Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Latin and South American history'

Though alphabetic script had become a prevailing communicative form for keeping records and recounting histories in New Spain by the turn of the seventeenth century, pre-Columbian and early colonial artistic and scribal traditions, including pictorial, oral, and performative discourses still held great currency for indigenous communities during the later colonial period. The pages of a corpus of indigenous documents created during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries known as the Techialoyan manuscripts abound with vibrantly painted watercolor depictions, alphabetic inscriptions, and vivid invocations of community elders’ speeches and embodied experiences. Designed in response to challenging viceregal policies that threatened land and autonomy, the Techialoyans sought to protect and preserve indigenous ways of life by fashioning community members as the noble descendants of illustrious rulers from the pre-Columbian past. The documents register significant events in the histories of communities, often creating a sense of continuity between the colonial present and that of antiquity. What is more, they provide the limits of the territory within a depicted landscape using a reflexive, ambulatory model. Representations of place evoke ritual practices of walking the boundaries from the perspective of the ground, enabling readers to acquire different forms of knowledge as they move through the pages of the book and the envisioned landscape to which it points. The different communicative forms evident in the Techialoyans, including pictorial, alphabetic, oral, and performative modes contribute to understandings of indigenous literacies of the later colonial period by demonstrating the diverse resources and methods upon which indigenous leaders drew to preserve community histories and territories.

The Techialoyans present an innovative artistic and scribal tradition that drew upon pre-Columbian, early colonial, and European conventions, as well as the contemporary late-colonial pictorial climate. The artists consciously juxtaposed traditional indigenous materials and conventions with those of the contemporary colonial moment to simultaneously create a sense of both old and new. Not only did the documents recount indigenous communities’ histories and affirm their noble heritages, they also proclaimed possession of an artistic and scribal tradition that was on par with that of their revered ancestors, thereby strengthening corporate identity and demonstrating their legitimacy and autonomy within the colonial regime.

The speeches given by Pedro Segundo and Getulio Vargas during wartime not only reveals their orientation of leadership but in turn provides something else. These discourses gives one a unique window into not only how these leaders chose to perceive the challenges of wartime but how to address them to the national populace. The rhetoric they used had to transform for purposes of mobilization while adapting to shifting political environments. Among one of the features of this adaptation was the choice of which aspects of the national consciousness to stress at pivotal moments. By examining the public speeches of Pedro Segundo and Getulio Vargas one can see the political orientation of both leaders, understand the political climate of both periods, and witness how much Brazil had changed in the eighty-one years between the beginning of the Paraguayan War and the end of WWII.

This thesis seeks to recover historical memory during El Salvador’s devastating anticommunist campaigns from 1932 to 1963. With El Salvador’s long history of repression against social movements, fear and even shame have silenced stories about the movement and its participants. In line with the current projects dedicated to social memory, this projects reconstructs the untold story of Felix Panameño, a local shoemaker and member of the Communist Party in the 1930s through his family’s memories. Shoemakers were key to the growing political consciousness of the time, as documented by Roque Dalton through the testimonial of shoemaker and survivor of the 1932 revolt, Miguel Mármol. Much of Panameño’s life and struggle transpired within key political moments from the persecutions of political activists that followed the 1932 revolt, known as “ La Matanza”, through the wave of repressive military dictatorships that conspired against political activist and democracy. These dictators imposed a tyranny that ultimately drove large numbers of Salvadorans to migrate to the U.S. beginning in the 1960s. Many of these immigrants, in turn, silenced their memories and depoliticized in exchange for a new beginning. Today, some of these memories are being rebuilt, giving insight to better understanding El Salvador’s past, as well as the present peoples’ struggle for democracy at home and those participating from abroad.

The primary objectives of this thesis are to research the Conquest of Mexico and to integrate research to expand upon Mexica, a 125 page historical fiction screenplay that was started in 2008 about the 16th century invasion of Mexico by Hernán Cortés. Through quantifying and writing commentary on the revisions to reflect the integration of new research, the enhanced work is accompanied by a critical introduction essay that simultaneously serves as a literature review to determine how sources contributed to the dramatization. The critical introduction is in Spanish, the research was conducted in Spanish and English, and Mexica is in English, to better reach the target, mainstream American audience. The essay addresses schools of thought and theoretical frameworks on the conquest and how they have been accepted, rejected, dramatized and/or incorporated in the screenplay. By analyzing chronicles, literature, film and television relevant to the conquest, narrating experiences and creative license are demonstrated. The essay exhibits a historiographical review by examining myths, misconceptions and consensus on several themes relevant to this era of initial contact in the New World. The critical introduction of Mexica explains how the enhanced script better integrates the indigenous perspective through analysis of a variety of sources, with a non Euro-centric emphasis, to reflect compelling and multidimensional characters in the historical fiction genre.

This dissertation is a social history regarding moviegoing and film audiences in Cali, Colombia, from the 1940s through the 1970s that aims to explore the meaning of movies in relation to the broader historical context and field of social forces in which they existed. This analysis of the intersection of the actual material conditions of existence of film-related practices and social imaginaries about movies is developed taking into account three main elements. The first one is the definition of film audiences by their film preferences, moviegoing practices, and socio-demographic characteristics. The second aspect is the role that moviegoing and moviegoing-related activities had within the broader cultural and political positioning of the filmgoers in relation to personal and collective, urban identities as demarcated by social class, age, and gender. The third element has to do with the geopolitical positioning of Cali, which poses very specific inquiries into the context of a non-capital city of a so-called underdeveloped country in Latin America. The analysis of these three aspects permit us to acknowledge and understand how moviegoing, the activities related to it, and the ways in which people thought of themselves as film spectators intertwined with urban, cultural, and political dynamics in modes that defined the diverse yet connected ways in which people identified themselves as urbanites, dealing with the conflicts between tradition and modernity in the historically and geographically situated context of an "underdeveloped" country and its struggles to reach the much desired and elusive modernity.

Neighborhood Politics investigates the role of commoners in the social production of an ancient city. Traditional archaeological approaches examine cities primarily through the lens of elite power and agency. Recent approaches have taken a bottom-up approach to research. Neighborhood Politics explores the ancient city as a product of both commoner and elite agencies, power, and practices. Neighborhood Politics proposes a novel methodology: 'neighborhood archaeology.' Neighborhood archaeology emerges out of household archaeology and community archaeology. In order to fully understand urbanism, neighborhood archaeology examines commoner houses, related buildings, and their inhabitants as complex socio-spatial contexts. Consequently, neighborhood archaeology here highlights the multiple contours and tensions of authority, identity, and space that characterized an ancient neighborhood. Investigations in El Purgatorio's residential district focused on architecture, domestic assemblages, and urban planning in order to understand the diverse social identities, shared practices, and built environment of El Purgatorio's commoners. Investigations examined the social history of the Casma Polity's capital city, the configuration of community there, and local-regional linkages from the perspective of commoners' everyday lives. For El Purgatorio's commoners, social diversity was configured around household composition and labor output. Diversity was materialized in unequal access to space, building materials, and construction labor. Urban hierarchies were concretized during neighborhood feasts that simultaneously created neighborhood solidarity. Elites provided raw materials for the neighborhood economy; but commoners prepared food and chicha for ritual and quotidian consumption, some of which was returned to elites in tribute. Diverse residence and circulation patterns show that the neighborhood was a negotiated landscape created through both commoner authority and the extended authority of elites from the monumental district. Neighborhood Politics highlights the complexity of urban identities, the significance of everyday activities, and the tensions in the built environment of the residential district at El Purgatorio.

This dissertation argues that in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands over the turn of the twentieth century, two curanderos, Teresa Urrea (1873-1906) and Pedro Jaramillo (1829-1907), created alternative projects of nation that did not come from above – from the state, the church, or professional medicine – but from below, from a distinct cultural practice that revitalized sick, racially oppressed, and subaltern bodies. The medicine that Urrea and Jaramillo practiced, curanderismo, was, and remains, a hybrid system of healing practiced throughout Mexico and Latin America and in places where ethnic Mexicans have a strong presence, such as the U.S-Mexico borderlands. Through curanderismo Urrea and Jaramillo provided culturally resonant healing and spiritual sustenance to ethnic Mexicans, Indians, Tejanos, and others in the borderlands who faced increasingly oppressive forms of state power deployed by both nations. This dissertation also shows that through their curanderismo practices and politics, Urrea and Jaramillo helped shape national ideologies as well as spiritual and medical practices. They participated in the creation and maintenance of transnational ethnic Mexican communities and identities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

The chapters examine how Teresa Urrea and Pedro Jaramillo crossed the border from Mexico into the United States during the late nineteenth century and practiced what I call the “the politics of curanderismo ” in different regions of the borderlands. Chapter one examines Teresa Urrea’s identity as Juana de Arco Mexicana and how she was a threat to the Mexican government because of her work as a healer and advocate for Yaqui and Mayo Indians of northern Mexico in late nineteenth century. Chapter two utilizes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Don Pedrito’s cures from 1890-1907, as well as an examination of South Texas demographics, to demonstrate that Jaramillo’s curanderismo drew upon available medical ideologies and strengthened his borderlands community while, at the same time, threatening professional medicine. The third chapter returns to Teresa Urrea and her residence in the city of Los Angeles, California from 1902-1903 and examines the transatlantic world of Spiritism and Spiritualism that she participated in. The fourth and final chapter explores the ways in which curanderismo and corresponding ideas about modernity, science, and spirituality figured into the power dynamics and construction of national identity on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border into the twentieth century.