abstract: Las Islas Canarias son un archipiélago de la costa africana situado a cien kilómetros de la costa de Marruecos y del Sáhara Occidental. Estas islas fueron conquistadas a finales del siglo XV y son actualmente parte del Estado español, y su posición como punto de paso tricontinental ha facilitado una historia colonial que es paralela a la del Caribe y que está caracterizada por la asimilación de sus poblaciones indígenas, las plantaciones de caña de azúcar y el comercio esclavista atlántico, la emergencia de un Nuevo Mundo, las migraciones constantes desde las Islas Canarias hacia el Caribe, el desarrollo de movimientos independentistas y la turistificación del paraíso caribeño/canario, entre otros aspectos. La identidad de las Islas Canarias, si embargo, ha permanecido en una posición ambigua en la discusión de conceptos de tricontinentalidad o puente entre continentes, cuando estas islas no son simplemente consideradas como una región más de España con ligeras diferencias. Desde el Caribe, varios autores regionales han cuestionado sus propias identidades proponiendo los conceptos de creolización, relación o meta-archipiélago. Las ideas comunes exploradas por intelectuales de ambos archipiélagos incluyen los conceptos de colonialidad, modernidad, mitologización de la isla, fragmentación, atlanticidad, frontera y ultraperiferia, entre otros. De esta manera, esta tesis doctoral conecta las Islas Canarias y el Caribe a través de la exploración de sus discursos identitarios, y aplica a Canarias las teorías poscoloniales desarrolladas en el Caribe. Partiendo del análisis de diversos trabajos de Fernando Ortiz, Antonio S. Pedreira, Édouard Glissant, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, Antonio Benítez Rojo, José Luis González, Juan Flores, Gustavo Pérez-Firmat, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa y Juan Manuel García Ramos, entre otros, esta tesis propone el término canaribeñidad para definir el desarrollo bilateral y común de las identidades nacionales en las Islas Canarias y el Caribe, destacando la contribución canaria a la identidad caribeña (la fundación de la literatura cubana, el guajiro/jíbaro, la brujería…) y viceversa (discursos independentistas y nacionalistas, la experiencia diaspórica, la música, el tabaco, el sentido de fraternidad con el Caribe…). El corpus analizado en esta disertación incluye obras literarias transatlánticas, desde las primeras crónicas hasta ejemplos de teatro, novelas, ensayos, artículos periodísticos y poesía de los siglos XVI-XX. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2019

Floods are a significant threat to communities around the world and require substantial resources and infrastructure to predict. Limited local resources in developing nations make it difficult to build and maintain dense sensor networks like those present in the United States, creating a large disparity in flood prediction across borders. To address this disparity, I operated the Iowa Flood Center Top Layer model to predict floods in Puerto Rico without relying on in-situ data measurements. Instead, all model forcing was provided by satellite remote sensing datasets that offer near-global coverage. I used three datasets gathered via satellite remote sensing to build and operate watershed streamflow models: elevation data obtained by the Space Shuttle Endeavour through the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), rainfall estimates gathered by a constellation of satellites through the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM), and evapotranspiration rate estimates collected by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensors aboard the Aqua and Terra satellites. While these satellite remote sensing datasets make observations of nearly the entire world, their spatiotemporal resolution is coarse compared to conventional on-the-ground measurements. Hydrologic models were assembled for 75 basins upstream of streamflow gages monitored by the United States Geologic Survey (USGS). Model simulations were compared to real-time measurements at these gages. Continuous simulations spanning 58 months achieve poor Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency and Klinge Gupta Efficiency of -112.0 and -0.5, respectively. The sources of error that influence model performance were investigated, underlining some limitations of relying solely on satellite data for operational flood prediction efforts.

In 2004, Puerto Rico's new environmental legislation became part of the penal code with the intention of protecting the island nation's natural resources through criminal prosecution. However, the problem is a dearth of information about the prosecutions of environmental crimes and the law enforcement agent's implementation practices. The purpose of this study was to describe the execution of the law and the few cases prosecuted. Lipsky and Hull and Hjern's theory of implementation were used to help answer the research question: What are the implementation procedures of law enforcement agents on Puerto Rico's environmental crimes law, and what can be done to improve these practices? This qualitative case study included semistructured interviews with police officers and 3 district attorneys who were selected based on their involvement in environmental crimes cases. Document analysis such as court files were analyzed to reveal the implementation practices of the law. Data were analyzed using NVivo software. Results revealed that police officers and prosecutors possess little knowledge of the environmental crimes and this was not a barrier for execution of the law. However, court judges did not uniformly interpret the meaning of the law in the adjudication process which suggests that failure to successfully prosecute is due to lack of understanding of these environmental crimes by legal counsel. Enhancing the training of police, prosecutors, and judges is needed to improve policing and implementation of the law. Successful implementation practices can promote better legislation and prosecution in order to reduce environmental degradation of the island.

Many project managers and business leaders lack effective strategies to control internal factors that affect information systems (IS) projects, which may impede leadership's ability to respond to market changes. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies used by 6 purposefully selected project managers who successfully implemented information system development (ISD) projects by controlling the internal factors that affected different ISD project phases in Puerto Rico's telecommunication service industry. The framework that guided this study was coordination theory. The data collection process included semistructured interviews and project documentation including business requirements, project charters, project plans, and lessons learned which also served as resources for member checking and validation to strengthen the trustworthiness of the study. Analysis of the data occurred following Yin's 5 analytical steps of validating, coding, interpreting, summarizing, and generating themes. The 5 themes that emerged were top management support, clear requirements, communication, project plan, and lessons learned. Each theme corresponded to a phase of the project life cycle. Top management support and clear requirements were the top critical factors (TCF) in the initiating and planning phases. Communication and project plan were the TCF in the executing, monitoring, and controlling phases. Lessons learned were the TCF in the closing phase of the project. Implications for social change include helping IS project managers successfully implement IS projects, providing innovative services to customers, and improving an organization's position so it can provide jobs and economic stability in the region in which it operates.

The spatial characterization of Puerto Rican commercial fisheries describing fishing gear use in relation to habitat classes and bathymetry ranges was achieved through the collection and analysis of spatial fisheries data. An extensive field data gathering session was conducted in the entire Puerto Rican territory during the summer months of 2009, from June to October. The field data was digitized and analyzed using geographic information systems (GIS) and computer spreadsheet software, and gear usage charts and graphs, fishing grounds maps, and fishing intensity maps were produced for four gear categories: line, net, dive, and trap gears. Patterns and evidence of likely relationships linking gear usage and benthic habitat, and between gear utilization and water depth ranges, were presented. The importance of the spatial characterization of the commercial fishery for Puerto Rican fisheries management, and other recommendations were given within the concluding chapter.

While incidence rates are increasing for many cancers in Puerto Rico, mortality rates are declining (Torres-Cintron, et al. 2010), resulting in growing numbers of survivors and creating a situation in which long-term survivorship concerns are beginning to emerge as priorities. The importance of quality-of-life among survivors of cancer is increasingly being recognized among healthcare providers, although there remains a gap in knowledge of how young adult survivors cope with long-term treatment-related physical effects, such as infertility, and of the impact of cancer on survivors' social relationships and future goals. Because understandings of "cancer survivorship," as well as of reproduction, vary according to cultural context, this study examined the physical and social impact of cancer on young adults in Puerto Rico, and specifically the importance of parenthood. A media analysis of women's magazines, key informant interviews with ten cancer researchers, as well as in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 23 young adult cancer survivors, 16 healthcare providers, nine cancer advocates, and two members of the clergy were conducted in order to shed light on the lived experiences, needs, and concerns of young Puerto Rican cancer survivors.

As an important part of our lives, stories help us to form both our personal identities and the identities of the social groups that make up our society. They facilitate us to be in contact with our beliefs, our feelings, our knowledge, our perception, and what is significant to us. Similarly, we understand those very things from the stories of others. These stories are obtained through different ways: family, friends, literature, poetry, religion, teachers, movies, art, and so on. Through these, our culture is born and sustained. There is no doubt that architecture is an important defining element of our culture. For that reason, we must decisively evaluate its essential role in the communication of these stories. Being more than just the planning, design and construction of a building, the architecture design process involves the manipulation of mass, space, volume, texture, light, shadow, materials, program, and other elements in order to achieve an end which is aesthetic as well as functional, and if taken further architecture can be experienced through the senses. When thinking about what architecture involves, I have to ask myself a question, can architecture take a more dynamic role in the transmission of our culture; generally, symbolically, and more particularly, by encouraging and reinforcing the dissemination of stories? In our modern-day western built-environment, museums have taken a most active role programmatically in the transmission of our culture and stories. My thesis will focus on this building type. During the last 30 years, museums have experienced a change from presenting real things to the creation of experiences. In essence, exhibitions have transitioned from object-oriented to story-centered. How can architecture better provide this recently modified museum experience? Furthermore, what can architecture do to push this focus even further so that people are better able to absorb these stories and experiences? Before attempting to answer these questions however, I must explain how my thesis question will be explored in actual terms. Consequently, I will investigate how the architecture of a museum can further activate, reinforce, and promote a set of stories important to our culture and country as a whole. My thesis project will be a museum that portrays the sequence of events and cultural history of Puerto Rico. With this in mind, I would like to explore an effective method to convey and inform people about who we are and where we come from. All the elements that had contributed to its creation give this culture the distinctive attributes to set it as the perfect model to use architecture as the tool that will disseminate our cultural history. Given the fact that it is very compelling for people to learn through visualization, the creation of a museum that reflects the Puerto Rican culture would be an outstanding tool to educate people. However, instead of designing a museum that merely houses artifacts, I want to create a museum that tells a story about about Puerto Rico's past and present.

The assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in 1961 marked the beginning of many rebirths for the Dominican Republic. Confronted with the growing pains of an emerging democratic national consciousness, the island was also faced with an unprecedented circumstance: a massive exodus that displaced thousands of Dominicans to the United States and Puerto Rico. My dissertation focuses on contemporary narrative representations of Dominican migrations to the United States and Puerto Rico. In chapter 1, "A Product of Exiles, Travels and Displacements: The Constructions of an Ethnic and Racial Consciousness in the United States in Pedro Henríquez Ureña's Memoir," I propose my own working definition of a Dominican transnational subjectivity at the beginning of the 20th century as I see it surfacing in Henríquez Ureña's memoir. In chapter two, "With Floating (Intranational) Borders: Displaced Dominicans in Puerto Rican Narratives," I explore the narrative representation of Dominican migrations to Puerto Rico and the challenges they bring about to the Puerto Rican national discourse constituted in the late 1930s. This chapter analyzes José Luis González's La luna no era de queso: memorias de infancia (1988), Ana Lydia Vega's "El día de los hechos" from her short story collection Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (1982) and Magali García Ramis's "Cuatro retratos urbanos" from the short story collection Las noches del riel de oro (1995). In chapter three, "Of Absent (nomadic) Fathers and Boys in Construction: Dominican Diasporic Subjectivities in Junot Díaz's Drown," I analyze the short story collection titled Drown (1993) by Junot Díaz. My reading of Diaz's work interprets his characters as gravitating towards communities in which they become active components of multi-racial and multi-ethnic communities fostered by global migrations. In the last chapter, "Crooked City Women: A Reading of Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Narratives of Late 20th and 21st Century Dominican Women writers," I focus on Loida Martiza Pérez's novel Geographies of Home (1999) and Josefina Báez's performance piece Dominicanish (2000) to illustrate how their work challenges patriarchal forms of expression that are rooted in the homeland and then disseminated in U.S. diasporic Dominican communities. / text

According to the Puerto Rico Health Department as of January 2008, 258 cases of HIV, ages 10 -19 had been reported and 224 cases of AIDS, ages 13-19 (Puerto Rico Health Department, 2008). The purpose of this research was to describe the basic social processes of medication adherence in Puerto Rican youth who are HIV positive. Three research questions were proposed: 1) What are the basic social processes of medication adherence in Puerto Rican youth who are HIV- positive?; 2) What factors influence medication adherence (or nonadherence) among HIV- positive adolescents?; 3) What behaviors indicate that the HIV- positive adolescents adhere or do not adhere to their prescribed medications? The Autonomy Development of Adolescence by Steinberg provided the theoretical framework for this study. Grounded theory was used to study 13 Puerto Rican HIV-positive adolescents. Data collection included semi-structured, in-depth interviews, field notes, participant observation, and a demographic questionnaire. A substantive theory Striving to Live a Normal Life, with the core category of normal emerged from data analysis. Striving to Live a Normal Life explains how these Puerto Rican HIV-positive adolescents try to integrate their HIV status and treatment with their lives. These adolescents concentrate their lives on striving to live a normal life. A variety of ways is used to deal with HIV and has helped them visualize themselves as a normal adolescent with a normal life. Because they see themselves having a normal life, taking or not taking their medications for HIV is also seen as a normal part of their lives. This study suggests the beginning of understanding the concept and process of normalization in this population. These findings support the findings in a study done with HIV-positive adolescents from France in which the concept of normality was related to their lives. It also informs interventions to promote improved medication adherence among Puerto Rican youth who are HIV -positive.

This dissertation uses qualitative research methods to describe the history of language use and maintenance on the islands of Aruba and Puerto Rico. More specifically, it examines how the islands' unique colonial circumstances have affected the maintenance of the local language. The multidisciplinary field of language planning and policy (LPP) has historically focused on documenting, categorizing and revitalizing languages that have undergone significant language shift. As a result, the majority of the discourse regarding threatened languages also implies that a threatened language will soon be endangered. The language contexts on the islands of Aruba and Puerto Rico do not conform to this often assumed linear progression. The use of document analysis, interviews with key players in LPP and observations on both islands provide the data for the position that there are unique contexts where language threat can be discussed, not in terms of language shift, but in terms of perceptions of threat. In addition to providing a detailed historical account of language situations on both islands, this dissertation frames the findings within a larger framework of redefining language threat. Special attention is paid to how social agents have influenced perceptions through the social amplification of risk framework. The work concludes with an argument for a framework that incorporates not only languages that have witnessed language shift, but also language contexts where languages are perceived to be threatened, with the understanding that such a distinction could potentially move the field of LPP toward a better understanding of language maintenance.