This dissertation examines the discomfort around the insult in different specialized languages, analyzing the relationship between insult, politics, and culture in the history of Colombia. When viewed as an element of discourse, the insult illuminates certain critical events and subjects in the history of the nation. The insult is understood in a wide variety of ways --as direct enunciation of offending words, as the imminent failure of communication, as the staged claim of being offended, or as verbal and performative tool for electoral purposes. This dissertation analyzes a heterogeneous corpus of political, historiographic, journalistic, religious, legal, literary, proselytizing, pamphleteering, and digital primary sources. It spans the period from the Independence crisis at the beginning of nineteenth century to the digital architecture that enables online comment sections of mass media site in the twenty-first century. Each chapter reflects on one or two specialized language that, according to certain individuals or events, develop mechanisms to relegate the insult, and, from them, strategies and tactics are detailed in terms of its exploitation, containment, control, revitalization, overflow, and even involuntary stimulus.

This dissertation examines the co-evolution of consumption and production as competing models of agency in Argentine culture in the era of global consumer capitalism. Tracing the influence of several key political and intellectual developments in Latin America, the US, and Europe on the symbolic language of regional politics, I map out how participation in the global consumer market came to be understood as an expression of power and authority in the context of Argentina's disastrous experiment with neoliberalism in the last three decades of the 20th century. Then, using films and literary texts including works by Lisandro Alonso, Adrián Caetano, and Aníbal Jarkowski together with critical projects by George Yúdice and Josefina Ludmer, I examine how a model of subjectivity that exaggerates the economic, social, and cultural agency of consumers has managed to persist in Argentina's cultural imagination despite growing disillusionment with the neoliberal model and the disenfranchisement of the nation's consumers. Through close readings that reveal work as the site of a restored order that is ultimately incomplete, fantastical, and contradictory, I show how the myth of the consumer dictator perpetuates itself through a system of intellectual values, including abstract, absolutist visions freedom and tolerance, that isolate the subject and divert communication, inscribing an extreme version of consumer agency even upon production itself. Together, these instances of interrupted reform suggest that a model of agency suited to the era of global consumer capitalism must understand production and consumption not as alternative options, but as distinct, integral modes of creativity.

In this dissertation, I argue that the shifts in the terrain of literary criticism in Argentina during the 1950s represent the development of what I call a “critical infrastructure,” whereby criticism came to perform an essential function for the circulation and appropriation of books and literature in a context of major transformations in book publishing and distribution. In doing so, I bring together two phenomena that belong to a single historical shift, which saw the expansion of mass cultural production, and the consequent development of material and discursive practices to distribute them and to allow them to be appropriated. On the one hand, Buenos Aires experienced a rapid expansion in its publishing industry as a consequence of the Civil War’s ravages on Spain, turning Argentina for a brief period into the world’s primary producer and exporter of Spanish language publications. On the other hand, Argentina experienced what is frequently referred to as an “eruption” in literary criticism in the 1950s, propelled by the proliferation of a number of small, independent literary journals headed by young, middle-class writers and critics. These publications represented a critical challenge to the Argentine literary establishment, which was hitherto almost exclusively comprised of intellectuals belonging to the nation’s elite. While there has been considerable academic interest in each of these phenomena, theorizing their relationship to one another offers important insights into the reasons for the increased relevance and visibility of these otherwise marginal publications. Analyzing a variety of heterogeneous periodicals (including major newspapers like La Nación and La Prensa, as well as “little magazines” such as Espiga, Centro, Bibliograma, and Contorno), I discuss the expansion and increasing contentiousness of literary criticism, which became an ever more regular and visible presence in such publications. I trace the transformations in publishing (1899-1953) to show how a process of indifferentiation among printed materials made the intervention of discursive practices —mainly performed by literary reviews— a structural necessity for the distribution and appropriation of books and literature. Drawing from Adolfo Prieto’s seminal Sociología del público argentino (1956) as well as other texts, I discuss the ways in which the presence of a mass public with ostensively heterogenous ways of “consuming” literature posed a challenged to traditional ideas about national literature, the act of reading, the “figure” of the reader, and consequently also about the nature and function of criticism. Finally, I analyze the small avant-garde magazine Letra y Línea (1953-54) to show the empowering effect this transformation had on relatively marginal, middle-class writers, who invested themselves in a radical critical task in order to seize the opportunity offered by this structural discursive need.

“Translated Conquests” recovers the deep linkages between New World texts and territories to offer a new understanding of the relationship of literature to empire in the nineteenth-century United States. When Columbus planted a flag on a Bahamian beach, it was the notary in the background who transformed his performance of possession into legal truth; from this moment forward, Spanish empire relied on paper “instruments” to claim and administer New World territories. I reconstruct the forgotten history of how, as Spain lost its hold on these American territories in the nineteenth century, much of the material archive of its colonization project was relocated from the past seat of New World empire to the future one—the United States. While the hemispheric turn in American literary studies made it a commonplace that the nineteenth-century narrative appropriation of Spanish “discovery” and “conquest” ran parallel to the territorial appropriation of former Spanish possessions, my project reveals that these processes were materially linked through an inherited archive that authorized both truth-claims and land claims. Bringing methods drawn from book history to bear on hemispheric studies, “Translated Conquests” traces the circulation of these material texts—ranging from colonial titles and portolan charts to relaciones and manuscript histories—to demonstrate that their accumulation in the United States underwrote claims to hemispheric history and territory in the expansionist period between the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and the Gadsden Purchase (1854). By grounding hemispheric studies in material flows, my project offers a revised conceptual framework that situates nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism within the longue durée of an entangled Atlantic World. Novelists, historians, and translators including Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Hickling Prescott, and Buckingham Smith refashioned Spanish history as the prehistory of the United States, but their nationalist works emerged from a transnational network that included London antiquarian and bookdealer Obadiah Rich, Spanish scholar Martín Fernández de Navarrete, and Mexican historians Carlos María de Bustamante and José Fernando Ramírez. As they claimed newly-available sources, all of these authors entered into a centuries-old debate over how to write the history of the New World, questioning which genres and media counted as reliable evidence and what kinds of claims they authorized. My readings of how the archive both materially enables and is figured in these works offers a revised understanding of the relationship between claiming history and claiming territory in the nineteenth-century United States.

“Entertaining Culture: Mass Culture and Consumer Society in Argentina, 1898-1946” is a study of Argentine mass culture in a new consumer society: a new cultural dynamic that emerged around the turn of the century in Buenos Aires. This dynamic entailed a redefinition not only of the relationships between culture, creators, and publics, but also of those categories themselves. Early twentieth-century Argentine mass culture was a heterogeneous realm of cultural production and consumption in which varied and often conflicting ideologies, aesthetic convictions, and class or party allegiances jostled for purchase, creating a constant push and pull of competing desires and values. Within this context, criticism and ambivalence about the effects of cultural modernization was ubiquitous, a byproduct not only of the heterogeneity within mass culture itself, but also of the tension-filled incorporation of culture into the market. By analyzing Argentine mass culture in this light, my dissertation challenges monolithic understandings of mass culture that ignore how it exposed and grappled with the tensions in its own premises. The cultural dynamic of the period collapsed the categories of culture, consumer good, and entertainment and blurred the limits between production and consumption, often provoking dismay from creators, cultural critics, nationalists, and educators, frequently voiced from within mass culture itself. Mass culture adopted variety as a central premise, claiming to offer something for everyone and for every taste, in a business strategy designed to attract as many paying consumers as possible, and to turn them into brand loyalists. Cultural ventures also used a number of other tools, such as novelty, brevity, immediacy, familiarity, levity, and affordability, to expand their market share through entertainment, providing cultural production that fit the bill and encouraging Argentines to demand these qualities of the cultural production they consumed. Mass culture also encouraged Argentines to view the world through the logic of spectacle, according to which anything or anyone, given the mass cultural treatment, could be transformed into entertainment. While the transformation of culture into a for-profit entertainment venture and a consumer good made it possible for more aspiring artists to make a living at writing or performing, it also provoked frequent criticisms of the industrialization of culture, the mercantilism of producers, the quality of cultural works, and the naïveté of audiences and aspiring creators. To better understand the tensions in play in this new cultural dynamic, I advance the concept of “cultured consumption,” a term I use to identify the dominant ideal of consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. As a loose complex of practices, cultured consumption was characterized by a tension between competing models of social aspiration: one, based on the performance of gentility and refinement, per aristocratic practices; another, founded upon a middle-class ideal of comfortable domesticity and family-centered values. Thus, by participating in cultured consumption, Argentines asserted their ascription to a certain set of potentially competing values and desires, from upward mobility and good taste to economy and family unity. Furthermore, according to the premises of cultured consumption, purchase of certain products and participation in certain activities would mark consumers as authentically and patriotically Argentine. Nevertheless, it was not clear how Argentine culture was to reconcile refinement and moderation, performance and authenticity, and public and private activity. Cultured consumption was, thus, both progressive and conservative, aspirational and protective of the status quo; in it, standards of taste took on moral and even political connotations. Through it, culture was both democratized and limited according to a set of sometimes competing standards and values. In this way, mass culture promised ever broader sectors of the population that by participating fully in it they could satisfy their heterogeneous desires, experience self-actualization, and improve their lot in life. At the same time, mass culture invoked consumption, spectatorship, and artistic aspirations as possible threats to the stability of the family and social structure to limit the expansion of access to culture and cultural production. Mass culture, thus, set itself up as the articulating joint between public and private life in Buenos Aires: a series of practices that increasingly defined participation in, and an interpretative lens that allowed Argentines to make sense of, public and private life—including mass culture and consumption themselves. Against the limited narratives of the period traditionally proposed by literary criticism and cultural history, this dissertation argues that it is precisely this heterogeneous area of mass cultural production that can help us better understand Argentine culture of the period more broadly: it allows us to see how these tensions played out on a massive scale. Considering cross-object study to be essential for understanding the new cultural dynamic, this dissertation recuperates archival materials and understudied genres such as mass-circulation periodicals, advertisements, reviews, advice literature, recitation manuals, celebrity profiles, and popular plays and music, and analyzes both the texts themselves and the interactions, institutions, and practices around them. This methodology allows me to do two things: first, to put disciplines such as consumer history and media studies in dialogue with literary criticism, theater history, and cultural studies; second, to complicate the narratives of the period traditionally espoused by literary critics and cultural historians. While the former, through their focus on aesthetic and political polemics, largely erased an area of cultural production massively consumed in the early twentieth century, the latter, by portraying culture as tangential to a more important political or economic narrative, deny culture its historical agency. My dissertation, in contrast, considers Argentine mass culture of the period to be not only a cultural dynamic that comprised systems of production, practices, and content, but, more broadly, the mouthpiece of a new worldview that redefined all areas of life. This worldview, originating in the cultural realm, would shape the course of Argentine social, economic, and political history to come. In foregrounding mass culture in this way, I propose a new corpus and lens for evaluating modernization in Buenos Aires.

This dissertation analyzes the effects of community violence on health care service utilization and access in Mexico. Given the widespread effects of violence, there is good reason to believe that health service delivery might be affected, but it is largely unknown. This study looks at potential channels through which violence may impact the supply and demand of health care services in Mexico, through qualitative and quantitative methods. It posits that violence can have heterogeneous effects on service utilization and provides a deeper exploration of factors that may have negative and positive effects on service utilization. Supply-side effects point towards deterring effects of violence in service utilization out of fear of travel and fear among medical staff to go to their workplaces or shortening the hours of operation out of fear of exposure. Mixed effects logistic regression models reveal demand-side effects through a significant increase in health care service utilization as violence increases possibly related to worsening health (e.g. through stress or other mechanisms), which may drive individuals to seek more services. In sensitivity analysis, increased primary care service utilization as a result of an increase in the homicide rate remains significant when predictors of service use such as having a chronic condition, insurance status and urban areas are included in the models. Qualitative findings also reveal an increased demand for mental health services at the primary care level as a result of increased community violence. Findings underscore the importance of access to outpatient services and mental health services at the primary care level in contexts of high violence. The significant increase in the use of outpatient service utilization point towards potentially protective behaviors driving the increase of use of services as violence increases. This analysis highlights the responsibility and need for providing safe access to medical services in contexts of violence that may translate to natural disasters or other man-made conflicts.

My dissertation delineates the Dominican intelligentsia’s collecting of unofficial archives from the local bourgeoisie’s emergence after the Restoration of independence from Spain in 1865 through the Dominican State’s consolidation as a sovereign entity in the 1920s. By unofficial archives bourgeois actors meant, from foundational writer Manuel de Jesús Galván and first national historian José Gabriel García to scholars Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Abigaíl Mejía, private or nonofficial repositories, real or metaphoric, containing anything from personal belongings and printed works to unclaimed ruins. In dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Pierre Bourdieu, I show how in the Dominican context the use of authorized and state knowledge lagged behind that of informal, object-based knowledge. In doing so, “The Unofficial Archive” questions traditional understandings of the archive in intellectual history—Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—as well as in Performance, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, reassessing the foundational role that a lack of records played in postcolonial archives during nation-building. Chapter one introduces my reading of “archives.” Because Foucault and Derrida consider physical files and intellectual ideas separately, I contend that their methods account insufficiently for postcolonial archives, where material records and ideas are inextricably intertwined. To trace how the materiality of archives produce national habits and traditions the second chapter centers on the 1877 discovery of Christopher Columbus’s relics. As my close reading of historical works such as historian Emiliano Tejera’s Los restos de Colón en Santo Domingo (1878) shows, this recognition prompted supporters of the relics’ authenticity to create a national narrative describing the pillage and loss of the country’s archives, and to popularize this narrative through reproductions in print, visual, and architectural media like the 1898 Columbus Mausoleum in Santo Domingo’s Cathedral. In my third chapter, I examine how prominent bourgeois actors such as the Sociedad Amigos del País used the tradition about the missing archives to legitimize a national literature and historiography leading nation-building by creating unofficial archives in fiction, nonfiction, and printed ephemera. I read García’s Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo (1867-1906) together with Galván’s Enriquillo: leyenda histórica dominicana, 1503-1533 (1882) as unofficial archives that meditate upon what it meant to the Dominican nation that its archives remained wanting. My fourth chapter analyzes the nationalization of colonial ruins as unofficial archives by the intellectual bourgeoisie as a means for the group to continue gaining power and to fight U.S. imperialism from the post-Restoration through the U.S. military intervention (1916-1924). I focus on the anti-colonial origins of a national archaeology in the work of Alejandro Llenas Julia, Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s philosophical writings on the ruin in Horas de Estudio (1910), and the use of the edifices by intellectuals such as Max Henríquez Ureña to stir an international cultural debate during the occupation in order to defend the country’s right to sovereignty. I conclude with the government’s gradual appropriation and display of unofficial archives during the 1927 inauguration of the National Museum as described in press articles by Abigail Mejía, which resulted in a political iconography that I call a “bric-à-brac” that officially stages the national archives as half-finished. Under this official lens, a new generation of intellectuals used the lack of records to sustain the hispanicist rule of Rafael L. Trujillo (1930-1961) on the idea that he would be the one to protect the nation’s heritage. This dissertation brings together historical and material culture studies from a hemispheric point of view and bridges critical Caribbean and Latin American studies. From a Caribbean perspective, the project challenges Archival Studies to consider non-Western forms of archive emerging out of colonial contexts that remain unaddressed in scholarship about the origin of modern state archives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The Unofficial Archive” brings new insights into transnational debates on cultural heritage, its corruption and plunder, and into the social aftermath of colonial governance and state coercion. It urges scholars to address the long-term effects that conflicts over the inalienability of historical treasures have had in former colonies and Empires, and to ponder the role that advances in technology have had in the democratization of the past and the shaping of race and gender identities from modern times to the present. Ultimately, this research reveals how individual citizens who were ignored by or disagreed with official politics used unconfirmed knowledge and information networks to prevail upon officialdom on matters concerning human rights, universal truth, and the meaning of nationhood.

This dissertation traces the reception of Antonio Gramsci’s works over a series of critical moments in the development of the Latin American left, including the transitions to democracy in Argentina and Brazil, Latin American subaltern studies in the academic sphere, and the rhetoric of Pink Tide governments of the twenty-first century, with a focus on Bolivia. My central argument is that Gramsci has appealed to Latin American intellectuals as a theorist of the state—notwithstanding his more frequent characterization as primarily a theorist of civil society—and that the different appropriations and deployments of Gramscian concepts such as the war of position and the integral state have been oriented, in one way or another, toward a defense of constituted as opposed to constituent power, and more generally toward the closure of constituted political subjectivities. The project is intended at once as a study of the historico-political conditions of intellectual production in Latin America, and more specifically as a contribution to the scholarship on the long history of the centrality of the state in Latin American politics, as well as an examination, focused on a particular theoretical field, of modes of appropriation and resignification of political concepts in the construction and contestation of power.

Master of Science / School of Family Studies and Human Services / Joyce Baptist / There is a need for culturally sensitive clinical interventions for substance use disorders. Parental modeling, peer alcohol use, and depression are related to alcohol use, but have not been specifically examined among Latin American adolescents and young adults in the U.S. The purpose of this study is to examine contributing factors to alcohol use in Latin American adolescents and young adults in the U.S. Participants included 400 Hispanic and Latino adolescents from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Results from a path analysis suggested that parent and peer alcohol use are associated with adolescent alcohol use and that adolescent alcohol use mediates the relationship between peer alcohol use and young adult alcohol use. Clinical and research implications are described.

This study set out to investigate the connections between language retention and identity construction among young bilingual Spanish-speaking children from Latin American backgrounds living in urban communities in Sydney, It provides a critical examination of the complex articulation between languages, identity and education. The thesis proposes that there are significant cultural, social and political forces involved in language retention in childhood and that these forces mediate and shape identity construction in bilingual children. Much of the research literature on childhood bilingualism draws on dominant and established psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories of bilingualism and language learning. These theories do not fully explain the impact of broader sociological processes that impact on home language retention and identity construction in young children. Consequently, in early childhood and primary education, pedagogical understandings of bilingualism and language retention have focussed narrowly on learnability issues and cognitive development. Established theories of bilingualism have not fully articulated the intersections between language retention and identity construction in the early years of children’s lives, where the formation of identity is constantly negotiated, transformed and contested amidst a background of hegemonic English-speaking social fields such as in prior-to-school, school and other community settings. This thesis begins in Chapter One by providing an overview of the limitations of these psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic theories in making connections between identity construction and language retention for children of particular immigrant minority groups. Chapter Two reviews the literature and research. There has been little research in Australia into how bilingual families and their children negotiate identity and language retention. The thesis explores the proposition that the dominance of English and discourses of monolingualism legitimise institutional and educational practices that position young bilingual children, families and educators into marginalised situations in everyday social relations. It is against this field that the research reported here investigated how such sociological factors represent a significant force in children’s lives by impacting on their retention of their home language. Chapter Three introduces the key theoretical concepts used in this study which draws on Bourdieu’s theory of social practice (1990, 1991) and the theoretical resources of cultural studies informed, in particular, by concepts from Hall (1992, 1996) and Bhabha (1994, 1998). These conceptual tools enable the study to examine ways in which identity construction and bilingualism accumulate social, cultural and linguistic capital in selective cultural fields, and how these may hinder or promote the retention and learning of languages in children. Chapter Four overviewed the research methodology involved in this study. It incorporated quasi-ethnographic, case study and interpretative approaches using questionnaires, informal interviews, participant observations, field notes, children’s work and the collection of documentation. The research process began as a pilot study in which 5 adults and 3 children participated. Three interrelated phases followed. The participants in the study included 25 children and 29 family members, including grandparents and parents with different family structures from extended, blended, interethnic and interracial families. An additional 34 caregivers and teachers working in prior-to-school and school settings participated. The first phase involved 14 interviews of parents and grandparents. The second phase involved a case study of parents and their children attending an after-school Spanish Community Languages Program. I interviewed and surveyed 26 children, 13 parents, and 2 staff members. Finally, in the third phase, I surveyed 30 practitioners working with Spanish-speaking Latin American children in prior-to-school and school settings were. The investigation involved the documentation and analysis of young children’s bilingual experiences using Spanish and English in a range of social fields, such as family life, educational and community settings. As the children and their families are the focus of this study, the children’s views about growing up with two languages, and family perspectives and aspirations about living, working and raising children in multicultural/multilingual communities, form the basis of the investigation. Furthermore, the data analysis involved the examination of the evidence to ascertain how the power relations in educational and community settings shape and influence children’s negotiation of identity and the retention of Spanish. Likewise, data relating to caregiver and teacher attitudes towards bilingualism and language retention were also analysed. Chapter Five details the links between diaspora, hybridity and diversity apparent in the cultural histories and heterogeneous make-up of the families and their children. Analysis of the links between Spanish language retention and diversity show that diversity in families is a significant but not conclusive factor in what constituted success in language retention in young children. This analysis examines of the multiple ways in which the families and their children constructed their identities. The influences these constructions have on speaking Spanish were analysed to demonstrate the connections between language retention and identity construction. Chapter Seven draws on the children’s views, experiences and preferences for speaking Spanish to analyse how the linguistic habitus enables the accumulation of cultural and social capital in speaking Spanish across a variety of social fields. Finally, Chapter Eight provides an analysis of how teachers’ and caregivers’ attitudes towards bilingualism and language retention can impede or promote opportunities for children’s language retention. In particular, the evidence indicates that the lack of institutional and structural support for community languages had a direct impact on children’s interest in using Spanish in both mainstream and non mainstream educational settings. Four key findings emerged through the data analysis presented in the evidentiary chapters of this thesis. First, diaspora and hybridity highlighted the significance of the heterogeneity in Latin American families. Second, it was revealed that multiple constructions of identity mediated everyday lived experiences of being bilingual. Third, the linguistic habitus was significant in shaping children’s identity across different social and cultural fields. Fourth, teacher and caregiver attitudes and pedagogical practices towards bilingualism and language retention shaped children’s identity construction and opportunities for using Spanish. In conclusion, this study revealed that there is a strong connection between identity construction and language retention in young bilingual children. In particular, the study highlights the significance of multiplicity and hybridity in shaping identity which in turn forms dispositions that can enable the formation, reproduction and transformation of cultural and social capital. This study investigated the broader sociological factors associated with growing up bilingual and how these mediate and shape children����s understanding of themselves and their families, in terms of how they negotiate two (or more) linguistic codes. Hence, the study has contributed towards a reframing of understandings about bilingualism and language retention in childhood. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)