Oral narrative has been crucial to the process of individual and collective questioning of the historical dynamics of the Mexican Revolution in the formative context of the contemporary Nation. Through the analysis of the retrospective testimonies of the revolutionary veterans and the musical genres of the ' corrido' and the 'bola suriana', this study examines the rhetorical techniques involved in the narration of the events and political actors central to the Zapatista movement both during and after the conflictive era. These oral traditions create a discursive space wherein heroes and antagonists are constructed and judged according to the esthetic and ethical values of the interlocutor in direct relation with their audience. Here, the diffusion of a simplified image of revolutionary chaos polarizes the past in clear and refined tones, reducing the ambivalence of the historical portrait, opting for a stylized representation that is flexible to the goals and cultural palette of the interlocutor and their community The first chapter examines the Porfirian era and the initial eruption of zapatista popular support in the political context of the social inequalities that were institutionalized through the collusion between the federal government and the oligarchy of planters in Morelos and the surrounding regions. These narratives are dominated by memories of abuse, repression, and forced military service combined with the planters' control over land and the social life of the neighboring communities preceding the Revolution. The second chapter analyzes the figure of Emiliano Zapata as a political and military personality, looking at the constructive elements of his legitimacy and popular image: his moral character, his campesino identity, and his self-placement within a masculine rural social context. The third chapter examines the decline of the zapatista movement and the distinct interpretations of the death or possible survival of Zapata. Here, the oral narrative raises a discourse that, through the wide diffusion of alternative versions, questions the veracity of Zapata's assassination. Through an examination of the psychological functions of the varying accounts within the post-revolutionary national formative context, the transformation of Zapata into a popular icon and national hero can be further understood / acase@tulane.edu

Unlike the works of El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega from the Viceroyalty of Peru, writings by first-generation mestizos from New Spain have received little critical attention. The analysis of such works, however, can be invaluable: it can provide us with information as to how members of that emerging group felt about their position in colonial society, how they defined themselves with regard to European and aboriginal cultures, and what might explain their own interpretation of past historical events This study contributes some insight into the writings of Diego Munoz Camargo, a mestizo from Central Mexico. It focuses on a document until recently referred to as the Historia de Tlaxcala. The discovery in 1980 of an earlier version sheds some light on the text. It reveals that it began as a 'relacion geografica', a geographic report requested by the Spanish authorities in Seville Chapter One contextualizes the Camarguian text; explains to what extent it departs from the official request; and offers a comparative analysis of the two versions As the title Historia de Tlaxcala given to the first complete edition of the later version suggests, the Camarguian text was more than just a geographic report: it included a fairly detailed account of the Spanish Conquest of Mesoamerica told from the perspective of the Tlaxcalan authorities. The special relationship these had had with Hernan Cortes makes this narrative particularly worthy of studying The Second Chapter confronts that account with other Mesoamerican and European sources covering the events. An appraisal of what has been emphasized and, equally important, of what has been altered or silenced is made The Camarguian text qualifies as a mestizo piece of writing in that it borrows discursive modes and narrative techniques from both European and Nahuatl traditions. While Chapter Three assesses the author's recourse to a variety of European discourses commonly used in and prior to the sixteenth century, Chapter Four attempts to identify the Nahuatl discursive modes Munoz Camargo incorporated in his Relacion geografica / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Joseph E Hiller

The New Argentine Film Movement, a loose conglomeration of filmmakers that have altered conceptions of what it means to make national and political cinema in Argentina since the 1990's, has often located itself on the margins in terms of both geography and ideology. It is telling that in the four films analyzed in this study---La Cienaga and La Nina Santa by Lucrecia Martel, and Bolivia and Un Oso Rojo by Adrian Caetano---the downtown Buenos Aires is never shown. While the plaza de mayo and the casa rosada are the political and social centerpieces of Argentina, and the obelisco the prominent symbol of modern progress and nationalism, the structural analyses of these films reveals the formation of new national ideologies surging from the fringes of both the capital and the country. I argue that Martel and Caetano present this 'new' Argentina, imbued not with an uncontested 'European' heritage and stable middle class, but instead with multiple identities and intimately connected to the chaotic overhaul of the 2001 economic crisis which left many searching for new meanings, new jobs, and new residences. Specifically, I consider Bolivian influences in the films---in many ways 'Bolivians,' as discussed by scholars such as Alejandro Grimson and Cristina Garcia Vazquez, has come to designate the 'Other' in Argentine society. I find that both Martel and Caetano consistently investigate the 'Other' in their films, and while 'Bolivia' and 'Bolivians' are specifically referenced and prominent in their first feature-length works, their second films (completed after the crisis) generally take slightly different approaches / acase@tulane.edu

This work is a study of the relationship between literature and social criticism in nineteenth century Latin America. More specifically, it is an analysis of the critique of power as it was conveyed by authors from Mexico, Brazil and Argentina through literary genres such as the drama, the short story, the chronicle, and the political satire. It argues that through an aesthetic correlation between certain literary forms (mainly, the tragedy and the animal fable) and morality, these authors exercised a critique of the hegemonic discourse on social and racial domination in their societies. Using the figures of the slave and of the animal, these literary texts were not only criticizing governments and social practices, but also deconstructing the old aristocratic ethics in which the Enlightenment had founded the very legitimation of the modern state. Taking the figures of the slave and the animal as structural and analytical axes, this dissertation is devoted to the reading of six works. In the first section ("Slaves") it deals with three dramas that, invoking the relationship between tragedy and ethics, are proposed as political interventions that deconstruct the figure of the master and its moral contradictions in three postcolonial national scenarios. Despite the fact that its authors belonged to the political elites of their countries, these plays, Mae (1860), by Jose de Alencar, Atar-Gull (1855), by Lucio V. Mansilla, and La venganza de la gleba (1906), by Federico Gamboa, are a unique access to the tensions and disarticulations within the national dominant ideologies of the times, and end up showing how the figure of the slave was already necessary in Eurocentric discourse on legitimate power and, ultimately, on the definition of the human. In the second section ("Fabulous Animals"), this dissertation analyses El gallo pitagorico (1842), by Juan Bautista Morales; Cuentos (1880), by Eduarda Mansilla, and chronicles and stories by Machado de Assis (c.1891--1906). It argues that the talking animal in these texts (contrary to the norms of European fable) becomes a powerful vehicle for a moral critique that faces the discourse on humanism with its own failures and contradictions.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2003. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 273-291). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

<p> "Find Yourself Here" argues that since transmigrants often form profound connections to place, we can develop a nuanced account of transmigrant subjectivity through innovative fiction by migrants who describe their own neighborhoods. The authors studied use their own hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration, deploying various formal techniques to mirror the fictional location to the real one, thus literarily enacting the neighborhood. I construct a neighborhood geography from each work, by traveling on foot, interviewing the neighbors and local historians, mapping the text&rsquo;s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references, and teasing out connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy, to demonstrate how excavating the locale illuminates the text. My methodology is interdisciplinary: it incorporates recent sociological studies of transnationalism by Linda Basch, Patricia Pessar, and Jorge Duany, tenets of Human Geography, and the work of Latino literary theorists including Ra&uacute;l Homero Villa and Mary Pat Bray on space in narrative. My literary neighborhood geographies&mdash;of Salvador Plascencia&rsquo;s El Monte barrio, Junot D&iacute;az&rsquo;s New Jersey housing development, Sandra Cisneros&rsquo; Westside Chicago, and Helena Mar&iacute;a Viramontes&rsquo; East Los Angeles&mdash;sharpen Latino literary criticism&rsquo;s long-standing focus on urban and regional spaces in narrative by zooming in on neighborhood streets, while building on contemporary theories of transnationalism to analyze the broader cultural implications of local migrancy. By grounding the effects of transmigrancy in concrete locations, &ldquo;Find Yourself Here&rdquo; presents a comprehensive vision of the US Latino immigrant experience without generalizing from its myriad versions and numerous sites.</p>

<p> The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from <i> within</i> the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation.</p><p> The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo&rsquo;s <i> Farabeuf</i> (1965), locating in the novel&rsquo;s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese <i>Leng Tch&rsquo;&eacute;</i> execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik&rsquo;s <i>La condesa sangrienta</i> (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cambio de armas&rdquo; (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik&rsquo;s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory&rsquo;s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela&rsquo;s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime&rsquo;s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit&rsquo;s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel <i> Lump&eacute;rica</i> (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures&mdash;official and unofficial&mdash;are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bola&ntilde;o&rsquo;s <i>2666</i> through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.</p>

This dissertation is a cultural-historical reading of the text entitled Las Mercedes y La Escala Mistica written by Isabel Flores de Oliva, later canonized as Santa Rosa de Lima. The purpose of the present study is to analyze her iconolexic discourse as a unique type of mystic text within the realm of colonial Latin American feminine Literature. The first chapter describes, simultaneously, the discursive masculine tradition in the New World immediately following the Conquest, and the lack of discursive and written testimonies of women of the same era. Furthermore, we approach Santa Rosa's work with the help of Walter Mignolo's theory about colonial semiosis and its applicability to pictorical, oral and other cultural discourses. The second chapter centers its study on the socio-historical elements that surrounded Rosa at the time of her life and all those ideological and cultural variables that shaped her, allowing her to become the most venerated and beloved saint in the Americas. The third chapter focuses on the critical and analytical study of Santa Rosa's Mercedes and Escala Mistica. It shows the kind of strategies and conventions that the Saint employed in her texts. The dissertation concludes by desmitifying erroneous ideas about the saint, and demonstrating the fact that Santa Rosa was indeed the first mystic writer of colonial Peru and why she should be studied as such.

In the United States in the mid-1960's, Chicano cultural nationalists mobilized a generation by recuperating the history and mythology of the pre-conquest Aztecs as strategies of political resistance. Claiming themselves la Raza de Bronce the Bronze race) in their art, literature, and political discourse, Chicano activists and intellectuals distinguished themselves racially from white America and worked toward reunifying an indigenous culture that had been fragmented by colonization and diaspora. This discursive practice of reinscribing Mexican Indian ancestry is a political act that I refer to as narrating the Aztec Nation. Indigenous movement activists across the Americas have often reclaimed their pre-colonial histories. "Aztec Nation" examines the impact of Chicano cultural nationalist revisions of Mexican indigenismo (politics and aesthetics of the post-1910 indigenous movement) upon race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Chicano and Chicana literature and political discourse. In my analysis of Chicano and Chicana political manifestos, graphic art, poetry, essays, and novels, I trace various Chicano cultural nationalist expressions of indigenista ideology throughout el movimiento (the Chicano movement). In particular, I develop critical approaches for rereading Chicana literature and activist journalism published in Chicano/a movement newspapers and journals between 1969 and 1979 that emphasize Chicana faminist reinventions of indigenismo as a transnational alternative to ideological limitations within the Chicano cultural nationalist and second wave white American feminist movements. I offer a new critical term: "Chicana indigenista feminism," which recognizes a distinct Chicana feminist discourse that is characterized by an ongoing negotiation of mestiza (mixed blood) identity. My investigation begins with analyses of Chicano cultural nationalist literature and political documents from 1964 and ends with a reevaluation of chicana indigenista feminist theories posited as recently as 1994.