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This study was done in collaboration with the Kino Border Initiative. The Kino Border Initiative is a Catholic, bi-national organization run by Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, Jesuit priests and lay people. The organization is dedicated to providing services to recently deported migrants and migrants-in-transit through their soup kitchen, women's

This study was done in collaboration with the Kino Border Initiative. The Kino Border Initiative is a Catholic, bi-national organization run by Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, Jesuit priests and lay people. The organization is dedicated to providing services to recently deported migrants and migrants-in-transit through their soup kitchen, women's shelter and first aid station in Nogales, Sonora. Based on their experiences in the women's shelter, the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist and researcher sought out to further understand migrant women's experiences of gender-based violence prior to migration. Using data collected by the Sisters, it was decided to use an analysis rooted in testimonio, and, in this way, use the women's words as a foundational basis for understanding the migration of women. The analysis is based on 62 testimonies related to women's histories of violence and their migration experiences, and the information from 74 intake questionnaires that were all analyzed retroactively. The analysis of data and testimonios has led to the realization that violence suffered by migrant women is not limited to the journey itself, and that 71% of women report having suffered some sort of violence either prior to or during migration. Often times, the first experiences of violence originated in their homes when they were children and continue to repeat itself throughout their lifetimes in varied forms. Their stories reveal how the decision to migrate is a consequence to the transnational and structural violence that pushes women to seek out ways to survive and provide for their families.
ContributorsConrad, Marla (Author) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Thesis advisor) / Simmons, William P. (Committee member) / Téllez, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
This dissertation is a comparative study of three contemporary women filmmakers: Puerto Rican Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo, and Brazilian director Helena Solberg. Informed by transnational theory, politics of location, feminism on the border, and approaches to documentary filmmaking, the study examines three filmic texts: Brincando el charco: Portrait

This dissertation is a comparative study of three contemporary women filmmakers: Puerto Rican Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Chicana director Lourdes Portillo, and Brazilian director Helena Solberg. Informed by transnational theory, politics of location, feminism on the border, and approaches to documentary filmmaking, the study examines three filmic texts: Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (1994), The Devil Never Sleeps/El diablo nunca duerme (1994), and Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business (1994). Each film is narrated by a female voice who juxtaposes her personal and transnational identity with history to tell her migration story before and after returning to her country of origin. An objective of the study is to demonstrate how the film directors vis-á-vis their female protagonists, configure a United States Latina transnational imaginary to position their female protagonists and themselves as female directors and as active social agents. Further, the dissertation explores how the filmmakers construct, utilizing the cinematographic apparatus, specific forms of resistance to confront certain oppressive forms. The theoretical framework proposes that transnational documentary filmmaking offers specific contestatory representations and makes possible the opening of parallel spaces in order to allow for a transformation from multiple perspectives. Through the utilization of specific techniques such as archival footage, the three directors focus on historical biographies. Further, they make use of experimental filmmaking and, in particular, the transnational documentary to deconstruct hegemonic discourses. Lastly, transnational cinema is valued as a field for cultural renegotiating and as a result, the documentary filmmakers in this study are able to reconfigure a transnational imaginary and propose an alternative discourse about history, sexuality, family structures, and gender relations. In sum, my dissertation contributes to Chicana/o and U.S. Latina/o, American Literature, and other Ethnic Literatures by focusing on migration, acculturation, and multicultural dialogue.
ContributorsValenzuela Pulido, Norma A (Author) / Hernández-G, Manuel De Jesús (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David W. (Committee member) / Mcelroy, Isis (Committee member) / Sanchez, Marta (Committee member) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Esta disertación analiza las maneras en que el sujeto (in)migratorio es representado en el cine español y argentino de los últimos años. El estudio investiga cómo el cine del (in)migrante ofrece convincentes narraciones (no)ficticias que son aportadas con temas de raza, género, lenguaje e identidad desde ambas perspectivas del sujeto

Esta disertación analiza las maneras en que el sujeto (in)migratorio es representado en el cine español y argentino de los últimos años. El estudio investiga cómo el cine del (in)migrante ofrece convincentes narraciones (no)ficticias que son aportadas con temas de raza, género, lenguaje e identidad desde ambas perspectivas del sujeto migratorio y de aquellos ubicados dentro de las culturas "indígenas" de recepción. Al cuestionar la conceptualización de la nación-estado, este proyecto contribuye a una base teórica fundada en una ruptura de las nociones hegemónicas que han construido opiniones de diferencia y aceptación de una persona sobre otro. En términos de lenguaje, este estudio es relevante por su análisis del discurso y epítetos raciales que existen y persisten debido a parámetros y limitaciones en el lenguaje Castellano y su léxica inherente. Equipado con esto es la propuesta de que si nuestra lengua tiene un registro inadecuado para interactuar con el supuesto otro, entonces solo se puede concluir que nosotros también estamos limitados en nuestro entendimiento de otros sujetos globales. De allí, una mejora del lenguaje resultaría en una mejora de sensibilidades culturales y globales. Además, la representación del género y la raza son puntos importantes para una interpretación semiótica de estos textos y se observa las maneras en que los temas socio-lingüísticos son triangulados entre las películas, los países y las sociedades de tales producciones culturales. Por ejemplo, las mujeres están sujetas a puestos restringidos e inferiores del sector de servicio, como prostitutas y mucamas, mientras los hombres están atados a cuestionables formas de trabajo en la agricultura y servicios sociales de baja categoría. Al final de todo, un mayor empuje detrás de este género fílmico subversivo es romper con las erróneas, anticuadas y precipitadas nociones de identidades nacionales para incitar deseables sensibilidades culturales a través de la lente artística del cine.
ContributorsBlack, Kyle K (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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ABSTRACT This research aims to investigate the work and impact of the prolific and popular Pablo Parellada y Molas. Although the author is now forgotten, he is an important figure regarding the struggles between Modernist writers and their critics. Pablo Parellada was one the key detractors of literary Modernism, a

ABSTRACT This research aims to investigate the work and impact of the prolific and popular Pablo Parellada y Molas. Although the author is now forgotten, he is an important figure regarding the struggles between Modernist writers and their critics. Pablo Parellada was one the key detractors of literary Modernism, a movement which he attacked through his parodies as evinced in his poetry, drama and short stories. His works contain the main pejorative features that would become the standard critique of these young poets of Spain in the early 1900's. Through the work of Pablo Parellada, this study seeks to understand the literary debates of Modernism in Spain that took place in the early twentieth century. Through this understanding, this study becomes important for it reveals the many personal characteristics that were attributed to the young Modernist poets. Some of these characteristics continued to be used by literary critics and as well became part of the collective imagination at the time and were still circulating several decades later.
ContributorsHerrería Fernández, Antonio (Author) / Acereda, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Volek, Emil (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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ABSTRACTO

La identidad y el pluralismo se debaten cuando hablamos de dos escritoras chicanas. Ellas reclaman una herencia judía e indígena en sus obras literarias: María Speaks: Journeys into the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life (2004) de Sarah Amira de la Garza y The Desert Remembers My

ABSTRACTO

La identidad y el pluralismo se debaten cuando hablamos de dos escritoras chicanas. Ellas reclaman una herencia judía e indígena en sus obras literarias: María Speaks: Journeys into the Mysteries of the Mother in My Life (2004) de Sarah Amira de la Garza y The Desert Remembers My Name:On Family and Writing (2007) de Kathleen Alcalá. En sus obras se examina el proceso de la construcción de identidad dentro de la comunidad cripto-judía en el suroeste de los Estados Unidos. Dicha comunidad ejemplifica y pone en cuestión la construcción de la identidad en el mundo moderno, deconstruyendo la historia tradicional. Se aplican dos conceptos derivados del estructuralismo para analizar el proceso de integrar una identidad más en identidades ya existentes. Bricolaje, concepto teórico de Claude Lévi-Strauss en su obra: El pensamiento salvaje (1962); bricolaje proporciona el modelo a seguir para entender los diferentes patrones culturales que conforman la construcción de una identidad. Jonglerie de Seth Kunin o la manipulación de las identidades, extraído del artículo: “Juggling Identities Among the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest” (2001). Acudimos al deconstructivismo de Jacques Derrida y al poscolonialismo de Gloria Anzaldúa y Emma Pérez. Este estudio revela que María Speaks deconstruye una educación católica al haber contradicciones eclesiásticas y cotidianas que producen un agudo sufrimiento en el sujeto femenino, ejerciendo como bricoleur, éste acude a la historia chicana de resistencia, a los mitos aztecas y coloniales, y al conocimiento y creencias judías para construir una nueva identidad chicana que incluye la cara sefardita. En The Desert Remembers my Name, el sujeto femenino, partiendo de una conciencia mexicoamericana de los 1950 y los 1960 donde se dan indicios culturales judíos, deconstruye su temprana identidad chicana y, como bricoleur, emprende investigaciones históricas y de familia para recuperar hechos, figuras, prácticas y símbolos para reconstruir una identidad sefardita y opata como parte de una actualizada identidad chicana. El método teórico aplicado, Bricolaje, Jonglerie, deconstructivismo y el poscolonialismo han sido útiles para recuperar la cara sefardita de la identidad chicana heterogénea. Creemos que este estudio representará un punto de partida para futuros estudios de la literatura judea-chicana.
ContributorsBohanon, Citlali (Author) / Hernández-G., Manuel De Jesús (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David William (Committee member) / García-Fernández, Carlos Javier (Committee member) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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ABSTRACT



This dissertation focuses on the narrative fiction of three women writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who have been publishing since the nineteen-nineties. The short stories and novels of Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela from Cuba, and Ángela Hernández Núñez from the Dominican Republic, have

ABSTRACT



This dissertation focuses on the narrative fiction of three women writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean who have been publishing since the nineteen-nineties. The short stories and novels of Mayra Santos-Febres from Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela from Cuba, and Ángela Hernández Núñez from the Dominican Republic, have been analyzed within a theoretical framework composed of Antonio Benítez Rojo and Édouard Glissant’s ideas about Caribbean cultural expression and Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Groz’s writings about the body in current feminist studies. In doing so this study has sought to demonstrate how contemporary Caribbean women writers employ a nomadic aesthetic that opens up a multitude of possibilities of meanings for bodies, and by extension subjects, that have traditionally been obscured by the Cartesian binary that separates the body from the mind. In spite of being culturally, sexually and racially specific bodies, the bodies that appear in the work of Santos-Febres, Portela and Hernández Núñez are in constant movement and metamorphoses. Therefore, special attention is paid to the ways in which these bodies are open to social completion making them favorable locations for negotiations of power, resistance to normative identities, and the production of new systems of knowledge that not only recognize the importance of the body but also acknowledge the value of the affects.

RESUMEN



Esta tesis trata la narrativa de tres escritoras del Caribe hispano-hablante que comenzaron a publicar a partir de los años noventa. Los cuentos y novelas de Mayra Santos-Febres de Puerto Rico, Ena Lucía Portela de Cuba, y Ángela Hernández Núñez de la República Dominicana, han sido analizados a través de un marco teórico compuesto de las ideas sobre la expresión cultural caribeña de Antonio Benítez Rojo y Édouard Glissant y los escritos sobre el cuerpo en los estudios feministas actuales de Rosi Braidotti y Elizabeth Grosz. Al hacerlo, este estudio se ha propuesto demostrar cómo las escritoras caribeñas contemporáneas emplean una estética nómade que abre las posibilidades de significado para los cuerpos y sujetos que han sido ocultados tras el binario cartesiano que separa el cuerpo de la mente. A pesar de ser cuerpos cultural, sexual y racialmente específicos, los cuerpos que aparecen en los textos de Santos-Febres, Portela y Hernández Núñez están en continuo movimiento y metamorfosis. Por lo tanto, se presta especial atención a los modos en los cuales estos cuerpos permanecen abiertos hacia la terminación social lo que los hace espacios propicios para las negociaciones de poder, la resistencia a las identidades normativas y la producción de nuevos sistemas epistemológicos que no solo reconocen la importancia del cuerpo sino que también el valor de los afectos.
ContributorsTorres-García, Solymar (Author) / Foster, David W (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia M (Committee member) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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This research study analyzes the use of piropos as a dominant part of Buenos Aires street culture. Piropos are locally defined as advances made by male strangers toward women in the public sphere, and they typically include: following, staring, unsolicited sexual/romantic comments and physical contact. Although these amorous or sexually

This research study analyzes the use of piropos as a dominant part of Buenos Aires street culture. Piropos are locally defined as advances made by male strangers toward women in the public sphere, and they typically include: following, staring, unsolicited sexual/romantic comments and physical contact. Although these amorous or sexually expressive advances have been historically viewed as harmless, the local development of anti-piropo campaigns in Buenos Aires indicates that this flirtatious public act is more damaging than previously recognized. The current debate in Buenos Aires concerning the use of piropos in public has rendered this social practice worthy of investigation. Throughout this study, I examine women’s experiences with and interpretations of piropos by utilizing participant observation, surveys, focus groups, and semi-structured individual interviews. I explore women’s diverse emotional and verbal responses to these interactions, and I analyze how the use of piropos has impacted some women’s sense of wellbeing and security in the public realm. In order to demonstrate the effect of piropos on women’s daily lives in the public sphere, I examine the ways in which women alter their behavior in order to avoid piropos. Furthermore, this investigation examines how piropos are often interpreted by female recipients as a public display of gender-based power differences. Thus, I argue that piropos are consistently used to reflect and sustain machismo, and they consequently restrict women’s equal access to public spaces in Buenos Aires. The quantitative and qualitative data presented throughout this thesis unveil the weighty ramifications of a social practice that has often been overlooked.
ContributorsMitchell, Mia Lael (Author) / Elenes, C. Alejandra (Thesis advisor) / Murphy Erfani, Julie (Committee member) / Luna, Ilana (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
With the establishment of "the special period in times of peace" in the nineties, there was in Cuba a series of transformations that affected its artistic and literary production. Therefore, gradually, a thematic opening emerged focused on deconstructing the idealized sociopolitical reality of the island allowing for the reformulation of

With the establishment of "the special period in times of peace" in the nineties, there was in Cuba a series of transformations that affected its artistic and literary production. Therefore, gradually, a thematic opening emerged focused on deconstructing the idealized sociopolitical reality of the island allowing for the reformulation of the ways in which women were depicted. The main objective of this study is to initiate a dialogue with the short fiction produced during this period in order to shed light on the fragmentary representation of female characters. In regards to said objective, the approach selected centers on the observation and analysis of violence, humor and national memory as recurring thematic elements in the texts. With that finality, the aesthetic proposals present in the work of Aida Bahr, Ena Lucía Portela, and Marilyn Bobes, will be analyzed using current literary and cultural theory. Among these the most noteworthy are Josephine Gattuso Hendin's theory of violence and the representations of women, Henri Bergson's theory of humor, and the critical works of numerous scholars specializing in Cuban fiction produced in the last two decades. As has been concluded, through the protagonists and their discourse, thematic and stylistic components contribute to creating new representations of women allowing for new responses and ways of coexisting that cast doubt on the stereotype of the revolutionary woman. These components, likewise, question the relationship between the characters in the stories and the concept of nation, which in the words of Nara Araújo, will allow us to reveal the different ways of reading the world of the present generation. Therefore, through the analysis of the configuration of these reactionary representations, a contribution is made to the study of the current narrative produced by women in Cuba.
ContributorsMinjarez Sesma, Solem (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Committee member) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Since the Enlightenment, humanist philosophy has understood materiality as an inert and determinate world categorically separate from the sphere of consciousness and language. However, after evolving significantly during the 20th century, the natural sciences now recognize the complexity, indeterminacy and agency of matter. A parallel transformation can be observed in

Since the Enlightenment, humanist philosophy has understood materiality as an inert and determinate world categorically separate from the sphere of consciousness and language. However, after evolving significantly during the 20th century, the natural sciences now recognize the complexity, indeterminacy and agency of matter. A parallel transformation can be observed in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature and is exemplified in the works of Cristina Peri Rossi and Cecilia Vicuña. Drawing on knowledge which emerges from the natural sciences, the humanities and personal experience, these poets explore multiple dimensions of materiality from the microscopic world of subatomic particles and DNA molecules to the macroscopic world of the body and the structure of the universe. The theoretical orientation of this study emerges from posthumanism, which critiques the epistemological foundations of humanist thought and reconfigures reductionist concepts of matter, discourse, the subject, and agency which are grounded in dualistic ontology. Material feminist theorists explore materiality through interdisciplinary approaches which establish a dialogue between posthumanism, feminist theory and the natural sciences. The material feminist Karen Barad proposes an agential realist ontology which constitutes the principal theoretical framework of this thesis. According to Barad, phenomena are not exclusively social or material but rather material-discursive practices, and the concept of agency is reconfigured as the product of the dynamics of intra-action rather than an as an attribute restricted to the human sphere. Furthermore, this thesis utilizes diverse materials from the areas of literary criticism and scientific research in order to achieve an authentically interdisciplinary interpretation of materiality in the poetry. Peri Rossi and Vicuña express a profound questioning of the fundamental assumptions of humanism and offer perspectives which take into account matter's agency and dynamism. Their poetry presents materiality as a constant process of creation and as an active participant in the unfolding of reality, thereby opening up new horizons of investigation. By interpreting the works of Peri Rossi and Vicuña through the lens of posthumanist theory, this study contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature.
ContributorsColeman, Vera (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Urioste, Carmen (Committee member) / HernÁNdez, Manuel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013