difficult for Afro-Latinos to come into their racial and ethnic identity and feel like they belong in Latino spaces. However, these experiences are also an important step to …

The Socio-Demographic Factors Influencing Ntca Immigrants’ Accessibility To Mexico’S Health Care System, Ken Nishikata

Master's Theses

Mexico’s geographical location has made the country play a centric role in trans-national migration from the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA) comprising Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. As a result, immigration has increasingly become a political issue for Mexico over the past decades^[1]. Before the eruption of the Central American crisis in the 1980s, Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala was recognized for its openness. However, such a tolerating status-quo changed as the number of NTCA immigrants entering Mexico increased upon the exacerbation of the crisis that placed thousands of individuals in exile. Indeed, the turmoil during the …

La Voz Spring 2020, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issues:

• MA Student Randy Torres Awarded Mead Fellowship
• MA Student Spotlight: Victoria Almodovar
• Mark Overmyer-Velazquez to Publish Updated Translation
• Can Inclusive Programs Reduce Labor Market Discrimination?
• Exploring Mexico's Industrial Revolutions
• Anti-Haitian Stereotypes in Dominican Media
• Writing Puerto Rican History at UConn's Humanities Institute
• New State Course in African American, Latino, and Puerto Rican Studies

How To Be Unfaithful To Eurocentrism: A Spanglish Decolonial Critique To Knowledge Gentrification, Captivity And Storycide In Qualitative Research, Marcela Polanco, Nathan D. Hanson, Camila Hernandez, Tirzah Le Feber, Sonia Medina, Stephanie Old Bucher, Eva I. Rivera, Ione Rodriguez, Elizabeth Vela, Brandi Velasco, Jackolyn Le Feber

The Qualitative Report

From a position of academic activism, we critique the longstanding dominance del production of knowledge that solely implicates fidelity to Eurocentric methodological technologies en qualitative research. Influenced by an Andean decolonial perspective, en Spanglish we problematize métodos of analysis as the dominant research practice, whereby las stories o relatos result en su appropriation, captivity and gentrification, first by researchers’ authorship and later by the publishing industry copyrights. We highlight the racializing and capitalist colonial/modern Eurocentric agenda del current market of knowledge production that displaces to la periphery all knowledge o relatos that do not subscribe to Euro-US American methodological parameters …

La Voz Winter 2020, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Multi-Media Artist Begins Year-Long Residence at UConn
• Graciela Mochkofsky Presents the 2019 Mead Lecture
• La Comunidad Intelectual Learning Community Presents Research at Virginia Tech Conference
• Cost Rica Education: Why it's Worth the Trip?
• Music Professor Publishes Book on Global Mexicanidades
• La Colectiva Feminista Comes to UConn

Living Through The Chilean Coup D’Etat: The Second-Generation’S Reflection On Their Sense Of Agency, Civic Engagement And Democracy, Denise Tala Diaz

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation illuminates how the experience of growing up during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) affected the individual's sense of self as citizen and the impact on their sense of democratic agency, civic-mindedness, and political engagement in their country's current democracy. To understand that impact, the researcher chose to study her own generation, the “Pinochet-era” generation (Cummings, 2015) and interviewed those who were part of the Chilean middle class, who despite not being explicit victims of perpetrators, were raised in dictatorship and surrounded by abuse of state power including repression, disappearance, and imprisonment. The theoretical frame of the Socio-Political Development Theory …

Marielle Franco, Rhaissa Sanches

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

Marielle Franco was a Black, Brazilian activist (1979-2018) who rose from the favelas (poor areas) of Rio de Janeiro to be elected as a councilwoman in Rio's election of 2016. Franco was known for exposing the violence waged in the favelas by Brazil's military and police under the "pretense of maintaining law and order," as well as how the militia wields power over those who live in the favelas. In addition to detailing Franco's life, activism and death, this paper also explains the history and development of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the negative attitudes held …

José Martí: The World's Most Popular Poetry, And A Vision For The Americas, Anne O. Fountain

Faculty Publications

This chapter begins with a capsule biographical sketch that situates José Martí as an agent of decolonization. It discusses Martí's place in literature, especially Spanish American letters, his transcultural importance, his work in translation, his role in the history of Cuban–US relations, and his vision for US relations with Latin America. It demonstrates the extraordinary international reach of his most popular writing by giving close attention to how two works, a book of poetry, Simple Verses (Versos Sencillos) and an essay, “Our America” (“Nuestra América”) have come to represent him to an increasingly broad audience.

Roswell, New Mexico And The Dead Futures Of Latinx Speculative Fictions, Renee Hudson

English Faculty Articles and Research

With the predominance of Chicanxs in Latinx speculative fictions as the impetus behind this cluster, I want to consider how Latinxs are represented in popular culture, especially when the creators of such Latinx characters are not Latinxs themselves. Turning to popular representations, I contend, acts as a litmus test for how Latinx issues are widely perceived as well as how these concerns are perpetuated within popular media. The Roswell reboot, Roswell, New Mexico offers one such instance as both the showrunner, Carina Adly MacKenzie, and Melinda Metz, the author of Roswell High, the show on which the series is …

Imagining The Futures Of Latinx Speculative Fictions, Renee Hudson

English Faculty Articles and Research

"To combat the speculative fictions Trump conjures into reality, we must look to more liberatory forms of speculative fiction, especially ones that imagine a future for Latinxs at a time when such futures seem to be foreclosed by the concentration camps proliferating within the borders of the United States. At the same time, we must interrogate how our speculative imaginaries are, at times, limited by the contradictions of latinidad. Latinidad presumably names a shared, collective identity based on Latin American origins that seem to supersede differences in race, religion, and class (among other identitarian categories). However, a number of scholars …

Cinematographic Landscapes Of Blackness In Mexico: (Re)Framing Afro-Mexican Lives & Futures, Talia Weltman-Cisneros

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

The legacy of historical invisibility and socio-cultural marginalization and rejection have marred contemporary Afro-Mexican lives, silencing their stories, customs, traditions, and cosmologies, while also denying them a sense of belonging and place within the visions of the present and futures of Mexican landscapes. Mexican films have often echoed this estranged relationship between blackness and Mexicanidad, portraying black characters as stereotyped figures who have most often been marked as exotic, primitive, and alien or anachronic in Mexico. However, these subaltern imaginaries of blackness and of Afro-Mexicanidad are challenged in the recent films La negrada (2018) and Artemio (2017). This article …

Black Agency And Aesthetic Innovation In Sergio Giral's El Otro Francisco, Philip Kaisary

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

In 2013, Henry Louis Gates lamented the tradition of whitewashing and the passing over of slave stories which has become commonplace throughout cinematic history: “there have been all too few films that have captured, or even attempted to convey, the truth of the experience of slavery, from the slave’s point of view” and even fewer “worthy of recognition.” While it is true that there have been some high-profile films produced in the last decade – 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, and Birth of a Nation, among others – that have endeavored to represent slavery from the …

Afro-Latin American Documentary Resistance From The Pacific Coast: How Voces De Resistencia (2017) Changes The Landscapes Of Aesthetics, Academia/Community Collaboration, And Black Feminist Activism During The Colombian "Peace Process", Sarah Ohmer

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

Voces de Resistencia, Capítulo 1, is a short documentary film with an original soundtrack composed and performed by Black Colombian female folk a cappella chorus, or alabadoras. The multimedia product makes use of Black feminist pedagogy and resistance: it portrays a silenced and oppressed group in Bojayá, Colombia. The focus on alabadoras singers and composers promotes self-definition and exposes the power of self-determination in songwriting, an a cappella chorus performance, and documentary filmmaking.

African Immigrants In Argentina Post-Slavery: An Old-New Odyssey, Alain Lawo-Sukam

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

In this interdisciplinary article, I address the less known migration of Africans in South America, especially in Argentina. This is significant because studies on African migrations have focused mainly on European and North American routes (north-south), living aside south-south paths. The complex experience of the first African immigrants in Argentina relates to a certain extent and also contrasts with the recent migrations of the twenty-first century. Because of (post)colonial history, collective/personal experience and stories, African immigrants are finding new homes in Argentina. However, recent changes in immigration policies relaxed under previous governments could jeopardize this el dorado. This article …

Codings Of Blackness In Mexican Cinema: An Analysis Of La Negrada, Ebony Marie Bailey

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

In a country whose national identity revolves around the idea of mestizaje, Blackness has been omitted from official discourses surrounding mexicanidad. As a result, Afro populations in Mexico have been subjected to codings that render them invisible, otherized and inferior. This paper analyzes the codings of Blackness in Mexico as reflected in the space of art and cinema, specifically the film La Negrada, the first feature fiction film to introduce an all Afro-Mexican cast. On one hand, there is an attempt to reclaim and make visible Mexico's African roots. On the other, the film also walks the …

So What If She Can't Dance And Sing: A Testimony From The Afrohabanera, Dawn Duke

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

From the early 1990s, a new film gained momentum in which there were no actors, i.e. contracted, paid, and famous, rather ordinary people, residing at the fringes of society, who momentarily were on camera, guided by a director determined to film realistic images. Cidade de Deus (Brazil), Pixote: a lei do mais fraco (Brazil), La vendedora de rosas (Colombia), Rodrigo D (Colombia), and Ratas y ratones (Ecuador) are examples. There is little footage about Cubans during the Special Period (1989-1995). Further, until then no production had directly and realistically focused on Afro-Cuban women. Rolando Díaz's 1998 production, Si me comprendieras …

Marca Peru: Representations And Exclusions Of The Afro-Descendant Population From The Official Narrative Of The Peruvian Government, Ana Lucía Mosquera Rosado

PALARA: Publication of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association

The article will examine the representations of Afro-Peruvians in the video "Peru Nebraska," a documentary produced as part of the launching of the advertising campaign of Marca Peru, a national branding project elaborated by the Peruvian government in 2010. By examining the participation of the Afro-descendant population in this audiovisual piece, the document will relate these representations to the discourses of diversity, race, and citizenship in Peru. The article will also explore the nature of the discourses of ethnic and racial diversity in Peru in the new construction of the national and will evaluate the construction of the social …