This dissertation studies the politics of collective identity in the essays of Jesús Colón, Julia Álvarez and Richard Rodriguez. Through their essays I study the different configurations of collective identity (mainly those of Latino people, minorities, diasporic, transnational and national subjects) that these writes evaluate from their social position in the United States. A review of their works reveals important aspects about the problem of identity of a first and second generation of Latinos who try to understand themselves as part of the heterogeneous community in the United States. These three writers focus on the malleability of identity and use it to understand different ideologies and values. In his essays Colón highlights the reality of a subject that is economically marginalized by the historical process of capitalism. In addition, he advocates for the union of transnational workers of the Puerto Rican Diaspora in New York, who face stratification and social isolation. In contrast, Álvarez explores the construction of a diasporic identity that relies on history and on transnationalism. This author places emphasis on her writing as a nation, as a means to reflect and re-write the Dominican transnational identity. Rodriguez, the third essayist I study in this research, promotes the foundation of an American identity and evaluates the ways in which it is obstructed by the practices of communities that identify as minority. The objective of my research is to analyze the development of Latino identity using the models that these authors explore. I rely on their ideas and techniques to study the complicated and conflicting process of the evolution of a collective identity. Throughout the 20th century, these authors developed their own approach to the ideological fragmentation and mestizaje emphasized by postcolonial thought. This fragmentation influences their interpretation of history, ethnic/racial identity, family, language, education, cultural hybridity, representation and nationalism.

This study is an interpretation of the poetic work of the Puerto Rican poet Francisco Matos Paoli from 1937 to 1962 focusing on the creation and metamorphorsis of the poetic voice. This approach views the poetic voice as a linguistic device, autonomous from the real author. It establishes a distance between the I of the poem and the concept of mask or persona. The study interprets the poetic voice as a combination of several poetic modes which represent different accents in the major ideological perspectives of the discourse. The various modes of the poetic, patriotical, metaphysical I (subdivided into Christian, spiritualist and espiritista I), and the family I (subdivided into father, son, brother and lover) constitute the space of the poetic voice as one of tension between these discourses. These modes of the poetic voice express the basic binary opposition life/death which is transformed as it passes through the various books according to the movement of the poetic modes and their discourses. In Cardo labriego (1937) the opposition life/death begins in the first part of the book assuming the form of the opposition productivity/dearth. In Habitante del eco (1944) and Teoria del olvido (1944) the basic opposition is in the context of the spiritualist communication between the world of "here" and the world of "beyond." In Canto a Puerto Rico (1952), Luz de los heroes (1954), and Canto nacional a Borinquen (1982) written in 1955, the opposition life-death becomes the opposition freedom/colonialism. In Criatura del rocio (1958) the opposition uses the Christian signs in the context of espiritista communication. Finally, in Canto de la locura (1962) the different forms of opposition are all present in an attempt to reconcile them in the utopian space of the poetic voice. This reading of Matos Paoli's poetic journey comes to the conclusion that during this period of poetic production the discourse of the poet is creating a poetics based on a demand made of the reader. The implicit reader of this poetry knows the various contexts of the several modes of the poetic voice.

La lirica de Dulce Maria Loynaz (Cuba 1902) ha sido considerada por el canon academico como perteneciente al post-modernismo hispanoamericano. Tal lectura no satisface la plenitud metaforica que la constituye. Esta disertacion propone una relectura de su obra lirica desde las teorias de Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray y Julia Kristeva en torno a la identidad femenina. Se inicia con dos capitulos socio-historicos. El primero revisa la aportacion lirica de las mujeres poetas cubanas al canon literario desde sus camienzos hasta la generacion de Loynaz. Para la organicazion del esquema generacional se sigue a Raimundo Lazo. A caballo entre el post-modernismo y la vanguardia, el segundo capitulo analiza la produccion de estos movimientos en Cuba, deteniendose en unas consideraciones sobre la "poesia pura", para concluir que la lirica de Loynaz amplifica su poder significativo si se plantea su lectura desde los presupuestos de la Modernidad. Loynaz utiliza su textualidad poetica para disenar un Imaginario o identidad femenina basado en la liberacion de los presupuestos patriarcales que lo configuran tradicionalmente. Su estrategia reside en la metaforizacion acuatica, desde la que el yo lirico, paradojicamente, al adquirir una posicion marginal alcanza la integridad deseada. En una combinacion con imagenes de aire se desarrollan instancias misticas que contribuyen a la ausencia de limites. Lo inefable de la experiencia mistica se textualiza en el poema a traves de la liquidificacion. Al recuperar la voz a traves de la metafora, la voz lirica lleva a cabo un des-exilio, una ruptura de la especularidad que le hacia ser imagen de otro. Se copia la mimica del proceso mistico pero se transgrede pues, al alejarse del silencio, se lleva a cabo un proceso de des-histerizacion en la voz lirica. El pensamiento binario se suspende y se pasa a la fluidez. En la asimilacion de la tradicion literaria femenina que le precede, Loynaz recoge el misticismo de La Avellaneda, de Juana Borrero y de Emilia Bernal, para innovarlo a nivel estructural y otorgarle la dinamicidad de los enclaves liquidos en la constitucion del Imaginario femenino.

This dissertation examines the use of urban space in Cuban cultural production after 1990; the year Fidel Castro announced the beginning of the crisis known as "Special Period in Times of Peace". It was a period that brought the most dramatic changes in Cuban society after the sixties, provoking a decentralization of power in many sectors. I argue in this thesis that there is also a decentralization in the use of urban space, which reflects the collective disenchantment in the revolutionary project. In the literary and cinematographic works studied, raging from 1991 to 2014, the characters live in Havana city and inscribe meanings through their spatial practices. These spaces also influence the state of mind and actions of the characters, reinforcing the interconnection between the spatial, the temporal and the social dimensions. Using a spatial theoretical framework, within the field of cultural studies, the research is supported by the conceptualization of social space developed by Henri Lefebvre, of heterotopia by Michel Foucault, and the analysis of the use of urban space developed by Michel de Certeau. Many of the fictional works of the period show characters that do not have a feeling of belonging to a nation, who interact with the city from marginal spaces, such as rooftops and the limits with the sea. My objective is to examine the use, function and effect that these spaces of alterity have on their users, and their significance for the analysis of the Cuban society. The dissertation has been divided as follows: introduction, three chapters—each dedicated to spaces of alterity that share certain characteristics—, and conclusion. The first chapter explores the overwhelming presence of rooftops in the fictional works of post-Soviet Cuba; these are spaces that rise over the city and allow a feeling of freedom, and the possibility to lighten the weight of daily life. The second chapter proposes to see two of these spaces as heterotopias of accumulation of time, emphasizing an alternative order that reveals the contradictions of the spaces outside. In these heterotopias, the characters reconstruct anOther history, anOther national identity. In chapter three I analyze the space where the city meets the sea, particularly the area of Havana's famous seafront, el Malecón. Despite being a public and heterogeneous space, this frontier is also used by the characters to distance themselves from the official center, and to find a space of escape, refuge and rebirth. At first, these spaces of alterity are used as a means to escape; however, they also instill a liberating feeling, thus becoming spaces where the characters can look into themselves and recover their lost hopes. The possibility for a re-imagination of the self and the nation only happens in these spaces, suggesting that the official center is in a standstill. Therefore, this research shows the need to include spatial analysis in the study of Cuban society, and reveals the decentralization of space in post-Soviet Havana, which is interconnected with the ideological disenchantment of the nineties. Additionally, some of the works propose a redefinition of the concept of national identity that is not necessarily tied to the revolutionary project. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2015. / December 3, 2015. / Cuba, Havana, ideology, national identity, spatial studies, urban spaces / Includes bibliographical references. / Roberto G. Fernández, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgil Suárez, University Representative; Delia Poey, Committee Member; José Gomáriz, Committee Member.

This dissertation is a study on the role of race mixing in the formation of national identity in Mexico. It analyzes the cultural and political phenomenon of mestizofilia in 1920s Mexico, examining the national and international ideological crosscurrents that shaped it. This first chapter uses post-colonial and anthropological paradigms to explore the concept of the Other as a Western construct that objectifies the primitive, and rationalizes colonialism. Chapter two of the dissertation examines the history of thought on race mixing in Mexico, from the Conquest to the Revolution of 1910. The study looks at the effects of Western models for assimilation of the ethnic Other in New Spain and Mexico, as well as examines how negative European stereotypes of the primitive influenced Latin Americans' collective self-perception. Chapter three of the dissertation studies the ideological polemic of early 20th century between science and culture, and how it affected notions of the primitive as related to the post-revolutionary project of national construction. This chapter highlights the thought of three writers whose ideas express the socio-political and aesthetic sensibilities of the era: Manuel Gamio, premier Mexican anthropologist during the Revolutionary period; José Vasconcelos, writer/philosopher and Minister of Education under Obregón; and D. H. Lawrence, British travel writer and novelist who resided in Mexico during the mid-1920s. For the two Mexican writers, assimilating the primitive was part of their country's project of national construction. Both sought to create a sense of national unity around the symbolic figure of the Mestizo. The indigenous Other must become a part of the mixed-race body politic if Mexico was to progress. D. H. Lawrence was a vitalist thinker and primitivist artist who journeyed to the New World in order to write his novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), about the necessity of assimilating a primitive “blood consciousness” into the modern experience. For the European writer, reintegration of primitive tendencies was part of an aesthetic awareness and a personal endeavor that modern man must undergo in order to save Western civilization, but he denied that mestizaje could solve the problem of the lack of a shared collective consciousness in Mexico.

Magic realism emerged as a literary force in Latin America in the 1940s, and it has continued to have an impact on literature throughout the Americas through the start of the twenty-first century. In recent years, a number of postcolonial scholars have noted that magic realist texts are being used as a form of social protest throughout the world. These scholars have labeled magic realism subversive, hybrid, mestizo, or “impure.” The implications of the relationship between magic realist literature and social protest, however, have not been the focus of detailed scholarship. This study explores the relationship between magic realism and social protest in novels written in Latin America and the United States between 1950 and 1990, seeking to determine why the literary mode of magic realism is an effective vehicle for addressing volatile social issues. Organized chronologically, the study begins with an overview of the term “magic realism” and a brief discussion of some of the important predecessors of magic realist literature in the Americas. Later chapters use a range of theoretical tools within a comparative framework in order to perform detailed analysis of specific writers—Juan Rulfo, Elena Garro, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Rudolfo Anaya, Alma Luz Villanueva, Toni Morrison, and Linda Hogan—in order to explore how magic realist techniques have been adapted to different forms of protest according to each author's time and geographical space.

Developed from the similarity between exile theory and age studies, the term "exile" is expanded to a natural form of exile because of the shocking temporal shift that reconstructs social interaction, familial dynamics, and the aging body. Using Heidegger's theoretical work Being in Time, Simon de Beauvoir's The Coming of Age, and Jean Améry's On Aging as insight, this literary analysis captures how the elderly protagonists Goyo from Cristina García's King of Cuba, Máximo from Ana Menéndez's "In Cuba I was a German Shepherd," and Soledad from Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés's "Abuela Marielita" experience a natural exile among society, their family and within their own body. These areas express how the elderly's sense of displacement equates that of a political/geographical exile.

In Peru since the end of the last century, there has been a surge in new interest in cuisine in the country, due to the so-called Peruvian gastronomic boom. The novel Cocinero en su tinta employs this cultural phenomenon as its setting to articulate the personal conflicts of Rembrandt Bedoya, a recognized Peruvian chef, who searches for a récipe that represents the cultural polyhedral reality of his country to be presented in Madrid. This search is coupled gradually with the necessity of making peace with the memory of his father and establishing a relationship with his evasive and unattainable lover. The objective of this thesis is to investigate and analyze how the personal and national journeys of the protagonist is the recurring theme that links the narrative discourse. The first chapter is dedicated to analyzing the cultural importance of food in relation to the established ties with the protagonist, who identifies as much as a Peruvian as he does as chef. In the second chapter, Rembrandt’s personal and national conflicts are explored deeper, as well as his desire to find originality through his relationships with the other characters, estableshing and analyzing his search for the double meaning of origins. Key Words: Peruvian gastronomic boom, identity, creole from Lima, Gustavo Rodríguez

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The UCNA Experiment at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) uses an electron spectrometer to observe angular correlations between the neutron spin and the momenta of beta particles emitted during the process of beta (β) decay. Combined with neutron lifetime measurements, these observations probe physics beyond the standard model. In recent years there has been an effort to modernize the equipment to reduce the physical limitations of the experiment. The new prototype helps to reduce error via use of silicon photo-multipliers (SiPMs) and the SiPMs also have a greater quantum efficiency than the photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). However, there is still potential for error due to back-scatter, where an electron hits the scintillator and bounces off, but gets sent back into the scintillator by the magnetic field. Also when the SiPMs are activated they have a spike in voltage which exponentially decays. If 2 electrons hit within approximately 20 nanoseconds, there will be no new spike in 1 voltage which results in a pileup in the data. My work has focused on how to recognize when pileup and or back-scatter occurs, and how to further reduce the error in this process.