<p> The Spanish-American War of 1898 ended Spain&rsquo;s colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere, and represented the symbolic pinnacle of U.S. imperialism throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. During this historical juncture, the U.S. launched the invasion of Puerto Rico and established itself as the governing power. My analysis of this defining event in Puerto Rico&rsquo;s history focuses on the &lsquo;discursive&rsquo; and &lsquo;representational&rsquo; practices through which the dominant representations and interpretations of the Puerto Rican campaign were constructed. In revisiting the U.S. &lsquo;imperial texts&rsquo; of &rsquo;98, most of which have not been studied extensively, it is my intent to approach these narratives critically, studying their ideological and political significance regarding the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico as a colony. </p><p> The &lsquo;War of &rsquo;98&rsquo; has been typically represented as an inter-metropolitan conflict, thus relegating to a secondary place the contestatory discourses produced within the colonies. It is the purpose of my dissertation to examine &lsquo;dialectically&rsquo; the cultural counter-discourse produced by the Puerto Rican Creole elite alongside the U.S. official discourses on Puerto Rico, concerning its colonial past under Spanish domination, the military occupation of the island, and its political and economical future under the American flag. With this purpose in mind, I chose to study four post-1898 Puerto Rican novels, specifically Jos&eacute; P&eacute;rez Losada&rsquo;s <i> La patulea</i> (1906) and <i>El manglar</i> (1907), and Ram&oacute;n Juli&aacute; Mar&iacute;n&rsquo;s <i>Tierra adentro</i> (1912) and <i> La gleba</i> (1913), all of which have been underestimated and understudied by literary scholars. </p><p> As a gesture of resistance in the face of the disruption of the old social order (that is, the old patterns of life, customs, traditions and standards of value) caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898, the island&rsquo;s intellectual elite&mdash;most of which were descendant of the displaced coffee <i>hacendado</i> families&mdash;responded by fabricating an ideology-driven national imaginary and iconography that proposed a hispanophile, nostalgic, and romanticized rendering of the late-19th century coffee landscape (i.e. the pre-invasion period) as an idyllic <i> locus amoenus</i>, thus becoming an emblem of national and cultural identity and values against American capitalist imperialism, the &lsquo;Americanization&rsquo; of Puerto Rico&rsquo;s economy and political system, and the rapid expansion of U.S. corporate sugar interests. </p><p> This dissertation has two distinct yet complementary purposes: first, it examines critically the imperial/colonial power relations between the United States and Puerto Rico since 1898, while questioning the hegemonic discourses both by the Americans and the Puerto Rican cultural elite regarding Puerto Rico&rsquo;s historical and political paths; secondly, it is an attempt to do justice to the literary works of two overlooked Puerto Rican novelists, approaching them critically on several levels (historical, literary, and ideological) and bringing their works out of the shadows and into today&rsquo;s renewed debates around Puerto Rico&rsquo;s unresolved colonial status and U.S. colonial practices still prevalent today.</p><p>

<p> The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the lived experiences of underrepresented tenured Latina faculty in one four-year university in the southeast area of the United States to identify barriers towards achieving tenure. Eight tenured Latina faculty with experience of 7 to 20 or more years in a tenured position provided their perceptions and experiences of the challenges and support they encountered in their pursuit of tenure. A snowball sampling technique produced eight participants from an initial recruitment from an online search. Semi-structured interviews via in-person and audio-video conferences offered rich descriptions of the Latina faculty&rsquo;s experiences for coding and analysis. The NVivo for Mac software supported the coding and analysis process of the participant&rsquo;s responses. Five main themes emerged from the patterns found in the analysis. The five findings included: organizational exclusionary practices against Latina faculty at the university; white male-oriented culture where resources are used to benefit white males; demoralizing micro-aggressions towards Latina faculty from white faculty; the university leadership&rsquo;s lack of action and accountability to address diversity and inclusion challenges; and the lack of support networks and mentoring to help guide Latina faculty. These findings described an exclusionary academic environment, where the Latina faculty often felt insulted, isolated, and underappreciated with little to no opportunity to advance or contribute equally to the university. This study contributed to the literature by addressing various reasons higher educational institutions need to actively remove barriers that negatively affect Latina faculty seeking tenure.</p><p>

<p> This project proposes to re-conceptualize the city of Buenos Aires through the works of three Argentine authors. This work will move away from a univocal understanding of the city, and will re-think Buenos Aires as a confluence of meanings that subjects navigate and negotiate daily to destabilize metanarratives of urban space. In this work, the tropes of the (in)visible and performance/movement will bridge the three chapters, challenging us to distance ourselves from the oversimplified understandings that rely heavily on the visual. As such, urban space will be seen as under construction because it is always conditioned by the presence and performance of the subject. </p><p> Chapter one will work through Roberto Arlt&rsquo;s <i>Aguafuertes porte&ntilde;as.</i> It will highlight his attacks on institutions like the <i>Escuelas normales</i> and the <i>Sociedad Argentina de Escritores</i> (SADE) that looked to homogenize culture under the banner of <i>argentinidad,</i> and argue how his aguafuertes contest a dogmatic system of signs while serving as a critical starting point in the emergence of the margins in the city. Chapter two will interrogate Carlos Gorostiza&rsquo;s play, El puente (1948), written during Per&oacute;n&rsquo;s first presidency (1946-1955). It will focus on one figure in particular &ndash; the Madre &ndash; and show how performativity of this newly-mobilized subject destabilizes and recasts notions of the city by contesting normative behaviors reified by the upper classes during the 1930s and early 1940s. Chapter three reads C&eacute;sar Aira&rsquo;s novel <i>La villa,</i> incorporating the concepts of topography and topology as instruments to illuminate the <i> villa miseria&rsquo;s</i> impact on modern representations of urban space during Argentina&rsquo;s political shift from neoliberalism to neopopulism at the turn of the 21^st century.</p><p>

<p> This qualitative phenomenological interview study investigated the barriers faced by Latino Spanish speakers with limited English proficiency (LEP) when seeking to obtain a diagnosis and special education resources for their children. This minority population faces several barriers that may be linked to a later diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among Latino children; however, limited research has focused on the identification of these barriers and factors that contribute to a later ASD diagnosis in Latino families. Five Latina Spanish-speaking mothers with LEP were included in this study. Two 1-hour interviews were conducted per participant. The results showed barriers associated with the health care system, culture beliefs, cultural differences in the view of disability, limited health literacy, LEP, lack of ASD knowledge, and lack of competent interpreters. </p><p>

Latinos consistently have the lowest degree completion rate throughout the United States (Kurlaender & Flores, 2005). At the same time, Latinos are the fastest growing sector of the U.S. population. Taken together, these facts demonstrate an ongoing and growing inequity in educational opportunities and outcomes for a significant portion of the nation’s population. The findings of this study provide additional knowledge regarding how Latino students perceive interaction with faculty and how affirming relationships with faculty can develop Latino students’ sense of belonging. In addition, the study identifies three main support sources for Latino student persistence, which include family support, collegiate self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging to the campus. This study presents five recommendations for policy and practice based upon the findings of this study, for campus leaders to address the low number of Latino students persisting in their college journeys. Furthermore, it provides three suggested areas for future research.

This dissertation explores the topic of migration focusing on science fiction works created by artists from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. My analysis investigates the four most common science fiction themes used to represent migration: space exploration, alien invasions, dystopian states, and virtual reality. The dissertation is in part a recovery project, demonstrating the significance (and even existence) of science fiction works created by U.S. Latinas/os. The dissertation is also a work of genre historical analysis, locating these Latina/o and Latin American writers and artists in the history of science fiction. Science fiction emerged in its current form during European colonialism-- its exploration, invasion, and colonization of places already settled. In my dissertation I have found that Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Latina/o writers and artists work against the coloniality of science fiction. I argue in my dissertation that the dominant plot in mainstream science fiction arose out of a particular form of colonial literature, the "going native" narrative in which a colonizer adopts characteristics of or is identified with a colonized people. In science fiction, the "going native" narrative is translated into what I call the "going alien" narrative. One can "go alien" in regard to issues other than colonialism, for example, race, gender, or nationality. In my dissertation I explore how Latina/o and Latin American science fiction writers and artists respond to and work against the "going alien" narrative system that has long been the foundation of mainstream science fiction.

While we know about the increasing link between a college education, and social mobility, we are not as informed with who actually makes the transition to college, how they negotiate these spaces, the impact of their secondary education, and the effects of pre-college programs (Louie, 2007).The purpose of this interdisciplinary, narrative inquiry is to fill this gap by presenting a representative tale of how a student experiences her social worlds in relation to school and the impact of college access programs which the researcher administered. This academic year long study builds on a prior action-based ethnographic study and draws on ethnographic approaches. Data collection include four semi-structured 90 minute interviews, field notes, autobiographical and academic written work, as well as personal communication. Critical Race Theory (CRT), Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit), and Critical Race Feminism (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Parker, Deyhle, & Villenas, 1999; Solórzano, 1998; Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998; Tate, 1997), when used as theoretical frames help to expose the ways so-called race-neutral institutional policies and practices perpetuate racial, ethnic, class, gender, and language subordination as reflected in storied experiences. These frameworks help in exploring, questioning and problematizing broader schooling experiences and practices, as well as educational policies rather than just examining the singular dimension of college transition as if social contexts do not play a critical role (Koyama, 2007). This scholarship takes up the complexity embedded in the transition to college by critically analyzing the narratives of a Dominican student's experiences. As sense-making can be seen in part as "dialogic," Bakhtin's concept of "dialogism" is also used when exploring language (Bakhtin, 1981) as "people tell others who they are, but even more important, they tell themselves and then they try to act as though they are who they say they are" (Holland, et.al., 1998, p. 3). Representations suggest that in the process of recounting experiences multiple selves were enacted in relation to various figured worlds where discourses (Gee 1986–2005) serve as mediating tools for negotiation, contestation, and becoming.

This study examines the embeddedness of Spanish delivering technologies in networks constructing Latina/o linguistic and racial identity. It assesses potential impacts of technology on linguistic diversity, cultural continuity, and racial divides in the post 9-11 American context. Applying autoethnographic, multi-sited methodology, it critically examines discourses generated at (a) the SpeechTek tradeshow, and (b) three non-profit agencies in Holyoke, MA. Drawing data from participant-observation and structured interviews, it found residents of racially and linguistically endangered Holyoke had diminished access to these technologies, and they employed innovative cultural logic to reconstruct them as English language learning tools by opting instead for English. Implicated in white technological space, middle-class Spanish application producers attempted cultural brokerage. The study posits Spanish options as a contested digital borderlands, contact zone, dialogue, and cyborg technoscientific landscape where rhetorics of power pit Anglo-European universalist genres of language, race, and technology against hybrid voices of excluded populations of color.

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.

Current educational reform represented by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) symbolizes the summit of neoliberal reforms initiated more than three decades ago with the A Nation At Risk report (ANAR). The so called progressive plea of 'leaving no child behind' has brought poignant changes to US education in general providing an unprecedented impetus for new privatization schemes that disproportionably affect school districts serving large population of minority, low-income students in urban areas. This study provides a macro-micro framework for analyzing teachers' recontextualizations in the context of current reforms and demands.At the macro level, the study analyzes focal intertextual thematic formations (Lemke, 1995) in two cornerstone educational texts, namely, the ANAR report and the NCLB act. Particular historical aspects related to of the assemble of relations (Gramsci, 1971) that overdetermined the production of these texts are also examined. The study then uses the insights gained from this analysis of what is called the "cultural-pedagogic reservoir" as an entry point into analyzing in detail the "individual-pedagogic repertoire" of an experienced middle-school teacher as intertextual thematic formations particular to the focal texts re-emerge and are recontextualized in the interactions constructed in an intervention program for mostly Latino struggling readers. More specifically, the study analyzes the linguistic organization, and pedagogic genre of an experienced teachers' academic recontextualization and how these are accomplished in interaction in underperforming schools intervened by America's Choice, the district's "turn around" private partner.The specific Critical Discourse Analysis approach used draws purposely on analytical tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics theory and Genre theory (Halliday and Martin 1993; Martin, 2000; Martin and Rose 2003). This applied linguistic approach is complemented by the emancipatory agenda of critical ethnography and the overdeterminist class analysis of postmodern Marxism. Findings from linguistic analysis of policy texts reveal that the notions of risk, and crisis advanced by the ANAR report are taken into an unprecedented technocratic level in the No Child Left Behind Act that promote a new privatization (Burch, 2006) as the products and services of private companies are marketed not only as aligning to the law, but being "scientifically proven." The focal teacher working under this conditions was found to consistently use of a patterned and specific purposeful, goal oriented, and staged pedagogic genre organized through ideological principles that responded to a particular and context-bound way of alignment: "Strategic Alignment." Such a Strategic alignment represents an ideological framework that expands the frame of accountability to all stakeholders of the educational process, and not only to those most interested in promoting fidelity with standards and mandates. The teacher not only simultaneously and flexibly responded to standards and mandates represented by the "turn around" company (America's Choice), but also aligned to the needs, rights, and backgrounds of students, and to the thought collectives (Ramanathan, 2002) of the teaching profession. Even though the language of Strategic Alignment was found to be realized as a culturally relevant academic co-constructed linguistic space and a nurturing environment for Latino low-income struggling readers in an urban middle school and because it happens in the context of this new privatization scheme, such responsive pedagogical practices may well be co-opted and used as arguments to dismantle public schooling altogether.