The following collection of short stories explores the notion of being caught between two worlds, of straddling physical, emotional, linguistic and metaphorical borders. I have chosen these characters in order to give voice to those who are often voiceless. The collection has been divided in two parts in order to challenge ideas of what is "real." I argue that the emotional truth of a story is paramount, and this reality can sometimes be best achieved through unconventional means.

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 report is an analysis of Salvador Plascencia’s first novel, The People of Paper, with relationships to current understandings of lesbian genres from queer theory, the body from disability theory, and race in relation to the characters’ migrations/transgressions across physical and figurative boundaries from Mexico to the United States. Key thinkers who have influenced my reading of the novel include Gloria Anzaldúa whose text, Borderlands/La Frontera, portrays the intersections of a multiplicity of identities across gender, sexuality, ability, nationhood, race, and ethnicity. The thinking of Chicana lesbian scholar, Catrióna Rueda Esquibel; queer scholar, Alexander Doty; and disability scholars, Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Tobin Siebers, are also integral to the report as I explore the intersections of sexuality, disability, and diaspora of key figures like the “retarded” prophet, Baby Nostradamus, and the women of paper, Merced de Papel and Liz. These figures are explored in relation to each other as well as to the readers, critic, and author as the novel is a metafictional one that lends itself to the blurring of genre boundaries. Further, as I analyze these corporeal intersections, I focus on the lesbian trope of forked tongues as a trope of queer disability as it relates to the markedly “Other” body of Merced de Papel and the lesbian triangle she forms with Little Merced and Merced as well as to the formation of a queer disability community. / text

No description available.

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary study that brings together the fields of literature, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies in order to understand the motivation and meaning of English-Spanish codeswitching or language alternation in Latino literature produced in the United States. Codeswitching was first introduced in Latino literature around the time of the Chicano Movement in the 1970s and has been used as a distinctive feature of Latino literary works to this day. By doing a close linguistic analysis of narratives by four different authors belonging to the largest Latino communities in the country (Chicano, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, and Cuban Americans), this study examines whether codeswitching is used as a mere decorative element to add ethnic flavor, performs a mimetic role of oral codeswitching, or responds to a political strategy. To reach representative conclusions, the political, social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of each community are studied in order to establish commonalities or differences in the experiences of these immigrant communities in the United States and how these experiences inform their writing. Considering the negative views held by speakers of both English and Spanish regarding the use of oral codeswitching, the need to study its use in literature is compelling. To that end, I have adopted social, and sociolinguistic theories to identify whether codeswitching operates as linguistic and symbolic capital in Latino literature, which authors may profit from to advance a Latino agenda. This work concludes that how codeswitching is used in Latino literature and the goals it ultimately achieves—if any—hinge on the positioning of the authors vis-à-vis hegemonic English monolingualism and their own experience as members of the Latino community to which they belong. Thus, the role of codeswitching may indeed be solely ornamental or ethnic or it may be a political one; that of expanding the space in which Latinos are allowed to operate. The narratives studied include Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima (1972), Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).

No description available.