"El vértigo horizontal: La novela urbana de la ciudad de México" ("Horizontal Vertigo: The Urban Novel of Mexico City") offers a reassessment of the urban novel of Mexico City of the last twenty years, with specific focus on two novels: Materia dispuesta, by Juan Villoro, and Los detectives salvajes, by Roberto Bolaño. Guided by the ground-breaking work of geographer David Harvey, and that of Ana María Alonso and Néstor García Canclini, I argue that these novelists shed light upon the processes that have led to the transformation of past and contemporary urban space in Mexico City, and point to what Harvey terms the "urbanization of consciousness" as a marker of late capitalism. This interdisciplinary approach helps illuminate the processes that are present in the contemporary capitalist city. Of capital importance is the incorporation of an analogical reading of the novels by Bolaño and Villoro, whereby I examine the nexus between physical urban space and its artistic representation by tracing the cartographic imaginary of the characters and narrators. Both Materia dispuesta and Los detectives salvajes constitute representative examples of the contested urban space of the nationalist project of post-revolutionary Mexico, and of the spatial practices of individuals as signifiers of social class.

"Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay," is an academic study of narrative and documentary film from Paraguay. Cinematic production in Paraguay has "boomed" only with the last decade in part due to the censorship of the long-standing Stroessner regime and in part because new digital technologies have made audiovisual production more accessible. This study explores the dominance of a particular essentialized national identity in narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. This iconic protagonist and space (the campesino in the rural setting) is not the site of true Paraguayan authenticity, but rather, the product of competing national and transnational forces. Inside Paraguay, rural icons become the grounds from which to express political resistance and frustration with the status quo. Outside of Paraguay--particularly in the European power center of film festivals, funding and awards--a homogeneous and uncontested set of representations of national identity becomes the paradigm that satisfies the "first world" need to essentialize and orientalize the "third world." In the introduction I make my methodology clear, stressing that I am focusing my critical apparatus on circulating discourses regarding what it means to be a citizen of that Paraguay. I also grapple with the difficulty of dealing with a film archive that is classified as national while trying to dislodge the national frame as the paradigm for analysis and provide a problematization of the relationship between film and nation that has been so widely and uncritically accepted. In Chapter 1 I provide a historical contextualization for the relationship between film and the nation and provide important details in regards to the history of the moving image in Paraguay. In Chapter 2 I explore Hamaca Paraguaya's (2006) potential for resistance through formal subversion, historical revisionism, self-reflexivity and political denunciation. Using a double-register, in Chapter 3 I describe the transnational power structure as a palimpsest against which Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a cultural product. In Chapter 4 I analyze Frankfurt (2006) as a documentary that creates parallels between Paraguay's historical border wars and present-day global neoliberal capitalism.

The present investigation is a mixed method study combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore the use of "como" as a discourse marker in the Spanish spoken in Southern Arizona, based on a corpus of twenty-four sociolinguistic interviews of young male and female Spanish-English bilinguals. In a data set of 1148 occurrences of "como," 21.3% fulfill a focus discourse function, 2.2% fulfill a quotative discourse function, and 76.5% fulfill a lexical function. The analysis of young Spanish-English bilinguals using "como" in Spanish to fulfill discourse functions of "like" in English sheds light on how bilinguals structure discourse by drawing from both languages. The results of this study on the diffusion of the focus and quotative "como" to another Spanish-English bilingual community add to our knowledge of how discourse markers can travel both within and between communities and across languages.

La presente tesina examina los efectos que tienen la edad de adquisición de una segunda lengua y su frecuencia de uso sobre las capacidades productivas y perceptivas en la L2. Para ello, tres grupos (bilingües tardíos, bilingües tempranos y monolingües) participaron en experimentos de producción, percepción (identificación y discriminación) y acceso léxico. A diferencia de las investigaciones previas acerca de la producción y pro- cesamiento en una L2, los bilingües tempranos del presente estudio son dominantes en su L2, el inglés. Concretamente, se demuestra que los bilingües tempranos difieren del grupo monolingüe en su producción y percepción de los contrastes vocálicos /i/ - /E/, /a/ - /æ/ y /i/ - /I/ del inglés. Asimismo, se afirma que los bilingües tempranos difieren del grupo monolingüe en su procesamiento léxico. Los resultados sugieren que, incluso para bilingües dominantes en su L2, estar expuesto a una edad temprana no garantiza la obtención de capacidades de producción, percepción ni acceso léxico a nivel de nativo.

Este estudio consiste en dos análisis: el primero es un análisis diacrónico que traza el avance de la cópula estar invadiendo al ámbito de ser en el español del siglo XIII al siglo XX basado en el Corpus del Español de Davis (2000-) y que discute el mecanismo diacrónico que promueve el avance, la gramaticalización; el segundo es un análisis sincrónico variacionista que compara la extensión de estar en contextos donde normativamente se espera ser en las variedades de español habladas en Hermosillo, Sonora, y en el Sur de Arizona. A través del análisis de 1,300 ocurrencias en 40 entrevistas, este estudio determina los factores sociales y lingüísticos que condicionan la realización de esta variable entre grupos bilingües y monolingües. Estudios variacionistas anteriores detectaron un uso de la variable en contextos monolingües (Gutiérrez 1992; Cortés-Torres 2004; Alfaraz 2012) y bilingües (Silva- Corvalán 1994; Ortiz-López 2000; Gutiérrez 2003; Lowther y Lindsey 2005; Salazar 2007), con una aceleración en su uso en algunas comunidades bilingües. Los factores significativos de los estudios anteriores incluyen: tipo de adjetivo (Gutiérrez 1992; Silva- Corvalán 1994; Cortés-Torres 2004; Alfaraz 2012), educación (Gutiérrez 1992; Cortés- Torres 2004), edad (Gutiérrez 1992; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Alfaraz 2012) y género (Gutiérrez 1992; Silva-Corvalán 1994). Los resultados del análisis diacrónico indican que desde el cambio del latín al español medieval, estar empezó a tomar el lugar de ser. A través de una discusión de las definiciones de la gramaticalización y los rasgos de procesos de este tipo, concluimos que la extensión de estar se caracteriza como un proceso de gramaticalización. Los resultados del análisis sincrónico muestran un uso innovador de estar de 16.2% en Hermosillo y 20.8% en el Sur de Arizona, porcentajes comparables a los estudios anteriores. La procedencia del hablante (Hermosillo/Sur de Arizona) no es estadísticamente significativa y la distribución de los factores es bastante parecida en las dos comunidades. Esto surgiere que el bilingüismo (español/inglés) no resulta en una aceleración del uso innovador en este corpus, lo cual concuerda con Ortiz-López (2000) y Lowther y Lindsey (2005) y difiere de Silva-Corvalán (1994) y Salazar (2007). Los factores de tipo de adjetivo (edad, tamaño), grado de menos atención y nivel académico más bajo favorecen el estar innovador. Los resultados de este estudio concuerdan con estudios anteriores en cuanto a los factores que favorecen el uso innovador, los tipos de adjetivo (Gutiérrez 1992; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Cortés-Torres 2004) y nivel académico (Gutiérrez 1992; Cortés-Torres 2004). Este estudio contribuye al conocimiento de la variable en general y provee evidencia que no hay una tendencia general de una aceleración del uso innovador como resultado del bilingüismo (español/inglés).

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In early modern England (after 1707, Britain), there was an argument that war at sea, especially war in Spanish America, was an ideal means of warfare for England. This argument, whose origin can be traced back to the glorious memory of Elizabethan maritime war, revived at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. This thesis examines this pro-maritime war argument, by focusing on its connection with its supposed economic advantages, and investigates its impact on British politics and naval policy during the war, and changes after the war. It reveals that this argument received support from politicians of different political stances because of its alleged economic advantages; colonial maritime war was expected to damage enemy financial resources while enriching Britain, and help to recover the Spanish American market where French merchants were making a rapid advance. At the same time, it makes clear that different political affiliations of the supporters created two types of pro-maritime arguments with different political functions. The thesis also shows that the supporters of colonial maritime war in the government as well as in the opposition tried to implement pro-maritime war policy by naval operations such as capture of Spanish silver fleets and colonial expeditions, and by legislation such as the American Act of 1708. However, their attempts were frustrated by diplomatic considerations, incapacity of naval administration, and by conflicting interests between several groups concerned in the West Indian colonies and Spanish American trade. After the South Sea expedition planned by the South Sea Company in 1712 did not materialise due to similar difficulties, the government focused on protection of the Spanish American trade, and refrained from taking aggressive action against Spanish colonies partly because of considerations for the interests of the company which started the Asiento trade. On the other hand, by the late 1720s the opposition, which championed the interests of private merchants, gradually came to advocate pro-maritime war policy, which eventually led up to propaganda campaigns against the Walpole ministry in the period of the War of Jenkins’s Ear.