This study investigated the role of meaning activation and L2 oral language proficiency among Moroccan children learning to read in Spanish for the first time. Recent cross-linguistic research suggests that children learning to read in an L1 or L2 transparent orthography can achieve phonological decoding accuracy faster by relying on grapheme-phoneme strategies. In that case, it becomes extremely important to investigate the role of meaning and its relation to the development of phonological decoding and reading comprehension, especially when children are learning to read in an L2 transparent orthography. The main objective of this study was to discover whether phonological decoding and meaning identification can be considered to be two independent constructs or only one. The second objective was to expand the scope of L2 Spanish oral language proficiency by examining its influence on each of these constructs and on sentence reading comprehension. A battery of measures for assessing the various domains of phonological awareness, decoding, meaning identification and sentence comprehension, were administered to 140 Moroccan children with at least one year of literacy instruction in Spain. Letter knowledge and concept of print were used as control variables. Confirmatory analysis results demonstrated that decoding and word identification form different but dependent constructs. Structural equation modeling indicated that the contribution of L2 oral language proficiency depended on the exact nature of the dependent variable: L2 oral language proficiency does not directly predict decoding skills but is directly related to meaning identification skills and sentence comprehension. The findings provided an understanding of the roles of meaning and L2 oral language proficiency in isolated word reading and sentence comprehension, and clearly implied that decoding and comprehension are more independent when learning to read in an L2 transparent orthography. L2 decoding in Spanish can take place without comprehension. Possible theoretical, instructional and assessment implications related to L2 Spanish reading development are drawn based on the studys results.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the colonial assumptions underlying the representations, and narratives of Latinamericanism, Indigenism, and hegemonic discourses about ethnicity, locating them in the social, political, and cultural context of the twentieth-century Andes. The first chapter deals with Latinamericanism as a discursive formation that supported the dominant forms of political identity in Latin America from the emergency of a criollo subjectivity in the colonial period to the present. I argue that the genealogy of the Latin American subject implies an understanding of the criollo project of colonial self-determination as a political imposture that legitimized its position as subject of knowledge and power. The second chapter focuses on the critical discourse of Peruvian writer José Carlos Mariátegui, to show how his cultural criticism is complicit in constructing essentialist images of indigenous societies as an exotic other, and how it continues to be articulated within the perceptional and representational structures of colonial epistemologies. From this same perspective, in the third chapter I analyze the novel Yanakuna (1952) by the Bolivian writer Jesús Lara and his narrative worlds. Finally, the focus shifts to the emerging discourses of subaltern indigenous subjectivities, focusing on number of marginal, non-canonical testimonies from Ecuador by José Yánez del Pozo: Yo declaro con franqueza (1986). In shifting my attention to the small voice of history (Guha), I try to present the problematic relationship between the Marxist concept of class subject and these narratives of identity, highlighting the local agency and ethnic identities within contending emancipatory political projects in Ecuador.

This dissertation concerns the production of a political language in Colombia and Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that this new political language emerged and was made intelligible through a rhetoric and vocabulary of national regeneration: the task of giving new life (regenerating) to national populations becomes the common ground of political debate. My objects of study are the political essays and literary texts that were essential for producing and solidifying the idea of regeneration in two national contexts. Colombia and Mexico make a striking comparison in this regard. On the one hand, they represent a political dichotomy during the late nineteenth century: while Colombia was passing through an ascendant and newly aggressive conservativism, Mexico was embarking upon a long period of official liberalism that still reigns hegemonic today. And yet on the other hand, these political-historical contexts meet on the common ground of regeneration. It is illustrative to note that between the most reactionary conservatives in Colombia and the most radical liberals in Mexico, both shared a common thesis regarding their capacity to make vigorous a national society perceived to be in decay: both literally took a vocabulary of regeneration as their own. In Colombia, politician-writers such as Rafael Núñez (1888) and Miguel Antonio Caro (1886) would summarize their political task to the nation as nothing less than the choice between regeneration or catastrophe. More explicitly literary writers, such as José Asunción Silva (1896 [1925]) took up the language of regeneration as a mode of social critique. In the political middle, the intellectuals in and around the more centrist Díaz regime (Ignacio Altamirano [1888], Justo Sierra [1885; 1900]) would recur constantly in their treatises, essays and novels to tropes of social regeneration. Precisely through a comparison of these two casesat once divergent and convergentthis project will yield insight into larger relations between cultural production and nation-state consolidation throughout Latin America during a momentous historical period whose political reformations still resonate today.

This study is an exploration of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban poetry to illustrate the debate that revolutionary movements that evolve, develop and remain under the ideological umbrella of modernity do not achieve the open-inclusive and pluralistic society that they seek to establish. This is due to modernitys own desire for development and progress, which reduces the revolutionary movements efforts to limiting and exclusionary spacial/temporal parameters. This impossibility for a truly pluralistic society emerges also from modernitys inherent short reach and manipulation of memory. Through managing long and short memory, modernity seeks national unity under the premise that anything prior to the revolutionary movement was bad and that the only hope is in a future that only the revolution can provide. An in depth analysis of Cuban poetry written during the first two decades after the 1959 Revolution shows the impossibility of achieving a fully pluralist society that doesnt negate the co-existence of other cosmologies and cultural identities within that same society, and that doesnt disallow their membership into the national project. The unfolding of the characteristics of two opposing poetry styles that emerged during the 1960s and 1970s will serve as the basis for this illustration and analysis. The two styles in question are Colloquialism, a free verse style promoted by the state as the preferred way to write poetry; and Tojosismo, a more metric rhyme verse that followed traditional styles, developed outside the limits of the center of power and excluded from it. The research determines how these two styles of poetry differed in form, and also in the extension of their memories, jumpstarting from the controversies behind the centrality of Colloquialism and the marginality of Tojosismo. The study is a contextualization of Cubas poetry through this countrys social and political history, placing emphasis on the cultural policies established by Fidel Castro post the 1959 Revolution and the impact of such policies on the free production of poetry in the new revolutionary society.

Mi dissertation is based on literary and epistemological core problems surrounding the discovery and conquest of America. The discovery of America occurred during a very specific period of history, a moment of passage between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, a historical in-between during which unique changes started to develop. Those changes made possible the rise and consolidation of a new hermeneutical space, a space of interpretation, of negotiation and configuration of entirely different historical and cultural formations: precisely, the constitution of the West as a cultural, epistemological and geopolitical space. Those changes transformed the way in which knowledge of the world -imaginary and even cartographical- was materialized. To be specific, they gave birth to Eurocentric Modernity. These topics imply a series of profound problems such as a transformation in the perception of reality, and consequently, the necessity of new narrative and discursive forms capable of constructing and reinforcing the reality of colonial encounters. In an environment characterized as colonization, narration and therefore writing are two of the main devices used to fulfill and understand the world. For the Chroniclers, was necessary to create a new way to write the world and about the world, and one of the modes for achieving this would be using a new mimetic imagination. The work of early chroniclers, such as Christopher Columbus, Bernardino de Sahagún, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Lope de Aguirre and Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, helps me to explore this particular narration of the world, and, most importantly, the way such narratives helped to construct the occidental imaginary and Eurocentric Modernity. I study the conflictive constitution of new cultural hermeneutic spaces, the phenomenon of narrative pact by which important processes of othering and representation take place, constituting an other culture in terms of discourse and rhetorical exchange. I show how the other is not simply excluded but subdued and subsume by being given a voice and an ambiguous place of enunciation, often even an in-between place conceived of as a metaphorical space, heterogeneous, possible and unstable that produces an alternative mimesis as well as a contaminated modernity.

This dissertation focuses on how contemporary Southern Cone fiction responds to the post-dictatorial symbolic crisis by articulating a new political praxis based upon the intertwining of historical and aesthetic discourses. It thus addresses the link between narrative, historiography and politics in recent Argentinian, Chilean and Uruguayan texts that have not received major critical attention, probably because they do not fit into contemporary critical categories. The analysis seeks to go beyond the hegemonic debates on post-dictatorship mostly represented by scholars such us Idelber Avelar, Francine Masiello, Nelly Richard and Alberto Moreiras, among others which seem trapped in a number of recurrent topics and concepts mourning, memory, post-memory, horror, allegory that erase their critical potential and obliterate other possibilities. Breaking with this pattern, my work explores a dimension that has often been overlooked: the contemporary representation of the nineteenth century. I test the hypothesis that, in contemporary Southern Cone literature, the fictional re-writing of the nineteenth century (the foundational moment of nation, narration and intellectuals in Latin America) attempts to outline new ethical models for the intellectual, to solve the representational crisis through a reformulation of realism and to frame a specific political role for literary practice. My perspective owes considerably to a number of thinkers within the Marxist tradition especially Walter Benjamin, Gyorgy Lukács and Fredric Jameson and intends to contribute to some of their major discussion topics, above all the relation between history and aesthetics and the dichotomy allegory/realism.

I framed my Dissertation in the new discussions developed in Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Brazil and Mexico about the socio-cultural place of young people in the transformations of modernity. I am studying Colombian narratives about violence related to youth cultural identities, practices and communication in two specific socio-cultural marginal environments in marginal neighborhoods of Bogotá and Medellín. I comprehend narratives about violence to be a group of works (novels, chronics, testimonies, documentaries, and fiction films) related to the violent urban reality of the 80s and 90s in Colombia. These narratives determine positions and experiences that reveal imaginaries, sensibilities and identities of contemporary young people, understanding young people as social actors that have been sub-estimated. I also ask about how young practices and experiences refer also to global transformations regarding experiences of gender, sexuality, survival, religiosity, consumption of goods and violence.

Intercultural bilingual education was adopted by the Mexican school system to offer a type of education that was linguistically and culturally suitable for the indigenous groups of Mexico. Although the model was originally aimed at ethnic minorities, recently intercultural education is being extended to society in general as a strategy to change multicultural relations and to establish a more democratic society. However, the model has been criticized because of its lack of theoretical definition, legal grounding and practical problems in its implementation. Since the goals of intercultural education go beyond pedagogic issues, it is important to study how the Discourse of intercultural education is being interpreted, accepted, rejected and transformed by different social actors related to the educational field. This study explores the continuities and ruptures in the Discourse of intercultural education through the analysis of written policy documents and the discourse (i.e., language in use) of indigenous teachers, policy brokers, academics and indigenous leaders. Such continuities and ruptures reflect the underlying ideologies of these social actors regarding the goals of intercultural education, and the roles of indigenous teachers, society and organizations in this change process. Under the framework of critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 1985; 2003), official policy documents were compared to linguistic data yielded by ethnographic observations in indigenous schools and interviews with key actors in the indigenous educational field. An analysis of the discursive strategies and linguistic devices used by the interviewees and written documents shows that there are continuities, contradictions and overlaps in the positioning of the subjects regarding the tenets of intercultural bilingual education. The study exposes the role of these linguistic practices in the reproduction of dominant Discourses that perpetuate the status quo of indigenous education that the intercultural model was supposed to challenge in the first place; however, such reproduction is far from linear since indigenous teachers exert oppositional agency against institutional practices (linguistic and others) and take advantage of the discursive and legal space opened up by the intercultural model to develop their own educational projects, which constitute a cultural appropriation of the intercultural model.

This dissertation revisits the U.S.-Mexico borderlands to examine its neoliberal transformation intensified by globalization in order to address new aesthetic subjectivities that challenge this violent process from the peripheral experience and imagination. Despite increasing interest in the academic field, Border Studies have been trapped by hybridity theory -whose celebrative interpretations of the border phenomena frequently ignore social inequality and neutralize cultural conflicts- developed by Homi Bhabha and García Canclini, among others. Breaking with this postmodern frame, I explore the heterogeneous realities and marginal subjects particularly in relation to the crisis and the reformulation of two major and conflictive concepts: "cosmopolitanism" and "nation." I argue that for Border Studies to be effective, they have to respond to new scenarios of "peripheral" voices and experiences as they have been emerging along the U.S.-Mexico border and beyond. My dissertation thus focuses on narrative analysis of the topics that configure marginal languages and cultures: undocumented migratory labor and border crossing, the cholo community, popular border saints, narco-world and "bare life," feminicide in Ciudad Juárez and maquiladora workers. From Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Gloria Anzaldúa, the texts of embodied border identities I analyze attempt to dismantle binary models -the "borderless" and the "bordered"- of the idea of 'great community,' to demonstrate the representational crisis of a national or bi-national perspective that intensifies monolithic claims, and to offer different and even alternative ideas of community in a globalized context.

This dissertation explores the generative mechanisms of representation by which the Dominican and Cuban lettered cities situated themselves the 20th century vis a vis an imagined, yet dynamic US alterity. The argument is that the trope of the United States works as a productive prejudicea powerful master signifier that both grounds and modifies the established national narratives. The dissertation is divided into two parts, on the Dominican Republic and Cuba, respectively. The first explores the influence of Rodós Arielism (arielismo) on official Dominican nationalist discourse. During the early part of the 20th century, the US is seen in as a Caliban figure by Dominican intellectuals. But in the period of Trujillos dictatorship, this negative view of the US is displaced to some extent by a focus on Haiti as the main constitutive outside of Dominican national identity. The section explores how writers such as Ramón Marrero Aristy, Juan Bosch, Pedro Mir, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, Aída Cartagena Portalatín, and most recently Junot Díaz reacted to or challenged these totalizing discourses. In Cuba, the discourse of the lettered city on the United States also evolves in the course of the 20th century. In the immediate aftermath of independence, intellectuals like José Antonio Ramos oscillated between two ideas of the US: as a model for a desired modernity and as a symbol of imperialism. Later, during the years prior to the 1933 revolution, Jorge Mañach, Antonio Mella, Fernando Ortíz, and Ramiro Guerra, offer varied, and at times opposing views of the US. A similar disparity occurs in the post-revolutionary lettered city. Writers such as Luis Rogelio Nogueras and Roberto Fernández Retamar echo the earlier image of the US as an imperial power, whereas recent novels from the so-called Special period by Leonardo Padura and Edmundo Desnoes offer a more nuanced , self-reflective vision of Cubas relation with the United States. The dissertation shows that the different narratives of acceptance and/or resistance to the idea of the US are also ways of negotiating tensions and ambiguities internal to the national projects of both Cuba and the Dominican Republic during the 20th century.