Scholars have advocated for critical approaches to language education (e.g., Del Valle, 2014; Leeman & Serafini, 2016), including those that promote the development of Critical Language Awareness, CLA (e.g., Alim, 2010; Leeman, 2018). The goal is to develop students’ critical knowledge of the cultural, political, and social dimensions of language. To this end, Del Valle (2014) suggests the inclusion of language-related content units taught in the first or shared language from the early stages of language learning. This proposal entails revising strong beliefs such as the use of the non-target language in the new language classroom. The purpose of our research is to investigate whether including language-related content in English (the shared language) in an elementary Spanish language course helped students develop CLA without hindering class performance. Additionally, we explored if providing this content increased learners’ investment in the language. Results revealed that incorporating the CLA units did not influence overall class performance. Qualitative analyses indicated that students connected the content with their own social experience, which led to greater investment in the language. Finally, the content contributed to developing students’ critical awareness of linguistic ideologies and their impact on the construction of inequality as well as in enabling social change.

This dissertation draws on colonial texts in order to expand the critical corpus of Azul, beyond its conventional binary readings, either exclusively aesthetic or primarily Marxist, to render a vision of Rubén Darío that includes an account of Latin America as a space of criticism and transgression that challenges fixed notions of national identity, historical contexts, and authenticity in art. Expanding on definitions of fraud, this project develops the concept of fraude as a theoretical framework to show how Darío aesthetically constructs a writing which is deceptively apolitical. By fraude, I illustrate the form in which Darío appropriates and inhabits European identities and their spaces in order to invert the colonial violence historically inflicted in Latin America. Far from l&rsquoart pour l&rsquoart figure that is still so prevalent in the criticism ofAzul, the fraude, once decoded, reveals Darío as a poet whose writing opposes the empires of Spain, England, and the United States.

By reexamining the colonial discourse-- in relation to sculpture, cannibalism and precious stones--, my research exposes the colonial texts, designed to appropriate and exploit the &ldquoother,&rdquo as an act of fraud in and of itself. Thus, Darío&rsquos writing, in reversing the colonial fraud, acquires a "hidden" political significance. To engage the colonial discourse within a modern nineteenth-century perspective also establishes new ground for reinterpreting the politics behind the works of Modernismo authors, such as José Martí and José Enrique Rodó with whom this dissertation is in conversation. From this viewpoint, the literary texts are to be understood as socially symbolic acts that aesthetically question and undermine dominant narratives. Even in the twenty-first century, when the global markets more than ever mediate and displace historical occurrences through the use of technology in visual mass media, blurring the boundaries between falseness and authenticity, an evaluation of fraude as a strategy for analyzing and questioning our social "reality" is necessary. This project places Modernismo in conversation with Transnational American and Postcolonial Studies by investigating how people, through shared colonial histories (still relevant in our present time), aesthetically negotiate their legacy.

My dissertation, “Spiritual Subjecthood and Institutional Legibility in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America,” argues that early modern subjects of the Spanish Empire respond intentionally and strategically to institutional interpellation, representing their subjection in ways that advance their own spiritual and political agendas. The project traces subjects’ efforts to shape, limit, and exploit their legibility to spiritual and political institutions through texts by Teresa of Ávila, Ignatius of Loyola, Martín de Azpilcueta, fray Luís de Granada, and the Third Provincial Council of Lima.

The concept of institutional legibility originates with James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (Yale UP, 1998). Scott argues that institutions in early modern Europe develop “state simplifications”—shorthands by which they assimilate local variations in language, practice, or record-keeping to a state-wide standard—in order to distill from their subject populations the information they need for operations like taxation and political control. State simplifications make local activities “legible” to institutions by producing homogeneous data that reflects their interests. I invert Scott’s definition of legibility, focusing on local subject formation rather than institutional data collection. Following Althusser, I contend that the attempt to render oneself legible is a response to interpellation; it entails self-subjection to the relevant institution. However, I argue with Butler that self-subjection occurs not once, but continually; it is a constant and evolving performance, a creative act as well as a compelled response to authority.

The first chapter, “Limited Legibility in Teresa de Jesús’ Las Moradas del castillo interior,” shows how Teresa promotes the suspect practice of mental prayer by establishing a shorthand for assessing the orthodoxy of practicing mystics while also obscuring the content of her own mystical encounters. She provides confessors with ready-made state simplifications to determine the provenance of a mystic’s visions, but then sidesteps the obligation to describe the content of her own visions by allegorizing her relationship to God as a spiritual marriage, recasting their encounters as moments of spousal intimacy that good Christian wives should never discuss.

The second chapter, “Making mystic texts: Jesuit subject formation in the Spiritual Exercises,” argues that, through the Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola teaches Jesuits not only how to make their own mystical experiences, but also how to translate those experiences into mystic “texts”—verbal accounts of their immediate encounters with divinity—expressed in a standard, Society-wide language. The mutual legibility of Jesuit superiors and subordinates through the creation of mystic texts fosters the organizational cohesion and hierarchical stability that each individual Jesuit’s power to make mystical experience puts at risk.

The third chapter, “Sacramental confession and institutional strategy in sixteenth-century Spain and Peru,” suggests that confession works to maintain imperial hegemony by teaching penitents to police their behavior for sins that undermine the Crown’s projects of cultural homogenization and political compliance. Confessional manuals by Martín de Azpilcueta, fray Luís de Granada, and the Third Lima Council show how the sacrament controls the penitent’s conscience through the inspiration of guilt, the obligation to self-examination, and the expansion of the categories of sin to encompass social, political, and economic activities that contravene imperial interests.

Constructing legibility as a process of subject formation illuminates the agency of institutional subjects. Though compulsory, legibility affords the early modern subject some room to negotiate with the institution, and can create opportunities for her to advance her individual agenda.

In this dissertation, “Senses of the Salón: Performance and Literary Aesthetics in Mexico City’s Spaces of Spectacle” I argue that in Mexico’s capital city, the space of the cabaret— the semi-public zone of the masses founded on women’s labor—and the tertulia—the elite, predominantly male and exclusive literary salon—may seem diametrically opposed, but are actually interconnected. Conceptualizing Mexico City’s performance and literary scenes as mutually informing each other broadens the categories of the “productive citizen” and the “avant-garde” to include women, racialized minorities, and alternative artistic praxis. Foregrounding the bodily, sensorial dimension of the labor of Mexico City performers and “high” aesthetes is a point of entry to what Francine Masiello calls “a larger discussion of the effects of state practices of its people and, alternatively, [of] the ways in which the population resists or transforms social life [...T]he senses are the way through which a culture finds its location” (3). By charting constellations of Mexico City dance hall imaginaries and their accompanying intellectual history from the early 1920s to the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), we see how alternative, counterdiscursive, and/or bottom-up forms of social organization borne out of the Mexican Revolution clash with the virility and parochially statist nature of the country’s literary forms, artistic representatives, and political icons. The institutional fabric of Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s is still in post-war flux, rendering the capital city a fertile sensorium for experimental, democratic art and performance; but into the 1940s and 1950s, Mexico City’s socio-political sphere begins to flatten with the didactic, domineering influence of the (trans)national “Golden Age” cinema industry, and more locally in Mexico City, the moralizing censorship demanded by its infamous regente de hierro, Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, over three sexenios. The 1960s to the 1980s, with increased flows of foreign capital investment and Hollywood culture from the north, not to mention the apex moment of consolidation of the Mexican one-party autocracy of the PRI, showcases a turbulent mixture of violent political oppression and innovative responses of creative resistance and discursive memory. The more tolerant salones of the cabaret and the tertulia—facilitating symbiotic, though other times parasitic, relationships between popular workers and intellectuals throughout the decades—are the sensorial and inter-class glue, providing a window into the contact between art, economic policy, gender, and space. Put most explicitly, a focus on the two salones emphasizes the ways in which women, minorities, and occasionally foreigners are also intellectual authors fueling 20th century Mexico City’s at once cosmopolitan progressivism, at once highly idiosyncratic and nationalistic arts and culture scene.Chapter I begins in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, tracing a primarily female migration from rural to urban areas. With this labor upswing, Mexico City experienced a surge in the number of dance halls, cantinas, and sui generis hybrids of the two spaces. Though theatrical revue in Mexico has an impressive history that was established well before the beginning of the 20th century, the cabaret was a distinct space and came with new attitudes, new “structures of feeling” that attracted, and generated creative responses by Mexico’s artists and authors. Chapter I illustrates how the feedback loop between cabaret culture and literary expression was reflected in the motifs of established genres of differing political bents in the 1920s and 30s, such as the newspaper (El Nacional, El Demócrata, etc.), the literary journal (El Molino Verde, El Universal Ilustrado), and the poetry chapbook. I argue that the cabaret was equally instrumentalized by members of feuding literary groups in the capital, such as the estridentistas and the contemporáneos. Chapter II opens with bolero composer Agustín Lara and fictional narrative Rosa de cabaret by writer Vereo Guzmán to explore how the Mexican public was exposed to cabaret imaginaries on race and class through popular culture, in the form of radio broadcasts and the novel, that circulated in private domains and contributed to the “public intimacy” desired by middle-class women. The chapter then centers on two incomplete films by members of the international avant-garde—Que Viva México! by Sergei Eisenstein and La mancha de sangre by Adolfo Best Maugard—in order to illustrate the ways in which the cabaret was a space of inspiration not only for those who produced “official” Mexican cultural texts of the Golden Age of film in the 1940s and 50s, but also for progressive art practitioners whose works presaged political sea change in Mexico of the late 1930s. The two films’ shared status of material degradation as well as the involvement of real-life cabaret performers emphasizes the importance of the cabaretera in registering the development of labor policy for women in Mexico. The chapter closes with Emilio Fernández’s film Salón México and Aaron Copland’s symphony piece “El Salon Mexico”, arguing that the Mexican cinema industry and the predominantly male membership of the international literati overlooked the feminine, bodily question inherent to cabaret performance, opting instead for narratives of whitewashed social mobility as in the former, and macho-dominated proletarian unity in the latter. Chapter III hones in on the privileged act of writing in relation to the literary role of “the muse”. In his story “El Café de nadie” (1926), estridentista author Arqueles Vela discursively protagonizes “loose” women who cater to the powerful tertulia crowd. The chapter then details the life and work of tertulia hostess, cabaret owner, writer, and socialite Antonieta Rivas Mercado, whose relationship to Mexican politician and cultural attaché José Vasconcelos epitomizes the melding of politics, performance, and gender relations of the 1930s. The chapter explores Rivas Mercado’s dedication to the genre of the personal diary, looking to how an educated, liberated, and mobile woman in the 1930s (fails to) reconcile her exclusion from Mexico City’s taxonomies of writing circles. The chapter segues into the genre of the chronicle, looking to critic and historian Carlos Monsiváis and what I call his “exceptional cosmopolitanism”: that is, his reverence of mass culture and live feminine performance in discursive sites of “highbrow” cultural consumption, exemplified by the space he creates in his essay-chronicles that are included in his works Escenas de pudor y liviandad and Amor perdido. The chapter ends with an exploration of the Ateneo de Angangueo, a literary salon that spans the 1970s and 80s and is a prime extension of the tertulia from the first half of the century, but that seamlessly integrates prominent politicians into its exclusive network and meetings. Most apropos for the project, the Ateneo includes Mexican woman performer-turned-writer, Margo Su, in its ranks. Chapter IV and the concluding Coda ask how power dynamics turn away from male- dominated practices of owning, witnessing, and writing to embrace a female re- territorialization of performance and art. Whereas in the early 20th century, women were primarily the visual, bodily practitioners of cabaret—though some, such as Rivas Mercado, were creatively and financially autonomous, on top of providing emotional labor for high-profile members of Mexico’s literary and political sphere—many women became owners of dance halls, as well as campy performer-writers of the spectacular tropes activated in earlier years. Such a fact traces a lineage of subject formation through cabaret sociality and literary culture in vogue, as well as “queer formalisms” through the history of Mexico. One figure who dabbles in the roles of producer, patrona, and product is Margo Su. Starting her career as a dancer in Mexico City in the 1940s, Su and her husband co-manage theater and cabaret venues until well into the 1980s. In 1989 and 1991, Su pens two novels: Posesión and Alta frivolidad, which detail the links between Mexican politics, urban theater regulation, biopolitical surveillance, and the performance of posing transvestite bodies. Another important cabaretera in this lineage is Jesusa Rodríguez, playwright, performance artist, longtime cabaret owner, and current MORENA senator. Her cabaret production Sor Juana en Almoloya plays with traditional “highbrow” poetic and theatrical genres, as well as drag, to levy an incisive feminist critique of Mexico’s strict regulation of women’s creativity and bodily freedoms, from colonial times to the present. The dissertation ends with a brief “Coda” on the connection between tertulia and cabaret, and further, the marriage between performance and politics in Mexico, epitomized by the collaboration between Jesusa Rodríguez and her performing and life partner, Liliana Felipe. While scholars of contemporary performance have highlighted the importance of situating the productions of women in the context of burgeoning neoliberalism—an undoubtedly vital historicist move—it is equally important to link women’s creative energies to the local history of performance, to when the foundation was laid for official nationalist discourses about spectacle and the “modern” in a preceding boom of economic and political modernization. The bottom line is that women have been performing—and have been performed—far before the age of NAFTA. In conclusion, while the popular cabaret and the elite tertulia maintain an often tense— though generally productive—sociocultural relationship in the decades following the Revolution, by the end of the 20th century the two spaces and their conceptual repertoires subsume one another. Political subjectivity comes to be publicly claimed by vanguardist women in Mexico City who instrumentalize sensible experience in their labor; that is, workers of “the teatro frívolo”—and as best exemplified in the figure of the cabaretera— hone incisive sociocultural critique through popular dance and performance, and subsequently draw on such a foundation in order to participate in another sort of theater, Mexico’s political arena.

New approaches to 3D printing have made it possible to create 3D-printed materials that closely resemble traditional textiles yet these filament-based textiles, while easy to produce, often lack the tactile qualities and visual appeal of fiber textiles. To address this limitation and explore new possibilities for personal textile production, my research focused on developing methods that combine established manual textile craft techniques with additive fabrication. Needlecrafts offer the possibility of embedding 3D-printed fabrics with yarn to achieve the visual and tactile attributes of traditional fabrics. This thesis presents a series of explorations of combining needlecraft with 3D printed elements. These explorations set the foundation for PunchPrint, a technique for integrating filament and fiber-based textiles by combining the 3D printing of a custom parametric fabric substrate with punch needle embroidery. By combining punch needle embroidery with 3D printing and employing a toolpath that mimics traditional textile weave structures, we can fabricate a flexible fabric that serves as a substrate for punch needlework. Furthermore, I present an evaluation of a two-day workshop conducted with textile crafters and enthusiasts. Through the workshop I explore ways to integrate computational design and digital fabrication with the manual craft of punch needle embroidery, leveraging the design tool provided by PunchPrint.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 ended Spain’s colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere, and represented the symbolic pinnacle of U.S. imperialism throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. During this historical juncture, the U.S. launched the invasion of Puerto Rico and established itself as the governing power. My analysis of this defining event in Puerto Rico’s history focuses on the ‘discursive’ and ‘representational’ practices through which the dominant representations and interpretations of the Puerto Rican campaign were constructed. In revisiting the U.S. ‘imperial texts’ of ’98, most of which have not been studied extensively, it is my intent to approach these narratives critically, studying their ideological and political significance regarding the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico as a colony.

The ‘War of ’98’ has been typically represented as an inter-metropolitan conflict, thus relegating to a secondary place the contestatory discourses produced within the colonies. It is the purpose of my dissertation to examine ‘dialectically’ the cultural counter-discourse produced by the Puerto Rican Creole elite alongside the U.S. official discourses on Puerto Rico, concerning its colonial past under Spanish domination, the military occupation of the island, and its political and economical future under the American flag. With this purpose in mind, I chose to study four post-1898 Puerto Rican novels, specifically José Pérez Losada’s La patulea (1906) and El manglar (1907), and Ramón Juliá Marín’s Tierra adentro (1912) and La gleba (1913), all of which have been underestimated and understudied by literary scholars.

As a gesture of resistance in the face of the disruption of the old social order (that is, the old patterns of life, customs, traditions and standards of value) caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898, the island’s intellectual elite –most of which were descendant of the displaced coffee hacendado families– responded by fabricating an ideology-driven national imaginary and iconography that proposed a hispanophile, nostalgic, and romanticized rendering of the late-19th century coffee landscape (i.e. the pre-invasion period) as an idyllic locus amoenus, thus becoming an emblem of national and cultural identity and values against American capitalist imperialism, the ‘Americanization’ of Puerto Rico’s economy and political system, and the rapid expansion of U.S. corporate sugar interests.

This dissertation has two distinct yet complementary purposes: first, it examines critically the imperial/colonial power relations between the United States and Puerto Rico since 1898, while questioning the hegemonic discourses both by the Americans and the Puerto Rican cultural elite regarding Puerto Rico’s historical and political paths; secondly, it is an attempt to do justice to the literary works of two overlooked Puerto Rican novelists, approaching them critically on several levels (historical, literary, and ideological) and bringing their works out of the shadows and into today’s renewed debates around Puerto Rico’s unresolved colonial status and U.S. colonial practices still prevalent today.

My dissertation examines the writings of don Domingo Chimalpahin, a Nahua intellectual who produced a large body of written texts in Nahuatl and Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My study reframes his work as an Indigenous intellectual project that safeguards the history of Cemanahuac—the Nahua Indigenous world—and preserves for future generations of Nahuas and their descendants the possibility to reclaim their history, government institutions, and land. As such, the archive Chimalpahin compiles and produces forces us to rethink Indigenous intellectual production during a critical time in which the very existence of Indigenous peoples of New Spain was at risk. My dissertation argues that Chimalpahin continues and expands the tradition of an earlier generation of Nahua tlacuiloque—scribes—who painted and wrote in Nahuatl for Nahua readers of the future. My study illustrates that Chimalpahin transcends the altepetl-centered histories of his predecessors and refutes Spanish historiography by revising the narratives of Spanish authors while putting Indigenous history in global context. This intellectual project, I show, entails an alternative political and cultural history rooted in the perspective of an Indigenous commoner.

My dissertation contributes to scholarship on colonial Latin America by focusing on a time period often neglected or seen as uneventful. Most specifically, it centers on Indigenous voices to illuminate an alternative intellectual project of self-preservation and self-determination that challenges the views of Spanish intellectuals and Indigenous authors appealing to the Spanish Crown as well as Christian friars writing about the history of New Spain.