Armed conflicts have heavily impacted Latin American societies for centuries. Yet the numerous studies that have examined these armed conflicts have devoted little attention to the primary instrument of this violence: the firearm. This dissertation fills this gap by providing the first in-depth study of representations of weaponry in songs and literary texts from various armed conflicts, including the Mexican Revolution, the Sandinista Revolution, and postwar Central America. It examines the function of firearms in songs, photos and texts about revolutionaries, guerrilla fighters and demobilized soldiers. Taking the firearm as an artifact and trope, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between direct violence, politics and different projects of modernity. The first chapter examines corridos and literary texts about the Mexican Revolution such as El águila y la serpiente by Martín Luis Guzmán and Cartucho by Nellie Campobello. The second chapter analyzes a key but understudied expression of the Sandinista Revolution: the music of Carlos and Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy, in particular the albums Guitarra Armada, Amando en tiempos de guerra and Canto épico al FSLN. The last chapter deals with the figure of the demobilized combatant in Central American postwar literature: in the novel El arma en el hombre by Horacio Castellanos Moya and the short stories “La noche de los escritores asesinos” by Jacinta Escudos and De fronteras by Claudia Hernández. Incorporating theories about modernity, weapons technology, object-subject relations, affect, militarization and gender, this research shows that: 1) intellectuals are drawn to violence but try to position themselves outside of it; 2) often a female element is used to legitimize armed struggle and to soften its implications; 3) the use of a firearm can be deeply democratic in nature but lead to a profound militarization and traumatization of politics and society; and 4) precariousness lies at the core of many insurgent acts, since it is often precarité that leads to rising up in arms, which is itself a precarious political gesture. This examination of the relation between war technology and society testifies to the deep interconnectedness of modernity and violence and to the need for a more radical democracy

This longitudinal study focuses on the language production of two siblings, aged 6 and 9 at the beginning of the data collection period, who have been brought up in a bilingual family in New York. The parents of the two girls are native speakers of German and Spanish, respectively, and English for them is the language of education and the larger community. The study specifically examines the phenomenon of code switching, or transitioning between languages, either within one sentence or within one speech situation. I examine the extent to which these switches are caused by deficiencies in vocabulary in a specific language, and seek to identify other possible causes for such transitions. The data collected mainly through recording and transcription of the children's speech within the family home allowed me to identify a number of sociopragmatic functions most commonly fulfilled by producing mixed utterances, such as referring to a specific person, including or excluding someone from the conversation, changing the interlocutor or the topic or explaining or insisting on a certain idea. Lexical need was also an important cause of code switching, although it did not prevail over the other categories. The distribution in the amount and function of code switches turned out to be in a dynamic state, with both quantitative and qualitative changes observed throughout the study period. The age difference between the children and the relationship between the younger and elder sibling were additional factors which influenced their language choice. I conclude that code switching, especially in the case of child speech, should be considered a fluid and multifaceted phenomenon which represents the speaker's role in the conversation and reflects multiple social and pragmatic functions; while elements of two (or more) languages are often combined for purely lexical reasons, this is only one aspect of trilingual code switching, which allows the speaker, consciously or not, to explore the three languages as ways of establishing his or her personality and looking at reality both within and outside the means of each particular language.

In Latin American literary history, writing has been primarily a male-dominated activity. It is not until the second part of the nineteenth century, when the first generation of women writers appeared, that the act of writing novels, essays, and poetry allowed them to have a voice in the public sphere. Through their writings, women authors redefined women's roles in a society strongly influenced by patriarchal beliefs. This dissertation focuses on three authors from the Peru and Argentina: Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852-1909), Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera (1842-1909) and Juana Manuela Gorriti (1818-1892), and has two principal aims. The first is to demonstrate that, through the act of writing, these women writers crossed the boundaries from the private sphere of the home to the public arena of political action. I argue that, once they entered the public space, they openly expressed their opinions about how to improve the social situation of women, concentrating most of their efforts on supporting women's education as a path to social and economic independence. As a second aim, I analyze a set of novels in depth to show that by representing women as subjects in their novels, these nineteenth-century women writers contradicted the patriarchal-liberal ideology that defined women primarily as objects. Some of the existing research on nineteenth-century women writers argues that their representations of women reinforced patriarchal beliefs, since female characters were still kept within the limits of the domestic realm. However, my research shows that there was an important resistance to patriarchal-liberal constraints in Matto, Cabello and Gorrriti' writings. Applying the theory of scholars such as Mary Poovey, Bridget Aldaraca, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, I show that even though women characters in these novels do not leave the house to participate completely in public life, they start to exert control over their own lives and become more independent. Thus, I demonstrate that women writers portrayed their female characters as the initiators of political action with direct implications in the public sphere. Women characters also protest against the marginalized conditions of other social and ethnic groups. Female characters reinforce the need for a secular education for women, which can provide them with knowledge in the sciences and arts, and hence with means to become professionals. Women characters and their authors move between the private and the public spheres in order to make their voices heard. This was a real challenge for women in a century that witnessed many changes in social and political life; however, none of those changes aimed at providing women the rights of independence and full participation in the public sphere.

This dissertation examines the historical and political vision of Mexico in the following plays: Felipe Ángeles by Elena Garro (1916-1998); El eterno femenino by Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974); La paz ficticia by Luisa Josefina Hernández (1928) and Tlacaélel, Felipe Carrillo Puerto: Una flor para tu sueño y El sueño de la Malinche by Marcela del Río (1932). The main objective of this study is to fill in the criticism void about theatre written by women in Mexico (especially their historical theatre). Another very important objective is to show how these historical plays propose the need to change the current political and social structures that have been in place for centuries so that every individual is treated equally regardless of race, sex or social-economical class. These four women playwrights redeem not only female historical characters but also the values embedded in various social movements such as the Yaqui tribe rebellion at the end of the 19th century, the Mexican Revolution and the expropiation of the lands to the people of Spanish extraction who had stripped them from the indigenous people in the Yucatán Peninsula at the beginning of the 20th century. Since these playwrights set their own historical characters’ perspective in contrast to the perspective of them that official history has offered, this approach can be analyzed as a dialogical form, of one conscience opposite another one. Therefore, the study employs the tool for analysis provided by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination and Estética de la creación verbal. The ideological divisions presented in Del Rio’s play Felipe Carrillo Puerto: Una flor para tu sueño, are analyzed from Lucien Goldmann’s concept of a utopian world. The heroes of the social movements in three of the plays: La paz ficticia, Felipe Ángeles and Felipe Carrillo Puerto: Una flor para tu sueño allows the application of Georg Lukacs’ theory about the novel to be applied to theatre, because each one of these protagonists can be described very well with the term “problematic individual.” The significance of intertextualities present in the play El eterno femenino by Rosario Castellanos is analyzed from the perspective of Gerard Genette in his book Palimpsests.

In dieser Arbeit wird die Interaktion der Protagonisten in den Romanen von Horacio Castellanos Moya untersucht. Betrachtet werden die Bücher: La diabla en el espejo (2000), El arma en el hombre (2001), Donde no estén ustedes (2003), Insensatez (2004) und Desmoronamiento (2006). In der Reihenfolge abnehmender sozialer Distanz geht es nacheinander um Konzepte von professionellen Beziehungen, Freundschaft, familiären Beziehungen und Intimität. Geprüft wird hierbei die These, dass all diese Beziehungen als von Gewaltverhältnissen unterwandert dargestellt werden. Zum anderen soll eine detaillierte Analyse Aufschluss über Inszenierungsweisen, Implikationen und Folgen der dargestellten Gewalt ermöglichen. Als zentral erweisen sich hierbei einerseits der Begriff des „Epitaphs“, wie ihn Jacques Derrida in seiner Politiques de l’ amitié entwickelt und andererseits die „Theorie des kommunikativen Rabens“, welche Ottmar Ette in seinem Band ÜberLebenswissen: die Aufgabe der Philologie darstellt. Die Arbeit hofft außerdem dazu beizutragen, den Bekanntheitsgrad Castellanos Moyas, als einem herausragenden Vertreter zentralamerikanischer Belletristik, zu erhöhen. / The objective of the present master thesis is to investigate the images of social interaction in the novels of Horacio Castellanos Moya. The books taken into consideration are La diabla en el espejo (2000), El arma en el hombre (2001), Donde no estén ustedes (2003), Insensatez (2004) and Desmoronamiento (2006). In a succesion of lessening social distance, concepts of professional relations, friendship, family relations and intimacy are examinated. This will be done in order to, first, review the assumption that all these concepts are shown as being infiltrated by violent conditions. Second, a more detailed analysis aims at a deeper understanding of the ways of design, as well as the implications and results of the represented violence. Concepts wich proved to be important in this context are Jacques Derrida’s “Epitaph” wich he develops in his Politiques de l’ amitié and Ottmar Ette’s “Theory of the Communicative Raven” from his book ÜberLebenswissen: die Aufgabe der Philologie. Apart from this the paper is meant to make the novels of this extraordinary exponent of Central American fiction known to a greater public.

This senior thesis project examines how the educational system in Ecuador affects the youth of the country. It al so explores the aspirations mothers have for their children in terms of obtaining an education as well as their opinions about the current educational system in Ecuador. The investigation consisted of conducting interviews with both indigenous mothers who live in the countryside and mothers who live in the city of Quito. 1 chose to study two different demographics because I was curious if there were differences within the two groups on these issues. Moreover, 1 used my own observations as well as literary works to help me corroborate the information 1 received from the mothers to help me draw my conclusions. As 1 finished my interviews with 4 mothers from Cotacachi and 4 mothers from Quito, 1 found that the adolescents do differ in the way they access education, and how mothers perceive the educational system. Through data and interviews, 1 gathered that access to education as well as level of school attained by indigenous mothers and children is much lower than that of those in Quito. Nonetheless, there were similarities between the two groups in that they both had high aspirations for their child's educational future. Even though there are problems and inequalities in the educational system in Ecuador, the mothers expressed some hope as the government has made some positive changes.

This thesis explores the contributive role of architecture to the prosperity of a place. The research addresses the challenges and opportunities that rural regions face today by analyzing the general factors of marginalized rural communities through the lens of a specific community in mainland Portugal. A new approach for maintaining an authentic character, and a “sense of place” is presented which defends rural space as a genuinely experiential realm. The thesis proposes the design of a modern day treatment and research centre in the rural town of Manteigas, situated on one of the largest glacier valleys in Europe in the heart of the Serra da Estrela mountain range. Once alive with all the quaint characteristics that typify an idyllic rural identity, this town now faces a steep population decrease. Situated in the centre of the Zêzere glacial valley overlooking the town, the design accepts and interprets the natural geology of the site, harnessing the therapeutic thermal waters that continue to flow from the glacier line of the valley. The new centre represents not just a place for leisure and relaxation, but also an investigative laboratory for modern day natural healing therapies. The town of Manteigas is situated within three very distinct landscapes: a fertile landscape, a socio-cultural landscape, and a landscape of health and wellness. The design intervention responds to all these conditions and is dependent on each in its operation. This thesis is a proposal for a sustainable cycle of local and regional rejuvenation that will not be easily broken. The design proposal aims to build an infrastructure that will revive the identity of the community as a place of study and implementation of natural healing. The proposed design will also act as a catalyst to fuel future development and stimulate the local and regional economies.

Tese--Universidade de São Paulo. / Without thesis statement.

This report investigates the use of authentic readings and videos to teach Portuguese language and culture in the foreign language classroom. It starts with a discussion of the current state of the field about definitions of culture, their pedagogical implications and some approaches to teaching culture in the foreign language classroom. This discussion is followed by a review of recent research supporting the use of authentic videos and films to teach the target language and culture concomitantly, and a thorough description of the Brazilian literary genre of crônica, based upon the works of preeminent Brazilian literary critics and historians. The report ends with a unit design proposal based on the literature reviewed and grounded in second language acquisition theories and research. The proposed innovative approach that incorporates authentic non-scripted videos and literary readings, such as crônicas, provides a strong support to teachers that seek to teach cultural perspectives as well as products and practices in the foreign language classroom. / text

Not withstainding the adverse criticism given the prose works of Gertudis Gomez de Avellaneda by such men as Fitzmaurice-Kelly as less notable, I have found her novels and tales to be worthy of consideration. They are extremely romantic, some being full of the fantastic and grotesque, while others are historical similar to those of Sir Walter Scott. These romantic novels have a genuine and natural charm which makes them very pleasing to read. Most of them have been called sentimental tras , but still they contain numerous qualities of romanticism at its best. It will be my duty and pleasure to bring out these characteristios as Avellaneda portrayed them and thus prove that there is something more to her novels and tales than most critics believe.