The purpose of this project was to address the lack of scholarship on mid-twentieth century Haitian history and illustrate its significance. It employs primary and secondary sources in shaping a Gramscian historical narrative. Ideas of "everyday resistance" and internal and external politics are also be of significance to this work. In mid-twentieth century Haiti, the black-nationalist rhetoric of noirisme became the dominant political ideology. Blackness was amorphous and its application to politics was dependent upon class. In proclaiming blackness the average Haitian was attacking the class schism that beleaguered the island. Yet for the elite noirismewas a conduit to modernity and a useful tool for muting the division between rich and poor. With the election of Dumarsais Estimé in 1946, dialogue between the U.S. government, the Haitian elite, and the masses, relative to definitions of modernity played out within the new political reality of noirisme.

Tobacco was of primary importance to Spain, and its impact on Cuba’s economy and society was greater than just the numbers of farms, workers, or production, demonstrated by the Spanish crown’s outlay of monies for capital assets, bureaucrats’ salaries, and payments to farmers for their crop. This study is a micro- and macro-level study of rural life in colonial Cuba and the interconnected relationships among society, agricultural production, state control, and the island’s economic development. By placing Cuba’s tobacco farmers at the forefront of this social history, this work revisits and offers alternatives to two prevailing historiographical views of rural Cuba from 1763 (the year Havana returned to Spanish control following the Seven Years’ War) to 1817 (the final year of the 100-year royal monopoly on Cuban tobacco). Firstly, it argues against the primacy of sugar over other agricultural crops, a view that has shaped decades of scholarship, and challenges the thesis which maintains the Cuban tobacco farmer was almost exclusively poor, white, and employed free labor, rather than slaves, in the production of their crop. This study establishes the importance of tobacco as an agricultural product, and argues that Cuban tobacco growers were a heterogeneous group, revealing the role that its cultivation may have played in helping some slaves earn their freedom.

This qualitative study, based on interviews to 17 refugee families, attempts to identify the reasons behind the lack of integration of Colombian refugees in Costa Rica. The model of Immigrant Modes of Incorporation and the studies of Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner about the sources of social capital on migrant communities provided the theoretical framework used to identify the roots of the integration challenges. The findings suggest that Costa Rican policies towards the reception and integration of Colombian refugees are exclusionary. The host labor market is marked by sentiments of xenophobia towards the sample population while reported cases of persecution in the country also inhibit this population's economic integration. The lack of social capital sources contributes to inhibit this community's development, despite their participation in informal networks. There were signs of collective action. Yet, the refugee community fails to come together, while it also seems alienated from the community of Colombian entrepreneurs in Costa Rica.

Immigrant youth are the fastest growing component of the U.S. population and Mexicans are the largest immigrant group in the U.S. The manner in which they integrate into U.S. society and the ways that they become civically engaged, will greatly determine the nature of civil society in the United States over the next few decades. Moreover, religion is increasingly recognized as an important factor in immigrant adaptation. Based upon fieldwork of participant observation and interviews in Homestead, Florida, this thesis examined the relationship among Mexican youths' identity, religion and civic engagement. I found that if these youths are active in religious practices they will be more likely to identify themselves as part of the dominant group, in this case American society. Religious groups are powerful tools that can help these youth reach the greater community.

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Lino Novas Calvo (1905--1983) was an outstanding Cuban short-story writer and a pioneer in the modern narrative in his country. I consider point of view as a web of stances that the narrator takes vis-a-vis his narrative world---mainly perceptual and phraseological stances---made possible by a certain status of the narrator, and semiosically contributing to the expression of an ideological stance attributable to the implied or inferred author. My thesis concentrates on the perceptual stance or focalization in three of the most characteristic short stories by Novas Calvo---"La noche de Ramon Yendia", "Cayo Canas" and "La vision de Tamaria"---this stance constituting the central one in the functioning of point of view in Novas Calvo's narrative; the main focus of this stance is triple: character, space and time, and it often produces sequences of a cinematic kind. I also pay close attention to the modes of phraseological stance that generate the principal perceptual-stance phenomenon, namely the mediation of focalization. Coupled to these techniques, I examine the role of Cuban and popular language as well as poetic language. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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L'objectif de cette these est d'examiner le processus de formation d'une identite nationale tel qu'il apparait dans deux romans mexicains du XIXe siecle, Clemencia et El Zarco, d'Ignacio M. Altamirano. Son hypothese de lecture est que l'identite nationale idealisee dans les romans obeit en fait a un objectif ideologique clair qui correspond a la legitimation de la condition de classe sociale emergente d'une elite dirigeante, c'est a dire, les liberaux mexicains Reformistes. Pour verifier cette hypothese, la these se penche sur trois aspects des romans: les espaces fictifs, les personnages, et les desirs que ceux-ci representent. Ces trois noeuds concentrent le systeme de preferences ideologiques des romans. La perspective theorique de notre analyse s'inspire a la fois de la sociocritique des textes (Angenot, Robin) et de la critique generique (Brooks). Chaque element des romans etudies dans la these est donc rigoureusement relie au discours social de l'epoque, d'une part, et, de l'autre, aux productions romanesques europeennes contemporaines. Ceci met donc en evidence les ambiguites du processus de formation d'une identite nationale a partir de matieres premieres discursives et textuelles essentiellement heterogenes.

Maten al leon, is a novel written in 1969, by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. This thesis will try to establish the present importance of the prevailing 1960's social discourse, when, due to the lack of all critic's voices for direct and transparent expressive causes, it is forced to act out in an indirect manner, in the interstices and gaps offered by the official discourse, using the ironic double voicing, the parody double voicing, the allusion and through other methods of discourse based in the textual implicity, in the unmentioned. Throughout this novel, the author deglorifies the Mexican heroes and calls for an interpretative revision of Mexico's historic past. Furthermore, the thesis analyses Ibarguengoitia's displacement of the governing regime's imposed official memoir and clarifies the way in which the historic assumptions become ideological statements.