From 1686 to 1690, General Alonso de León led five military expeditions from Northern New Spain into modern-day Texas in search of French intruders who had breached Spanish sovereignty and settled on lands claimed by the Spanish Crown. His first two exploratory journeys were unsuccessful, but on the third expedition, he discovered a Frenchman living among Coahuiltec Indians across the Río Grande. In 1689, the fourth expedition finally led to the discovery of La Salle’s ill-fated colony and fort on the Texas Coast and to the repatriation of two of the French survivors. On his fifth and final expedition, De León established the first Spanish mission among the Hasinai Indians of East Texas and rescued several French children who had been abducted by the Karankawa. Through archival research, I have identified sixteen manuscript copies of De León’s meticulously kept expedition diaries. These documents form a distinct corpus and hold major importance for early Texas scholarship. Several of these manuscripts, but not all, have been known to historians and have been addressed in the literature. However, never before have all sixteen manuscripts been studied as an interconnected body of work and submitted to philological treatment. In this interdisciplinary study, I transcribe, translate, and analyze the diaries from two different perspectives: linguistic and historical. The linguistic analysis examines the most salient phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical phenomena attested in the documents. This synchronic study provides a snapshot of the Spanish language as it was used in Northern Mexico and Texas at the end of the 17th century. An in-depth examination discovers both conservative traits and linguistic innovations and contributes to the history of American Spanish. The historical analysis reveals that frequent misreadings, misinterpretations, and mistranslations of the Spanish source documents have led to substantial factual errors which have misinformed historical interpretation for more than a century. Thus, I have produced new, faithful, annotated English translations based on the manuscript archetypes to address historical misconceptions and present a more accurate interpretation of the historical events as they actually occurred.

In this dissertation I offer an analysis of the ideological significance of Juan de Castellanos' writings in light of the epic model provided by Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana. My main goal is to demonstrate that, unlike Ercilla, Castellanos embraced and manipulated the resources at the disposal of epic poets not only to praise the deeds and defend the rights of the first wave of colonists, but also to challenge the policies of Hapsburg monarchs concerning the administration of the recently established Viceroyalties in the New World. Hence, this dissertation aims to foreground the complexities and ambiguities of a text that bears evidence of an internal ideological fissure that significantly shaped Spain’s political and territorial expansion and contributed to the emergence of a new type of literature. If epic, as has been persuasively argued by Elizabeth B. Davis "was invaluable to the ruling circles of the imperial monarchy, who used it to forge a sense of unity and to script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest" (10), then the heroic poems written by Castellanos on behalf of the conquistadors and encomenderos represent the boldest attempt to turn the most prestigious vehicle of Spanish imperial propaganda, epic poetry, into a tool for the expression of colonial political concerns, a project which included but was not limited to the deployment of aggressive practices of poetic imitation, the expression of a new sense of selfhood, and the demarcation of a new sense of patriotism. Nevertheless, from its inception Castellanos' project was also plagued by many contradictions, most of which are the result of his nostalgia for the values and practices commonly associated with the warrior nobility of the feudal era, and by the constraints imposed by simultaneously having to point to and erase the trace of Ercilla's text. / text

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Auteursnaam op omslag: Jenny Fraai. Met lit. opg. - Met samenvatting in het Nederlands en Engels.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-285). Also available online in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Literatura / Esta investigación propone que la Histórica Relación del Reyno de Chile (1646) de Alonso de Ovalle, escrita e impresa en Roma es un texto eminentemente persuasivo, cuyo principal propósito es conseguir financiamiento y permisos para traer misioneros jesuitas a Chile. De este modo, para conseguir sus propósitos el autor se dirige a dos tipos de destinatar ios: al rey Felipe IV y los representantes del poder polít ico-económico de la época y por otra parte, al general de la orden jesuita Mutio Vitelleschi, como también a jóvenes jesuitas interesados en misionar en tierras lejanas. En esta perspectiva, la obra se estructura a partir de tres ejes de argumentación: el territorio, los hechos notables y la frontera, que son matizados de acuerdo al tipo de destinatario. Así, por medio de estos argumentos se observa la dimensión persuasiva y, por tanto, retórica de la obra, utilizando el género deliberativo. En síntesis, la descripción laudatoria del territorio chileno y el relato de los hechos notables de conquistadores y misioneros jesuitas, están supeditados al propósito que persigue el autor: mover los afectos de su audiencia para lograr una acción concreta en relación con las necesidades que requiere el territorio de Chile.

This study addresses chivalric writing and court culture during the reign of Juan II of Castile and aims to examine the changing chivalric ideal in Castile during this turbulent period of Castilian history. My thesis argues that political crisis in Castile led to a corresponding crisis in Castilian chivalry as commentators at the royal court tried to correct the failings of the Castilian nobility. The study is based around the work of Alonso de Cartagena, an esteemed diplomat, translator and the Bishop of Burgos in the latter years of Juan II’s reign. Like many of his contemporaries, Cartagena lamented Castile’s descent into civil war and felt compelled to take up his pen in response to the drawn swords of the Castilian nobility. His Doctrinal de los caualleros, produced in 1444 at the height of the civil war, was a highly critical look at chivalry and nobility in the Kingdom of Castile. Cartagena’s view of the chivalric ideal was one which was fundamentally shaped by the civil war. This study seeks to set his ideas in their broader context and argues that they should be seen as part of a wider Castilian debate on chivalry and nobility. This debate involved a number of Cartagena’s contemporaries including, Diego de Valera, Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo and the Marquis of Santillana Íñigo López de Mendoza. Cartagena, along with a number of these authors, challenged traditional views on chivalry and nobility and instead argued for a view of knighthood grounded in individual good conduct and personal worth, in place of lineage and inherited status. This study argues that the civil war in Castile paved the way for the development of a rich literature of chivalric reform and facilitated the development of the sort of knightly criticism seen elsewhere in Europe in the later Middle Ages. However, rather than simply being a theoretical discussion, the civil war and unique social pressures on the Iberian Peninsula made the debate highly relevant. Chivalry became a vehicle for political criticism and reform. For Cartagena and his contemporaries, chivalric writing offered a means of ending the civil war by addressing what they saw as endemic issues with the rebellious Castilian nobility. My work has thus argued for a view of chivalry as a changing and developing body of thought shaped by the intellectual and political context in which it developed. Chivalry was, in essence, a code of military ethics governing conduct on and off the battlefield. However, whilst its basic tenants of virtue, honour, prowess at arms and piety were broadly similar across Europe, how they were understood differed greatly. Rather than seeking an all-encompassing definition, I have argued that the focus should fall on the differences and complexities within chivalric thought.

No description available.

No description available.

There were two great ambitions in the life of Alonso S. Perales: the first was to help his people, the Mexican-Americans; the second was to help all of mankind. To pursue this first ambition, Perales became very active as a major political leader who supported civil rights and the abolishment of racial discrimination. Many viewed him as a defender of la raza (the Mexican-American race) and one of the most influential Mexican-Americans of his time. As such, Perales devoted most of his work to defending Mexican-Americans and battling charges that Mexicans were an inferior people and a social problem. He participated in various Civil Rights organizations and was one of the founders of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). This author argues that without Perales’ involvement, LULAC would have never existed. This work solely focuses on Perales’ life from the late 1920s to the early 1930s. It begins by examining Perales’ roots and his first involvement with Mexican-American civil rights. It then covers his role in the origin of LULAC, specifically its predecessor organization, the League of Latin American Citizens. Furthermore, this work explores Perales’ involvement in the defeat of the 1930 Box Bill and his role in the American electoral missions in Nicaragua between 1928 and 1932. Lastly, this work examines why LULAC has forgotten Perales. The main goal is to shed light on this often neglected aspect of Mexican-American history and hopefully to bring forth the importance and impact that Perales’ work had on la raza not only in Texas but nationwide.

In the 1940s, Alicia Alonso became the first Latin American dancer to achieve prominence in the field of ballet, until then dominated by Europeans. Promoted by Alonso, ballet took firm roots in Cuba, particularly after the Cuban Revolution (1959). This dissertation integrates historical research, postcolonial critique and discourse analysis to explore the performative and discursive strategies through which Alonso defined the identity of the Cuban ballet. The study examines the historical context of the development of ballet in Cuba, Alonso's rationale for the practice of this dance form on the Island, and the relationship between the Cuban ballet and the European ballet. Alonso insisted that the cultivation of ballet in her country was not an act of cultural colonialism. For her, the development of the Cuban ballet amounted to an exploration of a distinctive Cuban voice within this dance form, a reformulation of a European legacy from a postcolonial perspective. Her rationale for the practice of ballet in Cuba captured the tension between cosmopolitan and nationalist forces that defined the country's artistic production throughout the twentieth century. Alonso defended the legitimacy of the Cuban dancers' performances of European classics such as Giselle and Swan Lake. She cast Cuban dancers as both heirs of the European nineteenth-century classics, but also proponents of a distinctive national aesthetics defined by the accents that they brought to the performance of this repertory and that, in her opinion, were expressive of the Cuban culture. Alonso proposed that, among other elements, a special sense of musicality distinguished Cuban dancers: she recycled the image of Cubans as a musical people, a trope that commonly informs representations of Cubans and their culture. The phenomenon of Alonso and the Cuban ballet helped to redraw the international boundaries of this dance form, disassociating the notion of ownership of ballet's legacy from its geographic and cultural origins in Europe. In today's dance world, increasingly marked by the international flow of dance genres, the study of Alonso's promotion of ballet in Cuba sheds light on the practices and discourses through which dancers assimilate and take ownership of foreign traditions. / Dance