This study investigated the relationship between students self-reported perceptions of their learning experiences and outcomes on measures of oral fluency, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, communicative ability and cognitive ability. Specifically, the study analyzed the correlation between activities in the classroom, in the social realm, and in the home environments with outcomes from measures Spanish acquisition. In addition, diary analysis was conducted to investigate which environment seemed most relevant to the learners during the semester. The participants in this study were 37 college students learning Spanish in two contexts: at home (AH) in a university in Colorado, and study abroad (SA) in Alicante, Spain. The results of four companion studies that investigated linguistic gain were correlated with the student perception scores produced through diary analysis. These analyses were conducted in order to understand relationships between students reports of their activities during the semester and changes in their overall Spanish acquisition. The results indicated that differences existed between the AH and SA groups in terms of which environment seemed to be most relevant. While the AH group discussed classroom activities to the greatest extent, the SA group talked most about their experiences with Spanish in the social environment. In addition, while several measures of fluency, grammatical ability, and vocabulary acquisition were related to the home and social environments for the SA group, the AH group data showed relationships between the classroom environment and those measures. Very few relationships were noted between communicative ability, vocabulary and cognitive measures and the perception scores. However, two especially noteworthy relationships were found. For the AH group, the positive classroom environment was related to better attention control, and the negative classroom environment was related to reduced ability to control attention in the target language. It was concluded that differences between the two contexts were evident. While the AH learners were minimally exposed to native speakers outside the classroom, the SA group enjoyed a great deal of exposure. This contact, however, was generally only related to gains in their ability to communicate orally, and may have actually negatively affected learners ability to produce grammatical forms.

The dissertation examines a body of narratives related to the literary and film representations of Eva Perón, the most crucial female figure of the populist Argentine imaginary. The defining feature of the corpus goes from the publication of La razón de mi vida, in 1951, to 2003, when Daniel Herrendorf published Evita, la loca de la casa. The dissertation focuses on populism as a particular inflection in the modernization process in Argentina, as it is studied by Ernesto Laclau, among others. In this sense, it examines the reverberative effects that the presence of Eva Perón caused in the paternalistic and homophobic Argentine society during the 1950s and after that, in a process that allowed her to become an ideological, political and aesthetic icon in the nationalistic culture. The different images of Eva Perón in literature and film are read as a cultural metaphor that crosses the last fifty years in Argentina. The issues that were expressed through her life became permanent points of reference and were later used in the articulation of other ideological and cultural concerns, lending themselves easily to other formulations. In this way, the figure of Eva Perón has developed into a cultural reference point that has the ability to engender different meanings in different contexts. The hypothesis of the dissertation is that these representations can be read as allegories of the different social, political and cultural moments in the modernization process in Argentina. In this sense, these narratives can be articulated in the symbolic sphere with an imaginary where modernity, gender and populism interweave at different levels. To analyze the representation of Eva Perón from its beginning and to follow it in its trajectory, allows us to uncover the reasons behind the creation of her rich symbolic value. The objective of the dissertation is to address the following questions: How was Eva Perón depicted in Argentine literature and film during the period 19512003? What factors are at the origins of those modes of representation? What place can we assign to these representations in relation to the modernization process in Argentina?

Our study starts with an analysis of two nineteenth century foundational novels from Puerto Rico (La Peregrinación de Bayoán, 1863) and Cuba (Amistad Funesta, 1885), and continues with an analysis of the literary work produced by twentieth Century Cuban and Puerto Rican female authors (Luisa Capetillo, Mariblanca Sabas Alomá, Nancy Morejón, Ana Lydia Vega, Achy Obejas, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, and Mayra Santos-Febres). Through a comparative approach focused on the diverse representations of gender, sexuality, Caribbeanness, and nation, we have studied the similarities and differences among these female writers literary projects, as well as the continuities/discontinuities of their own projects in regards to the geo-cultural and biopolitical imaginaries developed by their literary predecessors, Eugenio María de Hostos and José Martí, respectively. This comparative and critical analysis addresses three specific questions and concerns: to study how the geo-cultural and political imaginaries represented in these two novels have been designed under the image of a single and unified fraternal and virile political body which excludes women from the social, and/or those bodies or sexualities which threaten to fragment the ideal construction of a unified and homogeneous civil society, and which obstruct the literary representation of the ideal virile subject, leader of the national emancipatory cause. to examine how the above-mentioned female writers have challenged such politico-patriarchal configurations, which have in turn, established the hegemonic cultural landscape for each country and for the Caribbean region in relation to the discourses of sexual preference and economy (the heterosexual family), race (racial mixing/mestizaje or whitening/blanqueamiento), and geography (insularism, Caribbeanness/ Antillanismo, or Americanness/ Nuestroamericanismo). to analyze how the challenge to these modernizing norms (heterosexist, phallocentric and pro-transculturation) opens the way towards new alliances amongst the peoples of the Caribbean islands and their Diasporas, based on a spirit of solidarity and an affective search for the Other. These critical projects allow us to imagine the Caribbean as a culturally flexible region, and as a more equal, just, and open society, founded upon a new minoritarian ethics capable of resisting and deconstructing the effects of coloniality of power, already present in anticolonial XIXth century literature.

The dissertation explores cultural representations of the new Latin American city that has emerged since the waning of national-popular development and the advent of neoliberal globalization. The discussion focuses on Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City in the 1980s and 1990s. The main argument is that, with the withering of the modern city and its narratives, new (post-civil and post-national) subjectivities have emerged, and that cultural cartographies of the city can help us to better grasp these new configurations. The first chapter, A Totality Made of Fragments, examines the construction of the image of the city in Modernist culture as an allegory for the totalizing and integrating impulse of the nation in the work of Fuentes, Sábato, and Vargas Llosa. The second chapter, Walking in the City, explores the relationship between walking in the city and writing about the city in Rubem Fonsecas and Clarice Lispectors texts on Rio de Janeiro, focusing on these texts critique of literature and literacy. The third chapter, Public Spaces and Urban Geographies of Civility, enages uses and figurations of public spaces as sites for the expression of civil society. By reference to Poniatowskas chronicle-testimonio about the student massacre at Tlatelolco in 1968 and Eltits novel about Santiago de Chile under dictatorship in the 1980s, this chapter offers a critique of the normative ideologies of civil society and public space. The fourth chapter, Homosexual Desire and Urban Territories, examines a novel by Zapata (1979) and an ethnographic study by Perlongher (1987) in order to map out how cartographies of queer desire in Mexico City and São Paulo disrupt public spaces drive towards closure and universality. The fifth and final chapter, Deterritorialization and the Limits of the City, concentrates on neoliberal globalization in the 1990s in Buenos Aires. It combines analyses of cultural theory, fiction, and film in order to show the emergence emergence of new, post-national subjectivities that are reshaping the city in ways that depart radically from Modernisms drive towards integration, citizenship, and national culture.

EL NEGOCIO DE LA MEMORIA: ESCRITURA Y SUJETO AUTOBIOGRAFICO EN LA LITERATURA DE LENGUA ESPAÑOLA (1970-2005) Elver Sergio Ramírez Franco, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2005 This dissertation examines one of the most dynamic fields of recent literary production in Spanish language: autobiographical discourse. It focuses on the notions of subjectivity, identity, temporality, truth, gender, race, ideology, image, memory, body, eroticism and ideology as represented in the symbolic space of the autobiographical discourse of ten key authors (Reinaldo Arenas, Jorge Luis Borges, José Donoso, Salvador Elizondo, Gabriel García Márquez, Margo Glantz, Juan Goytisolo, Pablo Neruda, Severo Sarduy, Mario Vargas Llosa) of twentieth century literary tradition in Spanish/Latin American Literature. The theoretical perspective of this work is postructuralist. The dissertation consists of 4 chapters. The first one provides the frame for the analysis and defines concepts such as subjectivity, identity, temporality, representation, memory, vraisemblance and truth. It incorporates concepts proposed by Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, James Olney, Paul Ricoeur, and Gayatri Spivak in order to map these categories. The second chapter studies the relationship between autobiography and image, and autobiography and representational techniques. This chapter pays attention to the narratological strategies with which the authors, who are at the same time the narrators and the main characters of their texts, re-create their image through their writing. The third chapter explores the connections between body, erotic exclusions, power relations and homoerotic writing (Homographesis) as the social constitution of identity through and against- those inscriptions as the components of social identity. This chapter focuses on three writers: Reinaldo Arenas, Juan Goytisolo, and Severo Sarduy The last chapter attempts to show the underlying phallocentric ideology which operates in the process of subjectification of straight writers, and the complex negotiations of identity during a period marked by the emergence of a global society, tele-technology and simulacrum. The results are summarized in the final conclusions.

The main objective of this study is to determine the impact of immigration interpreters on the testimony of Spanish-English bilingually conducted hearings in one U.S. immigration court. Specifically, I analyze the performance of nine immigration interpreters. I identify the precise linguistic strategies they employ when interpreting and, using conversational and other discourse analytical approaches, determine how they become active members of the proceedings. The immigration hearings I observed took place in one Federal immigration courtroom located in a large northeastern city. This research shows the extent to which interpreters play a pivotal role in controlling courtroom discourseconstructing courtroom reality and either mitigating or magnifying the culpability of defendants through a variety of linguistic mechanisms: a) inaccurate lexical choice, b) the use of source language rather than target language words and phrases, c) the use of definitions and calques, d) the improper addition or deletion of repair mechanisms and of hesitation forms such as pauses and fillers, and e) the addition of polite forms of address to convey solidarity, to adhere to Hispanic cultural norms, and to avoid face threatening acts. This study shows that the linguistic power interpreters wield exerts a coercive force, particularly on witnesses and defendants, and that such linguistic coerciveness on the part of interpreters influences other participants in the judicial proceeding. In this study, both judges and attorneys are shown to have been influenced by the lexical choices of interpreters. Finally, I show that the intrusiveness of interpreters changes the pragmatic force intended by the speakers, which constitutes a violation of the ethical standards set for interpreters in the United States by such authorities as the Federal Judicial Center.

This dissertation examines some canonical Central American autobiographical works of the 20th Century. The authors studied include Rubén Darío, Rafael Arévalo Martínez, Froylán Turcios, José Coronel Urtecho, César Brañas, Eunice Odio, Roque Dalton, Miguel Mármol and Rigoberta Menchú. The dissertation maintains that autobiographical writing always interpellates the Others story and that this interpellation is based in the need to incorporate into modern discourse the social sectors considered pre-modern. Indigenous people, peasants, women, artisans and workers, oral or illiterate cultures, represent a zone of autobiographical fear and desire. These combined impulses are connected to some cultural peculiarities of the Central American region: mainly, the way in which the rhetoric and practice of Liberalism is adapted by the regional elites from the end of 19th Century onward. After a general overview offered in Chapter 1, this dissertation is divided in three parts that correspond to three different cultural epochsModernismo (Chapters 2, 3, 4), Vanguardia (Chapters 5 and 6), and Postvanguardia y testimonio (Chapters 7 y 8). In Modernista autobiography the class-racial-ethnic Other appears as something that haunts the traditional, representing both an object of fear and a limit to a Eurocentric concept of modernity. In contrast, the Vanguardista autobiography emphasized its desire of the Other. This general desires for incorporate the (national) Other is linked to the foundational /nationalist emphasis that the avant-garde showed in Central America. However, Liberalism never incorporated fully the utopian social models of the Vanguardistas. Due to the crisis of both the Liberal rhetoric and Vanguardista cultural projects, during the 1960s and 1980s the aesthetic-ideological project of the Vanguardia suffered a radicalization. One of the main outcomes was the popularization of testimonio, which has become the most analyzed form of Central American autobiographical writing today. In testimonio the Other and his/her cultural model (basically, orality) and the Gemeinschaft of rural community become embodied as a counter-hegemonic voice that seeks to interpellate the cultural models of the lettered city and modernity from a subaltern location.

Throughout the course of this dissertation, I respond to three related research goals. In order to investigate these goals, I gathered data from 169 members of two Cuzco, Peru non-profit governmental agencies, the Asociación Civil 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Proyecto Casa del Cargador, 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Civil Association House of the Carrier Project' and El Centro de Apoyo Integral a la Trabajadora del Hogar, 'Center for the Integral Support of Female Home Workers'. The majority of my participants speaks Quechua natively and acquired Spanish as an L2 during childhood or adolescence. I collected data from these two populations through the means of ethnography, demographic questionnaires, a social network analysis, a language attitudes study, elicitation of short narratives, role play interviews and a subjective reaction test. In response to my first research goal, I examine the nature of the semantics and pragmatics of the Cuzco Quechua epistemic system, including the epistemic suffixes, -mi/-n and -si/-s, and the Quechua verb past tenses, -rqa- and -sqa-. I find the Quechua epistemics to encode meaning beyond information source and level of certainty and to be affected by a variety of discourse factors. In my treatment of my second research goal, I find 31 different phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque Quechua to Spanish cross-linguistic influence features to occur in my participants' speech. I also examine the specific case of the cross-linguistic influence of the Quechua epistemic system on the Spanish spoken by my participants. The presence of cross-linguistic influence in my participants' speech supports a model of child SLA in which the L1 plays a significant role in the acquisition of the L2. Finally, in response to my third research goal, I find various demographic characteristics, social network characteristics, and the language attitudes of my participants to correlate with their production of the 31 Quechua to Spanish phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque cross-linguistic features. While presenting my results for my third research goal, I suggest that my participants may purposefully use various Quechua cross-linguistic features in order to identify themselves as Quechua speakers and distinguish themselves from native Spanish speakers, thereby creating an in-group variety of Spanish.

This study, set in an urban, predominantly Latino high school, addresses a situation of dialect contact between speakers of Puerto Rican and Mexican Spanish. Given the characteristics of this specific research context, existing models of dialect contact would have predicted the development of a linguistic phenomenon known as koineization. This study finds that, contrary to these models, koineization is not taking place in this high school and that instead, the two dialects are remaining distinct. In this dissertation, I will first describe the unexpected social and linguistic situation found at this school. It will be shown that ethnic identity is a very salient social category, and that the cross-ethnic interaction necessary for koineization is not occurring. A linguistic analysis confirms that the two Spanish dialects are indeed remaining distinct. This dissertation proceeds to demonstrate that various social factors are extremely important to the dialect contact situation under study. Specifically, questions of ethnic identity and an ideology of essentialized difference are shown to have a powerful impact on interaction, language choice, and ultimately, koineization. It will also be seen that the uniqueness of this contexttwo dialects of a minority language alongside another, dominant language, Englishalso impacts the question of koineization. Thus, this study affords us new insights into the topic of dialect contact, and emphasizes the consideration that should be given to numerous social factors in any model of koineization. Methods of data collection in this study included semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Numerous rounds of interviews were conducted with progressively smaller groups of participants. The last phase of fieldwork consisted of a focus on twelve key participants who were representative of ethnicity, sex, and the social networks present in the school. In a fashion similar to Bailey (2002), one day was spent with each of these key participants while they carried a mini-disc recorder. The purpose of this data collection method was to obtain more insights into the natural language and interactional behavior of these key participants. Methods of data analysis were varied and included a social network analysis, a quantitative analysis of linguistic data, and discourse analysis.

The dissertation examines fashion narratives in Argentine periodicals ranging from 1829 to 1880. It considers how both male and female writers, from conservative as well as liberal political camps, created an entire discourse of fashion for specific political and/or ideological purposes. My hypothesis is that while fashion commentaries appear to offer little insight into the dynamics of social relations and politics, upon closer inspection, they reveal an entire network of negotiations and strategies that often involved issues of race, class and gender (all of which were highly political topics in the period of Argentine nation formation from the early 1830s to the late 1800s). Fashion was also a place where the meaning of modernity in a peripheral context was negotiated vis-à-vis metropolitan conceptions of the term as well as a place where the political and cultural strategies that would modernize Argentina were often debated. The dissertation first considers the years 1829-1852 marked by the Federalist Juan Manuel de Rosas domination of Argentine politics, economics and social life and by the emergence of the prestigious Generation of 1837. The dissertation first examines how this Generation (whose members were principally from the Unitarist ranks) incorporated fashion into its writing and how fashion served to articulate many of its anxieties over nation formation, modernization and the changing gender roles brought about by Independence. The dissertation then considers writings from members of the Federalist ranks and how these latter writers used fashion and traditional dress for their own projects of state. The second part of the dissertation considers periodicals published after 1852 and it focuses on the emergence of women writers and the major female fashion journals that flourished during this period. Whereas female journalism was practically inexistent before 1852, now these writers used fashion narratives to metaphorically discuss topics ranging from nation formation and politics, to changing gender roles after the Rosista dictatorship to modernity and the role of consumption in creating an ideal sense of citizenship and finally to public health, hygiene and womens immoral participation in the public sphere through prostitution.