Thesis (M.A.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 12, 2010). Research paper (M.A.), 3 hrs. Includes bibliographical references (p. [53]-58).

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 101 p. : col. ill. Includes bibliographical references.

Muiscas figure prominently in Colombian national historical accounts as a worthy and valuable indigenous culture, comparable to the Incas and Aztecs, but without their architectural grandeur. The magnificent goldsmith’s art locates them on a transnational level as part of the legend of El Dorado. Today, though the population is small, Muiscas are committed to cultural revitalization. The 19th century project of constructing the Colombian nation split the official Muisca history in two. A radical division was established between the illustrious indigenous past exemplified through Muisca culture as an advanced, but extinct civilization, and the assimilation politics established for the indigenous survivors, who were considered degraded subjects to be incorporated into the national project as regular citizens (mestizos). More than a century later, and supported in the 1991’s multicultural Colombian Constitution, the nation-state recognized the existence of five Muisca cabildos (indigenous governments) in the Bogotá Plateau, two in the capital city and three in nearby towns. As part of their legal battle for achieving recognition and maintaining it, these Muisca communities started a process of cultural revitalization focused on language, musical traditions, and healing practices. Today’s Muiscas incorporate references from the colonial archive, archeological collections, and scholars’ interpretations of these sources into their contemporary cultural practices. They also rely on knowledge shared with other indigenous groups related to them. This dissertation examines the revitalization of Muisca musical and language practices as part of a larger cultural process. This revitalization demonstrates how indigenous communities navigate the challenges of multicultural politics designed, at least in principle, to support ethnic and cultural difference. To this end: I analyze the Andean-oriented musical practices of current Muisca communities in the Bogotá savanna that are performed in public events; and I examine the Muisca affective attachments to música andina and its role in shaping a Muisca indigeneity according to present time. The ethnographic study of Andean music as it is performed in current Muisca cabildos also demonstrate the connection between sound and politics. I explore how Muisca song and language help in dealing with the contradictions of reemerging indigenous groups under the nation’s multicultural governmentality. I study how música andina style, including the stereotype of Andean indigeneity advanced by the sounds, instruments, and lyrics, contributes to the development of a Muisca identity and supports cultural revitalization and official recognition. In this way, I argue that the sonic revitalization provides an aural identity formation beyond the nation-state’s essentialistic parameters of indigeneity, thus contributing to guarantee minimal conditions for survival as an indigenous community. Out of the different sociolinguistic situations where Muysc cubun (the Muisca language) is used, I trace the details and difficulties of the process of language revitalization through the analysis of a corpus of Muisca songs. It is time to recognize that many of the previous studies of colonial Muysc cubun sources followed the grammarian approach of missionaries, and consequently neglected the description of sound. Most importantly, it is time to pay attention to the sociolinguistic discourse of current Muiscas. Today’s Muisca people who have viscerally lived the long history of silencing, and territorial and cultural dispossession have a say in what has been lost and what can be built. They put forward an update of the colonial reduced general language as part of the way to build themselves as indigenous in the 21st century and rewrite the history of the nation.

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-55). / This work attempts to present the development of a new self-image of Latin American identity as manifested in the New Latin American Cinema Movement. Also, it attempts to help articulate intentions, strategies, and final products that are being formulated throughout the continent. The main part of this thesis is a compilation/documentary (in the form of a 3/4 inch video cassette) comprised of interviews with filmmakers and excerpts from these films as presented at the Second New Latin American Cinema Festival (held in Havana in November of 1980). This tape will illustrate the author's efforts to examine, present, and contribute to this growing movement. / by Joaquin O. Mercado Cardona. / M.S.V.S.

This dissertation examines the instrumental role played by race in the scientific conceptions of society at the turn of the Twentieth Century in Brazil and Cuba. The examination of scientific rhetoric in the work of Euclides da Cunha and Fernando Ortiz, as well as a large number of photographs, from this period of institutional modernization, identifies the racial variable as the conceptual locus of coexistence and struggle amongst multiple representational regimens produced by anthropology, sociology, literature and medicine. These diverse interdisciplinary matrices of meaning (set forth in texts and images) constructed the foundations of the concept of race through the equivalent notion of exoticism and anomaly as expressions of the axiom of difference. This ideological conceit was offered in countries marked by racial miscegenation as the means for cultural originality as well as the main threat to their political consolidation. This constituent relation of the racial difference, evident in Euclides da Cunha's masterpiece Os sertàµes (1902) or in Fernando Ortiz's early criminological work Los negros brujos (1906), prompted an alternative approach to the critical apparatus that has privileged the analysis of their aesthetic qualities. In addition, the design of ethnographic and medical portraits of the time evidenced a correlation between aesthetic value and biological description in disciplines such as criminal anthropology, tropical medicine or ethnology. This project sheds some light on the particular concern for governability and cultural legitimacy raised at the time by nationalistic ideology which influenced the racial hypothesis offered by Euclides da Cunha and Fernando Ortiz. Nonetheless this crucial aspect has been considered incidental to their intellectual careers. The work of these intellectuals has been canonized into Latin American contemporary history as models for cultural emancipation. Yet, the hypothesis of racial difference they helped to foster have explicitly or implicitly guided the implementation of state policies in culture, public health and police control in Brazil and Cuba. The analysis of the social and scientific uses of photography in the construction of the exotic and the anomalous as racial categories offers an alternative methodological approach indispensable for the reconsideration of photographic production in Latin America during the period of modernization.

Splendor of Ruins examines the growth of street gangs in Honduras in the aftermath of the Cold War, as a flourishing criminal economy and the devastation of Hurricane Mitch destabilized life in the capital, Tegucigalpa. I examine the displacement of smaller gangs in the city by the broad community of international gangs with ties to Los Angeles, California, called the maras, and campaigns against them by the Honduran state and United States Homeland Security. I emphasize the ways in which Mano Dura, or Strong Hand policing, along with Anti-Gang legislation, undermined the immediate distinction between anomic violence and sovereign power across the country. Splendor of Ruins focuses on the transformation of gang aesthetics during this same period, as gang members began tattooing their bodies, particularly the face, with detailed arrangements of Satanic and chthonic imagery. I ask how the appearance of the devil and other motifs of transgression can be understood politically, both within the context of state power reaching beyond the limits of its own laws, as well as within the easy lucre of the criminal economy in which many young Hondurans were choosing to live.

La pobreza urbana es uno de los factores de la ciudad de Buenos Aires más complejos para estudiar. A menudo desestimada meramente como epifenómeno del desarrollo desigual del capitalismo, la pobreza urbana ha jugado, por el contrario, un rol clave en la conformación tanto del paisaje físico como del discurso cultural argentino a lo largo del siglo XX. La definición de la pobreza es quizás el principal problema para quien se enfrenta a su estudio. Existen, por un lado, aproximaciones desde la sociología, la economía y la teoría política. Pero, por otro, también hay una percepción cultural, influenciada por prejuicios, estereotipos, figuras y sentidos. Como imagen y relato, la pobreza tiene mucho peso en moldear nuestra comprensión de la ciudad. Esto es especialmente fuerte en el caso de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Visiones de Buenos Aires encara esta cuestión, centrándose en las maneras en que los estratos más bajos de las clases populares —cirujas, inmigrantes, villeros y cartoneros— han sido integrados en diferentes prácticas artísticas, desde la literatura hasta el cine, la fotografía y las artes plásticas. Al analizar de cerca varias fuentes primarias, esta tesis examina las imágenes de la pobreza como un elemento de la ciudad en que se descubren las tensiones que afianzan la modernización urbana. Aunque numerosos estudios críticos sobre las ciudades latinoamericanas han reconocido la importancia del planeamiento urbano para analizar la historia cultural, esta investigación contribuye a esta discusión al volver a imaginar el peso cultural de la pobreza para comprender el imaginario de Buenos Aires y su desarrollo. Visiones de Buenos Aires cuestiona las interpretaciones generalmente jerárquicas del planeamiento urbano, señalando, en línea con los trabajos de Henri Lefebvre, Paola Berenstein Jacques y Nestor García Canclini, la necesidad de confrontar los planes oficiales de transformación urbana con las formas en que la cultura y el arte recogieron la presencia de la pobreza en la ciudad. Esta tesis examina la historia de la Buenos Aires del siglo XX a través de la descripción detallada de cuatro momentos fundamentales de su construcción material. En el primer capítulo describo la representación de los conventillos y el asentamiento informal del Barrio de las Ranas en los diarios de viaje de Enrique Gómez Carrillo y Jules Huret y en las fotografías de Harry Olds. Al considerar este corpus en el contexto del modelo que el Estado proyecta para la Buenos Aires asociada con el Centenario de 1910, demuestro cómo la representación de la pobreza y el planeamiento urbano estaban relacionados: ambos conformaron una manera particular de ver la ciudad como una escenografía. En el siguiente capítulo examino los modos en que el pueblo aparece en el cine de los años cincuenta. En específico contrasto estos retratos cinematográficos con el modelo urbano peronista dirigido a rediseñar Buenos Aires como ciudad obrera. Aquí planteo que la interpretación cultural de la pobreza y el planeamiento estatal colaboraron en crear una visión mítica de la ciudad. En el tercer capítulo me concentro en los años sesenta para analizar cómo los planes estatales para erradicar la pobreza constituyeron las premisas para fomentar el interés de la cultura en las villas miseria. Artistas distintos como Fernando Birri, Antonio Berni y Bernardo Verbitsky se preocuparon por construir una imagen de estos espacios de pobreza como territorios llenos de vida y objetos frente a la política estatal de vaciamiento. Esta narración termina con el modelo de la ciudad neoliberal que se produce en el enfrentamiento entre los planes de remodelación de Puerto Madero, los proyectos de urbanización de algunas villas miseria y la simultánea comodificación del pobre en la explosión de productos culturales que lo retratan. Al trazar las formas diferentes en que las clases bajas entraron, a través de las representaciones culturales, al imaginario urbano, esta tesis examina la historia, todavía no contada, del rol cambiante que la pobreza y las villas miseria ejercieron en las principales imágenes que se produjeron de la Buenos Aires del siglo XX.

Stages of History: New World Spectacles and the Theater of the World in the Sixteenth Century is a sweeping analysis of dramatic performances in New Spain and Brazil that superimposed depictions of far-flung conflicts with representations of local struggles. Settlers, Franciscans, Jesuits, and Amerindian collaborators overlaid stories of New World conquests with accounts of battles that took place in the Old World, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. The conditions of staging in New Spain and Brazil—particularly performance in public spaces and the use of non-professional actors (conquistadors, missionaries, and natives)—enriched portrayals of far off times and places. These circumstances led playwrights and actors to reinvent global history through the lens of local experience and thus contemplate the historical immediacy of the New World. Participants revised historical narratives and reinterpreted biblical prophecy; they reversed the outcomes of historic defeats and projected Amerindians into distant campaigns. The inhabitants of New Spain and Brazil pictured themselves as protagonists in faraway hostilities and boldly re-arranged Spain and Portugal’s place in Christian eschatology. In these spectacles, New World societies produced optical feedback loops that interlaced regional self-perceptions with worldviews held in the Americas. I conceptualize this visual dialogue by drawing on one of the early modern senses of the term “theater” (or the Latin theatrum): facilitated viewing or orchestrated seeing. Ultimately, the dislocations, anachronisms, and interruptions through which participants linked New Spain and Brazil to other parts of the world produced new narratives and legends. Chroniclers described these performances in the written histories and reports that they sent to influential patrons in the Old World. After their original performance, I argue, these spectacles were re-staged in the various forms of history writing in which they were described. In other words, theatrical performances were made to double as history writing. These spectacles inspired chroniclers to contextualize New World events within global history and tempted historians to edit the plots of dramas to better suit the aims of their histories. The theatrical practice of envisioning other parts of the world, and relating those images back to the Americas, I demonstrate, shaped the writing of New Spanish and Brazilian history. My title, Stages of History, refers to the multiple phases through which New World history came into being.

Thesis (M.A.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-157).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2003. / "July 21, 2003." Title from electronic submission form (viewed October 22, 2007). Includes bibliographical references.