Thèses sur le sujet « American and Latin American Studies »

This project proposes to re-conceptualize the city of Buenos Aires through the works of three Argentine authors. This work will move away from a univocal understanding of the city, and will re-think Buenos Aires as a confluence of meanings that subjects navigate and negotiate daily to destabilize metanarratives of urban space. In this work, the tropes of the (in)visible and performance/movement will bridge the three chapters, challenging us to distance ourselves from the oversimplified understandings that rely heavily on the visual. As such, urban space will be seen as under construction because it is always conditioned by the presence and performance of the subject.

Chapter one will work through Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes porteñas. It will highlight his attacks on institutions like the Escuelas normales and the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (SADE) that looked to homogenize culture under the banner of argentinidad, and argue how his aguafuertes contest a dogmatic system of signs while serving as a critical starting point in the emergence of the margins in the city. Chapter two will interrogate Carlos Gorostiza’s play, El puente (1948), written during Perón’s first presidency (1946-1955). It will focus on one figure in particular – the Madre – and show how performativity of this newly-mobilized subject destabilizes and recasts notions of the city by contesting normative behaviors reified by the upper classes during the 1930s and early 1940s. Chapter three reads César Aira’s novel La villa, incorporating the concepts of topography and topology as instruments to illuminate the villa miseria’s impact on modern representations of urban space during Argentina’s political shift from neoliberalism to neopopulism at the turn of the 21^st century.

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.

This thesis explores the possible creation of a new categorization of American Literature as presented in the Andean novel El pez de oro: Retablos del Laykhakuy (1957) by Gamaliel Churata. In El pez de oro, Gamaliel Churata presents a strategy for the recuperation of native Andean cultural agency that enables the Andean subject to reclaim traces of their ancestral past under more verisimilar and verifiable terms. Churata argues that through a recuperation of native language and its infusion into the body of the major colonial language, Spanish, the Andean subject is equipped with a new culture producing tool that enables the recuperation of language, agency, history, and, ultimately, representation and inclusion within cultural and political institutional frameworks. By introducing his own function of bilingualism, vernacular language, and mythological infusions into the body of colonial letters, Gamaliel Churata is able to destabilize and disrupt colonial historical and textual authority to the point where the invented concept of America and the colonial product of American identity can be re-examined. Through this examination emerges a new option for the categorization of American identity as an aesthetic construct. Within this new categorization of aesthetic American identity, the Andean subject can begin his own process of self-identification through his native language toward the production of a future Andean American subject.

This dissertation explores the work of Colombian writer Evelio Rosero (1958), whose work-like many of his nation's generation, but with a radically new aesthetic and ethic proposal—focuses on violence and on the disappearance of people in the context of the armed conflict that has ravaged Colombia for the last thirty years.

Despite having a long and consistent literary career that started in the early eighties and having received prestigious awards, Rosero continues to be almost unknown both nationally and internationally. My dissertation contends that such lack of recognition is serious and that current conversations about Colombian literature and the representation of violence more broadly cannot be done without taking into account his disruptive work. Through a careful analysis of Rosero's most representative novels—Señor que no conoce la luna, En el lejero and Los Ejércitos—I examine the literary techniques the author uses to produce a space—both literary and political—that neither justifies nor exacerbates violence.

Based primarily on the concept of the spectral put forth by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, on Mieke Bal's position on political art and on Jean-Luc Nancy's construction of rebellion in Noli me tangere, I demonstrate how Rosero's novels highlight the discourses and mechanisms that put into place and even sanction the violence they supposedly lament.

The dissertation is divided in three chapters. Chronologically organized, each one examines one of Rosero's most representative novels.

In the introduction I contextualize Rosero's literary work within the larger efforts to represent Colombia's violent situation. I argue that by focusing on disappearance, ambiguity and spectrality Rosero avoids the most common and problematic pitfalls of such texts. I take the position that by doing so Rosero gives visibility to the many ways in which a state of violence is (re)produced and represented -both aesthetically and politically—signalling a complicity (not necessarily deliberate) between the two.

The first chapter analyzes Señor que no conoce la luna. I argue that by focusing in the way los vestidos enslave and torture los desnudos due to their dual genitalia, Rosero shows the artificiality and arbitrariness of our social constructions and highlights how they are used to infringe extreme violence to a particular group of people. I contend that in the unregulated circulation of erotic desire Rosero finds a way out of this structure of abjection.

The second chapter deals with the radical "spectralization" that takes place in En el lejero. I take the position that Rosero's emphasis on the difficulty of identifying people and spaces, and his refusal to stabilize meaning are effective tools in dismantling a system of oppression and violence while opening a space for agency and solidarity.

The third and last chapter studies Rosero's most famous novel, Los Ejércitos. I read the novel's contrast between moments of intense visibility and instances of extreme obscurity and confusion as a way to underscore the violent nature of certain ways of looking at things and people. Rosero's insistence in our bonds with, and responsibility towards, what can no longer, not yet, be seen or heard is key to create a space for the political that is not based on violence and exclusion.

To conclude, I argue that through Jacques Derrida's "impure impure history of ghosts" Rosero develops an aesthetically astonishing and politically crucial way of re-counting and accounting for the violence that a prolonged state of warfare continues to (re)produce in Latin America.

Esta disertaciôn conecta la teorfa de la transculturaciôn narrativa de ´Angel Rama con la tradiciôn intelectual latinoamericana que aportô sus caracterfsticas mâs distintivas. Las teorfas de Rama fueron influidas por dos tradiciones latinoamericanas. Una es de carâcter polftico y tiene su origen en la Reforma de Côrdoba de 1918. La otra, de carâcter epistemolôgico y se remonta a la década de 1930, cuando comienza el culturalismo en Latinoamérica. Mi investigaciôn se ocupa de un grupo de intelectuales uruguayos que trabajaron en torno al semanario Marcha [1939-1974]: Carlos Quijano [1900-1984], Julio Castro [1908 -desaparecido en 1977] y Arturo Ardao [1912-2003]. También me ocupo de dos intelectuales brasile˜nos, Antonio Cândido [1918] y Darcy Ribeiro [1922-1997], quienes continuaron con la tradiciôn culturalista que inauguraron en Latinoamérica autores como Gilberto Freyre [1900-1987] y Fernando Ortiz [1881-1969]. Recuperar las redes intelectuales que acompa˜naron el proceso de articulaciôn de la transculturaciôn narrativa nos permite comprender mejor las tesis de Rama por dos razones. Primero, porque enmarca esta teorfa dentro de algunos de los debates polfticos y culturales mâs importantes de la Guerra Frfa. Y segundo, porque se aproxima a la manera como Rama comprendiô la historia latinoamericana y su coyuntura polftica y socio-cultural durante las décadas de 1960 y 1970.

El objetivo de la teorfa de la transculturaciôn narrativa es describir el proceso por el cual las manifestaciones literarias latinoamericanas pasan de la dependencia a la autonomia cultural. Como el proceso descrito se despliega dentro de la estructura social, para comprenderlo es necesario analizar la interacciôn entre las obras literarias y la sociedad que las rodea, de esta forma las ciencias sociales –antropologia, sociologia, economia– son instrumentos de anâlisis indispensables para comprender una obra o tradiciôn literaria. Este marco general de anâlisis es descrito por Rama como el culturalismo.

En el caso de Rama, una lectura desde los estudios literarios puede dar por sentado que el culturalismo fue tan sôlo un método de anâlisis alternativo al estructuralismo francés. Aunque esta perspectiva sea en parte correcta, no es del todo precisa. El culturalismo al que se refiere Rama es el mismo que practicaron los cientistas sociales en Latinoamérica desde la década de 1930. Recuperar la historicidad de la transculturaciôn narrativa no solo nos permite comprender la genealogia de esta teoria sino recuperar y hacer visibles algunas tradiciones intelectuales contra-hegemônicas que desarticulô la Guerra Fria en Latinoamérica.

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.

This dissertation studies how the melodramatic mode shapes the approach to political violence in six novels: Libro de Manuel, by Julio Cortázar, El beso de la mujer araña, by Manuel Puig; Historia de Mayta, by Mario Vargas Llosa; Estrella distante, by Roberto Bolaño; La hora azul, by Alonso Cueto; and La vida doble, by Arturo Fontaine. Beyond the realm of sentimental formulaic melodrama, I define this term as the interpretation of events after subjective emotions. By studying these novels, I propose that the melodramatic imagination has become the most employed set of tropes for the interpretation of public and private interactions in contemporary fiction. My analysis exposes how literary writing addresses commercial, political, and artistic aspirations through a combined use of strategies such as moral polarization, pathos, emotional interpretation, scenic emplotment, and sensationalism.

Chapter One analyses the connections between political violence and melodrama in Latin American literatures and cultures. Chapter Two is a study of Cortázar’s Libro de Manuel, a novel which fictionalizes what I call melodrama of the revolutionary, an emotional, uncritical identification with leftist urban subcultures. Chapter Three studies Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña to illustrate the existence of reactionary practices in progressivist and queer sectors, limiting their capacity to generate political change. Chapter Four is an analysis of Vargas Llosa’s Historia de Mayta, a dystopian diatribe against leftist politicians in which a melodramatic understanding of experience appears in both dominant and marginal sectors. Chapter Five studies Bolaño’s Estrella distante, a novel in which the search for a neo-avantgardist artist obsessed with the use of corpses as material allows the dramatization of melodrama in artistic sectors, leading to the normalization of totalitarianism. Chapter Six is a reading of Cueto’s La hora azul, a novel in which national reconciliation becomes a middle-high class subjective conflict, interpreting historical experience in terms originated in audiovisual melodrama. Chapter Seven analyzes Fontaine’s La vida doble, in which the voice of a former revolutionary and intelligence agent reinforces the idea that leftist convictions are futile, normalizing emotions that normalize material and symbolic inequity. Finally, the last section summarizes this work’s contributions.

This study helps to broaden a growing body of literature by examining the growth of an urban Jamaican community in the southeastern port of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.

Background: When the British colony of Jamaica abolished slavery in 1838, the upper classes attempted to tie free workers to sugar plantations; ex–slaves attempted to move away from the estates as soon as possible. Despite an increase in internal migration after abolition, the majority of the black population remained in rural areas, and dedicated their labor to the land. The Jamaican elite successfully argued for the introduction of contract laborers from Asia as a replacement for the slavery system. It brought the planters some limited economic success as export crops—particularly sugar—had the chance to rebound, but planters used immigrants to drive down wages. Increasing population pressure on the land, a series of natural disasters, few economic opportunities, and ineligibility for political participation prompted Jamaicans to look outside of their homeland for socioeconomic improvement by the late 1800s. Travelers emigrated in significant numbers to Panama, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua with the hope of earning higher wages, sending remittances to family members, and returning home with enough money to live independently. As work on the Panama Canal ended by the 1910s, Jamaicans turned their sights back to the Caribbean. During the second half of the 19th century, Cuba was one of Spain's two remaining Caribbean colonies despite attempting several wars of independence. At the end of the final effort in 1898, the United States intervened against the metropolis; the two powers reached an agreement giving possession of Cuba to the US, who would help to establish political order and assist the islanders in ruling themselves. US investment in Cuban industry, especially in sugar, allowed foreigners to purchase enormous tracts of land and to influence the restructuring of the island's political, social, and economic landscape. The seasonal sugar cane harvest attracted foreign workers from Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean seeking better wages than what they could find at home; between 1912 and 1920, thousands of British West Indians traveled to Cuba to labor in the agricultural industry or to occupy niches in the service industry.

However, Cubans scrutinized and discriminated against them for being black, for being foreign, for driving down wages, or some combination thereof. Though Cubans claimed to live in a color-blind society, racial discrimination persisted and the white elite supported a policy of “whitening” the island through selective immigration from Spain and miscegenation; these racial and cultural prejudices were particularly divisive given that a significant percentage of Cubans were of African descent. Furthermore, the general population was frustrated by the lack of Cuban sovereignty and saw foreign workers as complicit in the US intervention. As a result, calls for nationalism tended to veer into xenophobia and racism during economic downturns in the early 1920s and 1930s.

Methods/Sources: Due to limited access to archival sources in Cuba, the bulk of the data is from the British National Archives: the consular reports summarized political and social upheaval in Cuba, collected publications from the Cuban government, and gave a perspective of the migration from the viewpoint of the British government. Similar information came from the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Maryland. The provincial archive of Santiago de Cuba provided information on migrant activities: marriage and citizenship documents; and social, cultural, and political organizations. It also yielded the Cuban government's responses to West Indian immigration. Correspondence between colonial officials and international organizations came from the Jamaican National Archives; the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute for Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, held interviews of Jamaicans who lived during the period under study. Cuban and Jamaican newspaper reports detailed economic and political conditions in the two islands from journalists' investigations, letters from migrants, and governmental decrees.

Findings: I relate how different groups in Cuba reacted to Jamaican migration: the support for and against it, how this support changed over time, and how it differed by geography. I also attempt to give a fuller description of who these migrants were. I discuss their relationships with other West Indians and Cubans, their marriages, and the paths that they took to Cuban citizenship. How gender influenced and differentiated Jamaicans' experiences when they went abroad—how they were perceived and treated, and how they fared—receives special attention.

The work concludes by examining the reaction of the British officials who represented British West Indians in Cuba. It also puts the migration into a broader context by examining black British subjects who traveled to other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean during this era. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation.

The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.

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.

"Find Yourself Here" argues that since transmigrants often form profound connections to place, we can develop a nuanced account of transmigrant subjectivity through innovative fiction by migrants who describe their own neighborhoods. The authors studied use their own hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration, deploying various formal techniques to mirror the fictional location to the real one, thus literarily enacting the neighborhood. I construct a neighborhood geography from each work, by traveling on foot, interviewing the neighbors and local historians, mapping the text’s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references, and teasing out connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy, to demonstrate how excavating the locale illuminates the text. My methodology is interdisciplinary: it incorporates recent sociological studies of transnationalism by Linda Basch, Patricia Pessar, and Jorge Duany, tenets of Human Geography, and the work of Latino literary theorists including Raúl Homero Villa and Mary Pat Bray on space in narrative. My literary neighborhood geographies—of Salvador Plascencia’s El Monte barrio, Junot Díaz’s New Jersey housing development, Sandra Cisneros’ Westside Chicago, and Helena María Viramontes’ East Los Angeles—sharpen Latino literary criticism’s long-standing focus on urban and regional spaces in narrative by zooming in on neighborhood streets, while building on contemporary theories of transnationalism to analyze the broader cultural implications of local migrancy. By grounding the effects of transmigrancy in concrete locations, “Find Yourself Here” presents a comprehensive vision of the US Latino immigrant experience without generalizing from its myriad versions and numerous sites.

The 2006 student movement, termed the Penguin Revolution for the black and white uniforms worn by high school students, and the 2011 student movement, called the Chilean Winter, a reference to the "Arab Spring," have captivated the attention of the media and scholars alike. However, little work has been done to place these student movements into a broader historical context. Historically, Chilean students have had a long record of both general political activism and specific activism over educational matters dating back over 100 years. Even the most recent student protests, which developed into a broader movement against the neoliberal policies implemented under the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, were preceded by demonstrations with similar demands dating back to at least 2000. However, these precedents do not explain why the movements developed between 2000 and 2011, rather than immediately after the fall of the dictatorship in 1990. I argue that part of the reason is because that the students in the twenty-first century were the first ones to attend high school and college who were not raised under the dictatorship and for that reason they did not fear the repression and violence their predecessors, who grew up predominantly under the dictatorship, experienced. Thus, an analysis of the history of student political activism in Chile, the history of Chilean politics, the history of the Chilean education system, and the neoliberal reforms, especially in education, is necessary to provide a historical, political, and social context for the recent student movements.

This dissertation examines the dissemination of power represented in the works of Panamanian writers Roberto Díaz Herrera, Rose Marie Tapia and Mauro Zúñiga Araúz. My work focuses on two important periods in Panama's history: the repressive dictatorial era of Manuel Noriega and the post-dictatorial era during which subjugation and power operate in subtle ways, through institutions, mechanisms of civil society, and globalization. The primary sources are Díaz Herrera's testimony, and the novels of Tapia and Zúñiga Araúz. In my analysis, I draw upon the notions of power, subjugation and normalization developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I also draw upon the thoughts of Mikhail Bahktin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Beatriz Sarlo.

Chapter one presents the historical overview of Panamanian history and its literature. It shows how power, subjugation and normalization have operated in Panama at different points of its history. Chapter Two analyses the political terror of Noriega through Díaz Herrera's Estrellas clandestinas and Zúñiga Araúz's El chacal del general. Both narratives are challenges against Noriega, using scenes of actual persecutions, disappearances and tortures. Chapter Three explains how Tapia uses Roberto por el buen camino to denounce a wide range of inequalities existing in the post-dictatorial society. She focuses specifically on the culture of violence perpetrated by the underclass. Chapter four analyses how Zúñiga Araúz's Espejo de miserias takes the reader to a deep journey through a diverse range of social problems affecting women in Latin America, focusing on the subjugation and control of women's bodies through prostitution. This chapter uses Foucault's notion of biopower to illustrate how subjugation operates through globalization and the sex trade market. Chapter five uses Tapia's Mujeres en fuga to show globalization and the global market—through casinos and shopping malls—manipulating society, and contributing to Panama's socio-economic fragmentation. In addition to bringing attention to the literature of a country that is often ignored in contemporary Latin American Studies, my analysis demonstrates how these writers examine problems and questions concerning the use and dissemination of power that remain vitally important not only in Panama, but also throughout Latin America.

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.

Since the mid-1970s, the indigenous ritual dance known as Danza has had a profound impact on the self-identification and concept of space in Xicana communities, but how is this practice received in the powwow space? My project broadly explores how studentorganized powwows at UC Davis, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego (UCSD), are decolonizing spaces for teaching and learning about Native American identities. Drawing on Beverly Diamond’s alliance studies approach (2007), which illuminates the importance of social relationships across space and time, as well as my engagement in these powwows, I trace real and imagined connections between Danza and powwow cultures. Today, powwows are intertribal social events organized by committees and coordinated with their local native communities. Powwows not only have restorative abilities to create community for those who perform, attend, and coordinate them, but they are only a small glimpse of the broader socio-political networks that take place throughout the powwow circuit. By inviting and opening the powwow space to indigeneity across borders, the University of California not only accurately reflects its own native student body who put on the event, but speak to the growing understanding of "Native American" both north and south of the United States border. Ultimately, I argue an alliance studies approach to historical ethnography and community-based methodologies in music research are crucial, especially in the case of indigenous communities, who are committed to the survival and production of cultural knowledge embedded in music and dance practices.

This dissertation generates a broader qualitative and quantitative profile of Peru's middle class. It examines an unstudied group of Peruvian immigrants living in the greater New York City area, who are largely of middle-class origins, as are their families who remain behind in Peru. It analyzes immigrants and non-immigrants' lifestyles, changes in family dynamics that occur as a consequence of emigration of one family member, and the effect of remittances on middle-class lifestyles, identity, and experience at home. A close analysis of participants' life-styles and interactions provides conclusions about what defines Peruvian middle class status, and the factors that shape an immigrant's decision to migrate and pursue remittances. By closely examining immigrants from Lima now living in the greater New York area, and their economic, social, and cultural ties to their households back in Peru, I examine remittances as the nexus linking immigrants to their families that are now redefined by a more distant relationship. As social ties are commodified, the relationships between immigrants and non-immigrants prioritize decisions about money, including its production, transmission, reception, and distribution. Consequently, family structure often shifts to reflect a new priority on investment projects for the future over family reunification. By researching immigration and remittances, I analyze this shift in middle-class Peruvian family structure and its impact on social class, identity, and even plans for future emigration. This dissertation also refocuses the analytical lens on the uniquely middle-class origins of Peru's immigrants, challenging scholarly and popular assumptions about immigration that portray poverty eradication and reduction as the primary reason for migration.

Keywords: Transnational Peruvian Immigration, Peruvian Middle Class, Peruvian Remittances.

In the two decades prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the Mexican government pursued policies aimed at liberalizing markets, while simultaneously trying to ensure the stability of the peso. These policies consisted of monetary and fiscal controls to keep inflation low and free trade agreements to reduce Mexico's dependence on the United States. The policies significantly reduced the country's public deficit and were implemented in hopes that they would help reduce the country's exposure to currency crises.

Yet, despite all provisions the Mexican government put in place, the country's peso still lost two percent of its value in the first three days following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the US-based investment firm. The loss was significant given the average appreciation of the peso in the months leading up to the crisis was one percent per month, and given that not enough time had passed to fully understand the impact that bankruptcy would have had on Mexico. By the following Monday, the peso recovered all of its lost value, suggesting that investors were uncertain about the true impact the events unfolding in the United States would have on Mexico's economy. It also suggested that the uncertainty and negative sentiment within the market during the initial week of the global crisis played a stronger role in the rapid depreciation and recovery of the peso than changes in market fundamentals.

Using an inductive analysis of the historical events, this thesis suggests the circumstances in which sentiment engendered by mainstream media and distributed through digital channels during the financial crisis could have contributed to the dramatic short-term swings in the price of the peso. Specifically, this paper focuses on the new, digital information technologies, their use among investors as a means for financial research, and the role of high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithms in initiating information cascades. HFT algorithms account for nearly 70 percent of daily trading volume in financial markets and can magnify negative market sentiment among rational investors. Utilizing historical trading data for the peso and headlines and tweets published by the Thomson Reuters news group during the crisis, I seek to illustrate the correlations between market sentiment manifest in digital media and the price movements of the peso, indicating possible herd behavior tendencies in the form of information cascades.

Though it is not possible to empirically separate the market movements of informed decision-makers from the information cascades of investors and HFT algorithms reacting to media, the fact that information cascades can and do exist as demonstrated by specific examples in this paper has significant implications for the Mexican peso. The existence of information cascades implies that having strong macroeconomic fundamentals is no longer an adequate safe guard against the immediate impacts of external crises. As social media becomes the main source of breaking news and market sentiment for mainstream media and investors, it becomes vital for emerging countries such as Mexico to monitor social platforms for sentiment related to the domestic economy in order to proactively address investor pessimism. Finally, emerging country governments can utilize these platforms to push out relevant and truthful information about the economy in order to diminish investor uncertainty and minimize the impact of externally-induced information cascades.

This research is on the ways Puerto Rican women fought for their reproductive justice. It covers the years 1930 through to the 1980s on the island of Puerto Rico and the city of New York. The fight was not always won in the streets or in the courts but also through everyday struggles to survive. There were multiple forms of resistance used in order to fight for control of their own bodies and for the lives of their children. Reproductive justice is not limited to the right to have or not have children but also the ability to exercise choice and freedom over the children you have, over your own body and sexuality. The resistance led by these women was in all the ways they fought against oppressive forces which limited their ability to exercise reproductive freedom. The research was conducted through archival records, secondary sources and an interview conducted with my mother to learn the stories of the women in my own family and how they reflect the history I had researched. Puerto Rican women dealt with overcoming a high rate of sterilization, migration to the United States where they were met with racism and hostility and the ability to rise up and organize to demonstrate their voices as a collective. None of this could have been gained without the drive to survive.

Latin America is a region that has gone through and is still going through a lot of violent conflict. Both Mexico and Colombia have several similarities that stem from grand corruption. The vast systemic grand corruption is evidenced by the use of state violence, including massacres, other human rights violations, structural violence, the repression of the media, the repression of minorities, controversial land acquisitions, and the collusion of organized crime and the state, leading to state capture. The high levels of impunity, weak structures, and weak judicial systems have contributed to the continuation of systemic corruption and state violence. The research below explores the causal link between grand corruption, state capture, and state terror. It also explores the role of weak institutions, structural violence, and other factors that play an important role in 4 diverse case studies of state capture and state terror both in Mexico and Colombia.