Tesis (Doctor en Filología)--Universidad de Valladolid, España, 2007. / Digitized and made available on the World Wide Web by Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, 2007.

abstract: Through ideologies of gender identity, gender as performance, sexuality, and the transgressions thereof, this document serves as a memoir inside of a memoir. I made a pop concert dance piece through a western dance aesthetic with my thesis paper detailing the experience. What did that look like? Throughout this paper, I will explain my thought process, expectations, and experience through writing, which is a more challenging task for me. I am not an academic writer, but rather a rebel with a cause. My cause is to transgress the system in any way I’m able - through words, dance, and expression. As opposed to the artistic dance piece itself, this paper’s purpose is one of both selfish intent and catharsis. Given this, I approached my thesis paper with the same mindset used when developing my piece, in that I rebel fighting against the heteronormative standards that have run my life. I don’t fill this document with regurgitated theory. Moreover, this document morphed into a cathartic platform for me, a purging of counter-hegemonic principals and ideals. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Dance 2017

A dominating theme in current comparative community research is the investigation of changes in the urban structure of developing nations. The central concern is to determine if changes occurring in cities of developing countries are similar in nature to those experienced by cities in presently developed nations, particularly the United States.

This research aims to understand self-translation as a postcolonial, social, political, cultural and linguistic phenomenon and it focuses on how it communicates a hybrid transcultural identity that not only challenges the monolingual literary canons and concepts of national homogeneous identities, but also subverts to patriarchal society. Thus, I understand self-translation as a mean of empowerment and contestation. The cases under study are Puerto Rican writers Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago, and their novels The House on the Lagoon and América’s Dream, written in English and translated into Spanish by the authors themselves. I believe that Rosario Ferré and Esmeralda Santiago are representative of a group of writers, artists and intellectuals who through their work originated from the island and from the U.S. Diaspora, have aimed to give voice to a Puerto Rican postcolonial hybrid identity that has been silenced until recently. Therefore, they disrupt the official national cultural and linguistic discourse about the Puerto Rican identity that has been weaved by the Spanish language in opposition to U.S. colonialist attempts of linguistic and cultural assimilation. This dissertation is located in the intersection between the fields of comparative literature, translation, cultural, gender and postcolonial studies. The question that guides this research is: Is self-translation in the case of Puerto Rico, a result of cultural hybridity in Puerto Rico’s postcolonial context?Therefore, this is a multidisciplinary research project that integrates elements from the humanities and the social sciences. Methodologically, it integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches. Hence, hybridity is embedded in this research not only because it discusses English and Spanish writing, but because it includes textual analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis. The main finding is the deep conection between socio-political context, language, culture, identity, power and translation that supports the idea that self-translation is a postcolonial act, which in the case of Puerto Rico is strongly related to hybridity as an everyday practice of identity affirmation.

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The present study explored the outcomes of delivering training to Spanish speakers in either their native dialect or in Standard Spanish in the context of a self-running, narrated PowerPoint presentation on a health topic, "The Importance of Vaccinations." The training outcomes that were examined included learning scores; attitudes toward the training; and attitudes toward employment with organizations that employed the same or different dialect-speaking employees, supervisors, and trainers. In addition to examining the effects of ethnicity upon outcomes, this study also examined the effect of age, education level, time in the U.S., and familiarity with the locally dominant subgroup's dialect. Overall, results showed mixed support for the effect of presenting training to participants in their native dialect, as compared to the non-native dialect. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the theoretical implications for acquiring a better understanding of the cognitive and affective factors underlying the role of training language in the learning process. Practical implications for training design are presented within the context of cognitive load theory and the need for a theory-based approach to delivering training to non-English speakers. Implications for organizational efforts toward employee attraction and retention are discussed.

The Orlando Metropolitan Statistical Area became the fastest growing Puerto Rican population since 1980.1 While the literature has grown regarding Orlando‘s Puerto Rican community, no works deeply analyze the push and pull factors that led to the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to Central Florida. In fact, it was the combination of deteriorating economies in both Puerto Rico and New York City (the two largest concentrations of Puerto Ricans in the United States) and the rise of employment opportunities and cheap cost of living in Central Florida that attract Puerto Ricans from the island the diaspora to the region. Furthermore, Puerto Ricans who migrated to the region established a support network that further facilitated future migration and created a Puerto Rican community in the region. This study uses the combination of primary sources including government document (e.g. U.S. Censuses, Orange County land deeds, etc.), local and nation newspapers, and oral histories from Puerto Ricans living in Central Florida since the early 1980s to explain the process in which Puerto Ricans formed their identity in Orlando since 1980. The result is a history of the Puerto Rican migration to Central Florida and the roots of Orlando‘s Puerto Rican community

This study explored the meaning of social support networks among a self-selected sample (N=31) of migrant Puerto Rican women. Following a combined quantitative and qualitative research design, four areas were investigated: 1. How did the women define their social support networks? 2. How and to what extent were relationships maintained with the support networks left behind in Puerto Rico, (PRSSN)? 3. How were new networks established in Boston, (BSSN)? 4. What impact separation from PRSSN had on stress? Related areas of inquiry were stressed and specific demographic factors were considered. These included, age range of 20 to 40 years; living in Boston for three years or less, and the presence of children. Data was collected, with a demographic instrument designed for this research, based on Hollingshead Four Factor In- dex of Social Status (1975). Instruments to gather data included: Pearson's Personal Support System Survey (P3S, 1979), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Spanish translation (1975), and an open-ended questionnaire developed by this researcher to elicit descriptive information about the participants relationship with their PRSSN and BSSN. The definition of social support network was conceptualized by the migrant Puerto Rican women as people that provide help and encouragement, characterized by reliable relationships based on trust, and reciprocity. Distinctions between emotional and functional support were less clear due to overlap between reported forms of support. The self-selected sample yielded unexpected data uncharacteristic of those reported in the literature. These women had a high level of education, 46.4% had college or graduate degree, and 39% had high school diploma or some years of college. These women were young, 55% were 20 to 29 years old and their family size was small, 65% had 2 or less children. Clinically this group appears to be self-confident, assertive, initiators of change for themselves and their families, and capable of admitting their needs and looking for help through appropriate sources of support. The pursuit of help in no way should be interpreted as a weakness or inability to cope. On the contrary, this group showed unexpected inner resources and self confidence. These findings inform the literature on women's development, corroborating research by Gilligan (1977, 1982) and Miller (1976) about women's connectedness, and its relationship to growth. Further, they provide cultural-specific meaning to the characteristics and functions of support networks. They may also describe an emerging population of Puerto Rican migrant women. Implications for Counseling Psychology indicate educational approaches for interveining on behalf of migrant Puerto Rican women, i.e. providing language proficiency and other information needed to effectively deal with the dominant culture. These data, also recommend working from a strength versus deficit perspective.

This dissertation examines how the work of four Puerto Rican poets – Julia de Burgos, Clemente Soto Vélez, Martín Espada, and Naomi Ayala – demonstrates a poetics of resistance. While resistance takes a variety of forms in their poetic discourse, this project asserts that these poets have and continue to play an integral role in the cultural decolonization of Puerto Rico, which has been generally unacknowledged in both the critical scholarship on their work and the narrative of Puerto Rico’s anti-colonial struggle. Chapter One discuses the theoretical concepts used in defining a poetics of resistance, including Barbara Harlow’s definition of resistance literature, Edward Said’s concepts of cultural decolonization, and Jahan Ramazani’s theory of transnational poetics. Chapter Two provides an overview of Puerto Rico’s unique political status and highlights several pivotal events in the nation’s history, such as El Grito de Lares, the Ponce Massacre, and the Vieques Protest to demonstrate the continuity of the Puerto Rican people’s resistance to oppression and attempted subversion of their colonial status. Chapter Three examines Julia de Burgos’ understudied poems of resistance and argues that she employs a rhetoric of resistance through the use of repetition, personification, and war imagery in order to raise the consciousness of her fellow Puerto Ricans and to provoke her audience into action. By analyzing Clemente Soto Vélez’s use of personification, anaphora, and most importantly, juxtaposition, Chapter Four demonstrates that his poetry functions as a dialectical process and contends that the innovative form he develops throughout his poetic career reinforces his radical perspective for an egalitarian society. Chapter Five illustrates how Martín Espada utilizes rich metaphor, sensory details, and musical imagery to foreground issues of social class, racism, and economic exploitation across geographic, national, and cultural borders. Chapter six traces Naomi Ayala’s feminist discourse of resistance that denounces social injustice while simultaneously expressing a female identity that seeks liberation through her understanding of history, her reverence for memory, and her relationship with the earth. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Burgos, Soto Vélez, Espada, and Ayala not only advocate for but also enact resistance and social justice through their art.

The high teen birth rate in Holyoke, Massachusetts is a complex problem. The teen birth rate is over five times the state‘s rate and nearly three times the national rate. Since a majority of these births are to Latinas of Puerto Rican descent it is important to include the perceptions of Puerto Rican teens in approaches to prevent teen pregnancy and reduce the birth rate. Although there is a plethora of research on the topic of teen pregnancy and births, there is scarcity in the area of perceptions held by teens of Puerto Rican descent about teen pregnancy and births, future consequences faced by teen parents, contributing and protective factors of teen pregnancy, and potential preventive interventions. This qualitative study used a series of eight focus groups to gather data and examine perceptions held by Puerto Rican teens living in Holyoke about teen pregnancy and birth. The Ecological Model of Health Behavior provided the theoretical framework. Findings indicate that Puerto Rican teens in Holyoke perceive that: teen pregnancy is largely unintentional and a problem with negative outcomes, a lack of information on sexual health and reproduction contributes to this problem, sexual and reproductive health education should be provided to all teens, social factors may either contribute to or prevent teen pregnancy teens, and they want their ideas heard. These findings suggest that teen pregnancy and birth is a complex public health problem in need of a comprehensive approach recognizing that interventions focused on individuals are not likely to have powerful or sustained effects. Rather a combination of interventions addressing individual, interpersonal, community and societal levels are needed for risk reduction and effective behavior change