The indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico, have long manifested resistance to oppression and discrimination. This study centers on the analysis of Chiapas: el fin del silencio (1998) by Alberto Turok, connecting the work of the photographer to the problems faced by indigenous people in the region, such as inequality and marginalization. Race, class, gender, and globalization, in addition to the emergence of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), are essential factors to the discourse of resistance. EZLN, an armed indigenous group in Chiapas, led by its famed leader, Subcomandante Marcos, clearly opposed the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In examining resistance, ritual, and performance, the photography of Turok serves as testimony of the struggles of indigenous people and the relevance it has for a diverse Mexican society.

Esta disertación analiza las maneras en que el sujeto (in)migratorio es representado en el cine español y argentino de los últimos años. El estudio investiga cómo el cine del (in)migrante ofrece convincentes narraciones (no)ficticias que son aportadas con temas de raza, género, lenguaje e identidad desde ambas perspectivas del sujeto migratorio y de aquellos ubicados dentro de las culturas "indígenas" de recepción. Al cuestionar la conceptualización de la nación-estado, este proyecto contribuye a una base teórica fundada en una ruptura de las nociones hegemónicas que han construido opiniones de diferencia y aceptación de una persona sobre otro. En términos de lenguaje, este estudio es relevante por su análisis del discurso y epítetos raciales que existen y persisten debido a parámetros y limitaciones en el lenguaje Castellano y su léxica inherente. Equipado con esto es la propuesta de que si nuestra lengua tiene un registro inadecuado para interactuar con el supuesto otro, entonces solo se puede concluir que nosotros también estamos limitados en nuestro entendimiento de otros sujetos globales. De allí, una mejora del lenguaje resultaría en una mejora de sensibilidades culturales y globales. Además, la representación del género y la raza son puntos importantes para una interpretación semiótica de estos textos y se observa las maneras en que los temas socio-lingüísticos son triangulados entre las películas, los países y las sociedades de tales producciones culturales. Por ejemplo, las mujeres están sujetas a puestos restringidos e inferiores del sector de servicio, como prostitutas y mucamas, mientras los hombres están atados a cuestionables formas de trabajo en la agricultura y servicios sociales de baja categoría. Al final de todo, un mayor empuje detrás de este género fílmico subversivo es romper con las erróneas, anticuadas y precipitadas nociones de identidades nacionales para incitar deseables sensibilidades culturales a través de la lente artística del cine.

El presente estudio examina cuatro ensayistas periodistas latinoamericanas, Patricia Verdugo de Chile, Viviana Gorbato de la Argentina, Alma Guillermoprieto de México y Zoé Valdés de Cuba, para entender cómo cada autora transcribe sus investigaciones en el campo en forma narrativa. A través de un examen del uso del procedimiento de la entrevista, analizamos cómo todas estas periodistas de investigación utilizan el testimonio de sus personajes para crear historias que intentan, por un lado, reportar sobre temas culturales de manera objetiva, y por otra parte, captar las emociones de los que viven y que son testigos a los eventos de sus ensayos. Implementamos, por consiguiente, las estrategias discursivas del nuevo periodismo, las cuales proporcionan una manera de diseccionar la estructura de los textos. Al entender la forma de los ensayos en vinculación con probar la importancia del testimonio respecto al elemento emocional, se provoca una búsqueda de lo que significa cada obra. Debido al gran empleo del testimonio, se encuentra con una pluralidad de voces que en su conjunto tienen un mayor propósito: representar una comunidad con una causa pertinente. En el proceso de presentar su causa, se evidencia una posible conexión entre los textos y el género híbrido de la novela testimonial. Finalmente, al considerar el peligro de ser periodista en América Latina, hacemos hincapié en la importancia de esta labor literaria y la gran cantidad de mujeres de esta región mundial que corren tanto riesgo para facilitar a sus lectores esta diversidad de temas culturales.

This dissertation examines U. S. American intergenerational witnesses to the Holocaust, particularly how addressees turned addressors maintain an ethical obligation to First Generation witnesses while creating an affective relation to this history for new generations. In response to revisionism and the incommunicability of the Holocaust, a focus on (accurate) First Generation testimony emerged that marginalizes that of intergenerational witnesses. The risk of such a position is that it paralyzes language, locking the addressee into a movement always into the past. Using examples of intergenerational witnesses (moving from close to more distant relationships), this project argues that there is a possibility for ethical intergenerational response. There are two major discussion arcs that the work follows: self-reflexivity and the use of the Banality of Evil as a theme. Self-reflexivity in intergenerational witnessing calls attention to the role of the author as transgenerational witness, an act that does not seek to appropriate the importance or position of the Holocaust survivor because it calls attention to a subjective site in relation to the survivor and the communities of memory created within the text. The other major discussion arc moves from traditional depictions of the Banality of Evil to ones that challenge the audience to consider the way evil is conceptualized after the Holocaust and its implications in contemporary life. In these ways, intergenerational witnesses move from addressee to addressors, continuing to stress the importance of this history through the imperative to pass Holocaust testimony onward into the future.

Drawing from Foucault's notion of heterotopias, my dissertation identifies and examines three distinct but related events that resignified (re-imagined) Chile during 2010, the year of its Bicentenary, namely: the Rescue of the 33 Miners trapped in the San José mine, the Chilean Military Parade performed in celebration of Chilean Independence, and the Mapuche Hunger Strike of 32 indigenous people accused of terrorism by the Chilean State. My central hypothesis states that these three events constitute heterotopias with strong performative components that, by enacting a utopian and a dystopian nation, denounce the flaws of Chilean society. I understand heterotopias as those recursive systems that invert, perfect or contest the society they mirror. In other words: heterotopias are discursive constructions and material manifestations of social relations that dispute, support, or distort cultural assumptions, structures, and practices currently operating in the representational spaces of a given society. In addition to following the six heterotopological principles formulated by Foucault, these case studies have performance as the central constituent that defines their specificity and brings the heterotopias into existence. Due to the performative nature of these heterotopias, I have come to call them performance heterotopias, that is, sets of behaviors that enact utopias in the historical world, the place in which we live, the site in which "the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs," as Foucault puts it. Here, performance would act as the interface, the point of interaction, and suture between the conceived, the perceived and the representational spaces each heterotopia articulates. Thus, a performance heterotopia would be a particular type of heterotopia which is enacted through performance. A relevant aspect that emerged from my research is that heterotopic places not only mirror, contest, and compensate their own host society, but also refer to, and intersect with other contemporaneous heterotopias enacted in that society. In my conclusion I suggest that such interactions also happen between heterotopias that emerge in different countries and cultures. If so, the mapping of utopias enacted in the macro socio geographies of Latin American countries could offer new perspectives to understand the sociopolitical processes that are underway in the region.

The nature of the link between a literary text and its film adaptation has been a point of contention within academic thought since the inception of cinema due to the fact that film adaptation forms part of film history since the early 20th century. For most of the past century, the main concern of critics has been the level of fidelity that adaptations exhibit in terms of their relationship with the text, which was viewed as "the original" that directors needed to use as a model. In the last 25 years, however, the discourse of fidelity has been challenged by a number of intellectuals as a result of poststructuralist thought, which rejects the notion of an "original" text and proclaims the existence of infinite meanings within each text that are constructed by the reader, not the writer. The present investigation will take into account this type of epistemology as its starting point in order to review and defy a number of theoretical approximations from the last several decades that deal with the relationship between literature and cinema towards its main goal of overcoming the limitations of fidelity discourse. This will be carried out through an in-depth analysis of Latin American texts that have been adapted to film. Thematically both the literary texts and the films contain elements that portray the reality of marginalized groups that build their existence in opposition to the model of patriarchal heteronormativity. In current epistemological thought such a modus vivendi falls within the realm of queer theory. Another common thread that unites all the cultural productions is the presence of violence that showcases the high level of intolerance towards any subject who somehow seems to be different, hence threatening the dominant configuration of patriarchy. Furthermore, the different texts and films expose a general fragmentation within Latin American society, a result of the constant struggles among its diverse social groups, between the ones who occupy the position of socioeconomic power and those who are left outside of it; such a fragmentation also stems from the multiple clashes that occur within the marginalized groups themselves.