abstract: This dissertation investigates the life and career of singer Celia Cruz and the cultural legacy she has left the Hispanic culture in the United States and the world. It explores the musical journey of the Queen of Salsa and analyzes the different genres and themes that she developed in her performances during the years of her dedication to the public professional career. Among the various topics, this work discusses the African influence on the music of Celia Cruz because she made her first step to fame with the music and lyrics from African religious traditions. Additionally, this project investigates the theme of nostalgia and how Celia Cruz, with her music, helped to perpetuate the nostalgic feelings of Cuban exiles. It surveys the repertoire of songs with nostalgic themes that helps to perpetuate in the memory of the Cuban diaspora, a Cuba that no longer exists and is reflected only in their imagination. This work also examines feminist and queer issues in the life of Celia Cruz, in the lyrics of her songs and in many of her performances. Finally, it explores various stages in Celia Cruz's career that stand out: first, her beginnings in Cuba and Latin America where she soon became known as the Guarachera of Cuba; then, the contribution of Celia Cruz to the salsa music since its appearance in New York, its development in the United States, and its rapid international spread. Similarly, this project shows that Celia Cruz, with her performances worldwide, gained popularity and became the Queen of Salsa. She excelled on indoor and outdoor stages, on the small and big screen, and took her musical talent around the world. Because of her great artistic work, she was recognized for her achievements multiple times and won awards in the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, finally winning the title of Global Salsa Icon. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2014

abstract: Addressing the pending problem of understanding and interpreting the baroque discourse and multiple symbols in the third part, Realización, of the trilogy Crisol (1984) by Justo S. Alarcón, this study compares the vision of mestizaje, or miscegenation, in the said trilogy part and La Raza Cósmica (1925) by José Vasconcelos. To do this, we examine existing research on the two authors and we particularized the conception of mestizo, taking into account its expression in Mexico and the United States (U.S.). To analyze the text by Alarcón, our critical framework is based on fables and their didactic function as represented by the parables in the Bible and their moral functions as personified in the fables by Aesop and other writers. Although both authors predict the birth of a new race, we found that Vasconcelos, in a Utopian way, claims it would rise in Mexico. This new race, according to Vasconcelos, will be the product of hybridization between four races: white, yellow, red or Native American, and black. Justo S. Alarcón, on the other hand, suggests in Realización that such hybridization will take place in the United States, specifically the Southwest. Using analogies, allegories, and parables, the narrator presents several Aesopian characters that engage in massive and repeated migrations that ultimately produce a new crisol or melting pot. Such new hybridization takes place in the U.S. This study draws attention to the origin of the Chicano and the issue of identity. Future work could focus on both issues / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2012

abstract: ABSTRACT This thesis aims to demonstrate the validity of political violence in contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives as a reflection of the sociopolitical situation of immigrants and their descendants in the United States (U.S.). The thesis explores the various ways in which contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives present the political violence in the U.S. towards Mexican and Peruvian immigrants and Chicanos and Peruvian Americans examining the intersections that exist between the resistance and violence discourses and its sociopolitical consequences. Although the topic of political violence has been previously studied in U.S. and Latin American narratives throughout its history, its analysis has been insufficiently explored as far as contemporary narratives of the XXI century are concerned. With this in mind, two texts will be used to study this discourse of violence in Chicano and Peruvian American literature: Alejandro Morales' "Pequeña nación" (2005) and Daniel Alarcón's "Guerra en la penumbra" (2005). The thesis examines the immigrant as a center of discourse exploring the conflict between them and the institutions or groups in power that instigate this political violence. The first chapter covers the socio historical background regarding Mexican and Peruvian migration flows to the United States in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second chapter introduces "The Triangle of Violence" proposed by Norwegian mathematician and sociologist Johan Galtung as the basis for the theoretical framework and approach of this analysis. Chapter three analyzes the Chicano short story "Pequeña nación" by Alejandro Morales. The analysis of the Peruvian American short story "Guerra en la penumbra" by Daniel Alarcón follows in chapter four. The conclusion emphasizes the problem of political violence experienced by immigrants in the U.S. in contemporary Chicano and Peruvian American narratives and possible solutions contained therein, protesting a problem that can hinder immigration policy reforms and the defense of human rights. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2013

<p> Esta investigaci&oacute;n explora, a trav&eacute;s de la novela de El sue&ntilde;o del celta (2010) de Mario Vargas Llosa, una nueva postura sobre lo que implica ser un h&eacute;roe. El cuestionamiento que surge sobre el concepto heroico es lo que posibilita examinar la composici&oacute;n heroica del personaje principal de El sue&ntilde;o del celta, Roger Casement. Se conceptualiz&oacute; al personaje como un h&eacute;roe moderno, ya que el rasgo que lo identifica es su car&aacute;cter contradictorio. Para demostrar la caracterizaci&oacute;n de Casement como h&eacute;roe moderno se estudiaron diversas instancias narrativas que representaban tanto los rasgos heroicos como antiheroicos. Tambi&eacute;n se examin&oacute; la ambig&uuml;edad del personaje a trav&eacute;s de sus textos escritos y por medio de la construcci&oacute;n narrativa de la obra. </p><p> A trav&eacute;s de este estudio se lleg&oacute; a la conclusi&oacute;n de que Roger Casement, forma parte de la disgregaci&oacute;n &eacute;pica del h&eacute;roe que propuso Mija&iacute;l Bajt&iacute;n. Seg&uacute;n la teor&iacute;a de Bajt&iacute;n, Casement como h&eacute;roe novelesco se caracteriz&oacute; como un personaje inconcluso y con m&uacute;ltiples matices. Lo que permiti&oacute; demostrar que los g&eacute;neros literarios como la &eacute;pica y la novela pueden influenciar en c&oacute;mo se constituyen los personajes heroicos. En fin, en esta investigaci&oacute;n se cuestiona la conceptualizaci&oacute;n del h&eacute;roe tradicional trabajada por Hugo Francisco Bauz&aacute; en su libro El mito del h&eacute;roe: morfolog&iacute;a y sem&aacute;ntica de la figura heroica y por Joaqu&iacute;n M. Aguirre en su art&iacute;culo H&eacute;roe y sociedad: El tema del individuo superior en la literatura decimon&oacute;nica. Tanto Bauz&aacute; como Aguirre sostienen que el h&eacute;roe cl&aacute;sico manifiesta juicios elevados de valor, no son cobardes ni sienten miedo, sino m&aacute;s bien exteriorizan los rasgos heroicos m&aacute;s elevados. Entre ellos, el m&oacute;vil &eacute;tico de su acci&oacute;n, la transgresi&oacute;n, la ilusi&oacute;n, el sentido de mediaci&oacute;n, el valor, el deseo de vencer, el sentido de b&uacute;squeda, el valor que los dem&aacute;s le otorgan, entre otros. </p><p> No obstante, la nueva postura heroica que presenta El sue&ntilde;o del celta propone que el verdadero hero&iacute;smo no consiste en carecer de miedo, sino en superarlo. Ya que el verdadero h&eacute;roe es aquel que, a pesar de ser consciente de todas sus deficiencias, como el miedo y la debilidad, logra superar y enfrentar los problemas. Son estas caracter&iacute;sticas las que permiten presentar a Roger Casement como un h&eacute;roe en contraposici&oacute;n al h&eacute;roe tradicional al mostrar un car&aacute;cter contradictorio y aproximarse a la ambig&uuml;edad de la condici&oacute;n humana.</p><p>

One of the most recurrent and significant themes in Spanish American women's literature since its inception is food. In this dissertation I explored how food in Spanish American women's literature (since the second half of the sixteenth century to the twentieth century) is not only a theme, but also a metaphor and therefore an artistic type of language capable of transcending its basic biological and literal function. In this thesis project I intend to show the interconnections between food and writing in Hispanic American women's literature and how food imagery, eating rituals, and the kitchen as creative space have evolved in form and purpose from their beginning to the present regarding its discourses of power and self-affirmation. For this purpose I studied four key historical moments according to the point of view of Hispanic American women who used food imagery and discourse in their writings as a tool for self-affirmation. For the sixteenth century I examined the letter written by Isabel de Guevara to Princess Juana. The Hispanic American Baroque period during the seventeenth century is covered by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Madre María de San José. For the Hispanic American period of independence during the nineteenth century I studied works by Juana Manuela Gorriti, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera, Teresa González de Fanning and Soledad Acosta de Samper. Finally for the twentieth century I covered works by Teresa de la Parra, Rosario Castellanos, Laura Esquivel, and Isabel Allende.

My thesis is an experimental project that explores the connection between aesthetics and meaning-formation. The inspiration for the project emerged out of my research into the work of a group of poets known as infrarrealistas, whose most famous member, Roberto Bolaño, has become one of the widely read writers of our times. In the recently published anthology titled Perros habitados por las voces del desierto (2014) Rubén Medina, a founding member of the group, explains the infrarrealistas' artistic motivation as an attempt to capture the multiple forces that shape the subject's identity (16); forces that operate beneath the complex symbolic systems of communication. These forces are responsible for shaping the subject's immediate experience, or being-alive-ness. Influenced by the group's motivations and recent conceptualizations within the field of affect theory, the following project is an exercise in using poetry as a way to re-conceptualize the experience of being alive. Discursive formulations are avoided in an attempt to create a text whose meaning derives from its affective connection with the reader, and not from the intricate economies of meaning that limit the affective scope of academic and scholarly language. As a result, the following thesis upon first glance looks like the work of a mad man. Poems, citations, excerpts from books, pages from my personal diary are bundled together in a way that challenges what is commonly understood as an academic thesis. However, its validity rests in the fact that it tries to engage with current work in the field of affect theory, experimenting with aesthetics and meaning-formation, and leaving aside the discursive formulations to engage with its reader at an affective, or visceral level. / In Spanish with title page, preliminaries, and abstract in English. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. / Spring Semester 2015. / April 22, 2015. / Affect, Infrarrealistas, Poetry / Includes bibliographical references. / Enrique Álvarez, Professor Directing Thesis; Juan Carlos Galeano, Committee Member; José Gomariz, Committee Member.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Spanish language and literary tradition were still a form of intellectual colonization for the inhabitants of the newly formed Hispanic American republics. This dissertation proposes a theoretical approach to examine the modernista movement. By examining discursive formations, a reflection about the emergence of a postcolonial subjectivity in premodernista and modernista texts becomes available. This dissertation develops a poststructural view of modernismo as a postcolonial movement. It argues that the construction of subjectivity in the textual world of the modernistas repositioned Spanish Americans with respect to Spanish cultural domination. Analysis shows the ways in which modernista texts appropriated and transformed Western hegemonic literary discourses through translation or rewriting, thus affecting language and discourse. The resulting texts created an original literary form of Spanish different from peninsular that critics recognize as crucial in the formation of a Spanish American literary voice. In this work I examine extensively one literary journal ("revista literaria"), Revista Gris (1892-96) from Bogotá, Colombia. I identify the emergence of aesthetic discourses and practices that appropriated European models and ideas in different ways for nationalist or cosmopolitan postcolonial agendas. Although many of these discourses and practices were still mostly romantic, an epistemological shift was taking place. The analysis of Gris is focused on three types of texts: theoretical and critical essays, original poetry, and translations. Briefly, I also look at the way in which some of the aesthetic discourses and translation strategies from Gris reappear in Revista Azul from Mexico City, Mexico (1894-96). This short overview of Azul examines only discursive formations in critical and theoretical texts and translations. Contrasting Azul and Gris situates Gris within a wider Spanish American context and provides insight into later consolidation of emerging discourses and practices observed in Gris. The analysis of revista material demonstrates that, within a postcolonial dynamic to decolonize cultural production, Spanish American literature at the end of the nineteenth century was in a constant tension between acceptance and resistance, and imitation and subversion of paradigms which resulted in a very peculiar form of cosmopolitan expression. Cosmopolitism was to become one of the idiosyncratic elements of Latin American identity.

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My dissertation consists of a critical, annotated and translated edition, in English, of the fin-de-siècle novel, De sobremesa (1896), a key work of Modernista prose in Spanish America by Colombian writer José Asunción Silva. The edition features the translation, endnotes, an interdisciplinary introductory study and bibliography. After an introduction of the writer, I consider the work's form as a hybrid travelogue, memoir and manifesto, or ars poetica in prose, and its relationship to Decadence in form and content. I invoke examples of the confessional genre and memoirs from the day, and support suggestions that the novel anticipates later novels of dislocation and fragmentation. I contextualize the work as a product of the epoch's nascent ideas of psychotherapy, psychopathology and illness, and thus duly examine the presence and function of “pseudo-science” and the cult of scientific authority in the work. Accordingly, the remnant Catholic apparatus the hero adheres to is considered against his amorality. I explain this value system as partially a product of Paris, a space that is invented/discovered in the Latin American imaginary. I then treat the body in the novel, in dialogue with critics who note the novel's “medical gaze.” In this connection I study the characterization of science, normalcy, power, and subversive erotics. Appropriately I characterize the professionalization of medicine at the time and the so-called “therapeutic ethos” counterpoised to the neurotic aesthetics then in vogue. Consequently I explore the tropes of illness in the novel, specifically tuberculosis, nerves and madness. Subsequently I examine consumer psychology, and insert the hero's neo-feudal values in that era's material culture. Finally I discuss the translation process in theory and praxis, and in my translation proper provide notes to allusions and intertexts.

The epic poem has served as a literary, cultural, and historical guide for literature students since at least the time of Homer. The richness and density of reference to sources outside the poem is one of hallmarks of the epic form, in which the poet serves as a guide, who leads the student to a more profound state of reflection on the nature of the human condition. This guide, however, is no mere tour guide, but extracts a rather demanding price of the traveler who wishes to cross the terrain of the epic. Each verse may appear to the uninitiated traveler as an insoluble riddle. Diego de Hojeda's La Cristiada, while among the best epic poems written in Spanish, suffers from relative obscurity because of the limited number of editions, and the demanding density of the verse. The present dissertation fulfills a double purpose: it serves as a guide to the student, to explore the richness of La Cristiada, by providing a student edition of the poem, and in the same spirit, it endeavors to make a contribution to the revival of the epic poem in general. The present edition has several parts. We start with an introductory study to provide a solid foundation to understand in context Hojeda's life, times and mission. This is followed by the complete original transcription of the poem from the archaic 16th century spelling into readable modern Spanish. Also, in the tradition of Chapman's Homer, context side notes are provided throughout as a further guide to the student. Each of the twelve books of the poem ends with a series of notes, to document every name and place reference in the poem, as well as all historical, mythological and literary references. Finally, in the interest of completeness we have included several documents related to the first edition of La Cristiada, and the laudatory works that accompanied the poem when it was originally published in 1611.