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.

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.

Walter Benjamin attempted to learn Nahuatl and studied Pre-Hispanic and Colonial sources with Walter Lehmann, a well-known German linguist, translator and scholar, whose work centered on Ancient America. Benjamin’s immersion into the Native American archive crystalized in two “Mexican” dreams published in One-Way Street (1928). These “Mexican” dreams are not mere literary curiosities, but key instances of a larger polemical discursive formation between Marxism and the Global South. A first analysis of Benjamin’s “Mexican” dreams soon demanded crossing several languages, national traditions and centuries in order to show the (dis)continuities between Nahua, Spanish (Colonial), Mexican and Karl Marx’s own intellectual history. Benjamin’s “dreams” revealed themselves as late versions of a dense dialectics dealing with America’s place in History and the ghost of non-European communism(s).

In order to answer what is the larger intellectual history of Marx and Benjamin’s ideas and images about Mexico, this dissertation works with two groups of sources. On one side, Colonial Nahua and Spanish sources on Nahuatl linguistics, Aztec culture, poetics, magic and dreamworlds. And on the other side, Marx-Engel’s works and Walter Benjamin’s writings, in constant conversation with critical theory and the wider Avant-Garde.

The dissertations begins by going back to ask what were the Aztecs’ understandings about dreaming. Here dream is explained in relation to popular resistance against the Aztec State and its hegemonic economic order. Close reading of sources in Spanish and Nahuatl also revealed how Colonial intellectual authorities tried to control Nahua language, memory and dissidence. Particular emphasis is put on what this multilateral struggle about dreams, rhetoric and magic says both about high culture imaginaries and popular desires for another economy.

Once the Aztec and Spanish Colonial archives and debates have been presented, the dissertation moves into the theoretical and poetic corpus that Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin constructed to deal and speculate about Ancient and Modern Southern America, particularly the Aztecs and the XIX Century Trans-American geopolitics. The political program that guides and shapes such archiving is systematically questioned.

At the end of the dissertation I return to indigenous heteroclite poetics, through the theoretical and literary work of Faustino Chimalpopoca, a Nahua scholar and experimental poet from 19th Century Mexico. Chimalpopoca challenged Colonial and Modern mestizo views on Nahuatl and the Aztecs, and built a non-normative (and masked) literary writing, that strangely accompanied his scribal and translation work, for which he became widely known, until his figure fell out of grace due to his political involvement and his disensual intellectual practices—which did not prevent for Chimalpopoca’s name and legacy to be part of Walter Lehmann’s sphere of references. Chimalpopoca’s work serves as another point of contrast between Marxist positions and Aztec popular poetics and discontent-via-dreamwork.

The starting point of this research was the question on what is the long intellectual history of Benjamin’s “Mexican” oneiric fragments. But its end point is an enquiry on how the (dis)encounter between (Marxist and Southern) communisms produces a dense world of poetic images and geopolitical schemes. And ultimately, this research desires to stimulate the discussion about the divergent models for transformation and world revolution.

This dissertation is a study of three recent books by contemporary Mexican authors born in the

1970s. The dissertation examines the relationship between textual strategies and the ongoing

social and political crisis of the last two decades in Mexico, in the work of the poets María

Rivera, Heriberto Yépez and Dolores Dorantes. In my reading, these works present the reader

with new and radical ways of understanding the relationship between literature and society, and

more particularly, between poetry and politics. Together, they also represent an important

critique of the cultural and poetic legacy of figures like the late poet Octavio Paz.

The first chapter focuses on the work of the poet María Rivera, particularly her two poems, "Los

muertos" (2011) and "Oscuro" (2017). I propose that the "anomalous poetics" proposed by

Rivera serves as a vehicle for a double criticism. On the one hand, she questions the hegemonic

notion of a type of cosmopolitan and seemingly atemporal literature, a notion established largely

by the late poet Octavio Paz, under whom Rivera herself was formed. On the other hand, she also

questions the implicit agreements through which contemporary literary communities are

constituted. At the textual level, this critique translates into the emergence of thematic and

formal elements that account for a markedly political new poetics on the horizon of

contemporary Mexican literature. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the poem "Los

muertos", written in 2011, the historical importance of which lies in having been one of the first

poems to openly break with the literary silence around the escalation of violence caused by

militarization. The systematic use of textual strategies such as repetition and lists in the poem not

only makes visible the countless dead and disappeared in Mexico over the last two decades, but

it also problematizes the supposed linearity and continuity with which Mexican history has been

perceived. That is, the poem formally interrupts a historical "filiative" vision of the nation, based

on the continuity of alleged symbolic and ethnic elements. Instead, the poem articulates an

"affiliate" totality founded on affinity and empathy between diverse groups.

The second chapter studies the book Transnational Battle Field (2017) by the poet Heriberto

Yépez. The chapter pays attention especially to the modalities with which the author explores

social antagonisms and some of the transformations in subjectivity derived from neoliberalism.

The transnational lens that Yépez has employed in his entire work is also present in

Transnational Battle Field, a book that was written directly in English. This focus opens other

avenues of reflection beyond the national context within which a large part of recent literary

works thematize contemporary violence and social crisis. In dialogue with the decolonial

thinking of Frantz Fanon, Yépez invites the reader to recognize the social praxis that is

potentially present in works of art; such praxis is able to generate and question critical

subjectivities, and question the current cultural, linguistic and aesthetic homogenization at a

transnational level.

The third and final chapter analyzes the book Estilo by the poet Dolores Dorantes. Her book

textually displays affects and images that, in my reading, mimic and represent economic

processes that inform the ongoing climate of violence against poor working-class women in the

U.S.-Mexico border area. For Dorantes and contemporary thinkers like Silvia Federici, violence

against women must be understood as an expression that goes beyond the cultural, and that

points to a complex knot of violent economic change derived from the transformation of capital

worldwide. Dorantes' book captures and represents elements that suggest phenomena such as

population displacement, the attack on working women and the production of value through

labor exploitation. Circulating within a landscape of contemporary misogynistic imaginary, as

well as a series of economic processes, with the use of a "nosotras" that articulates the poetic

voice of the book, Dorantes criticizes the notion of a traditional and unified lyrical subject that is

still predominant in Mexican literature.

This dissertation represents an invitation to read a group of contemporary works that imagine and

build a radical relationship between contemporary textualities, political and poetic imaginations

and social crisis.

This dissertation locates a pre-history of modern material alienations in colonial Spanish America. Alienation is often understood as a modern phenomenon, the byproduct of exploitation under industrial labor or the crisis of the individual in the face of the strictures of modern society. Colonial actors, however, sensed, internalized, and expressed an understanding of and frustration with their material marginalization in the face of an ever-intensifying colonial economy that rewarded the landowning benefactor class at the expense of the diverse residents of the colonial world. Focusing on the literature, visual culture, and hagiography of mid-colonial Peru, these alienations appear and reappear in varying discourses of isolation, marginalization, and outsideness (enajenación in early modern Spanish) extending to indigenous, Spanish, and Afroperuvian subjects. In each case, land and labor are at the center of these forms of primitive alienation, causing diverse subjects to feel that the economic climate and conditions of work and worship have led the world around them to become unrecognizable, unfamiliar, and ultimately meaningless. Reading the works of Spanish colonial chroniclers, satirist Mateo Rosas de Oquendo, indigenous chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, and the hagiographers of Afroperuvian saint Martín de Porres as expressions of enajenación that anticipate later theorizations of alienation, I argue that as primitive accumulation anticipates capitalism, diverse colonial primitive alienations (from lands, community, spirituality, and history) arise in anticipation of the alienation of the industrial worker. This pre-history makes patent the modernity of colonial subjectivities to suggest that affective responses to the colonial enterprise mark the onset of the modern individual.