This paper addresses Ángel Vázquez’s novel La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (1976), a first-person account of several decades in the life of Juanita Narboni Cortés, a middle-class tangerina of mixed Andalusian/Gibraltarian parentage. I argue that despite Juanita’s distance from her Gibraltarian father, Gibraltar represents a kind of specter, physically distant but insistently “present” through her memories and family ties, and through interpersonal, economic, and cultural connections between Tangier and the Rock. I first describe Juanita’s role as a personification and mirror of late-colonial Tangier. I then explain how we can understand the novel as a ghost story of sorts. I also argue here that Juanita’s Gibraltarian father and Gibraltar itself “haunt” the narrative, with a good deal of this haunting being mediated through photographs. Finally, I analyze the novel’s conclusion to show how Juanita’s desperate attempt to locate a photograph of her mother, and her unexpected encounter with a paperweight, an object associated with her father and with Gibraltar, suggests that she must come to terms, at least partially, with the memory of her father—and by extension, with Gibraltar. I contend that despite Juanita’s centering of her narrative on her mother and Andalusia, by attending to her references to her father and to Gibraltar, we open the novel to an alternate reading that helps us recover these “secondary ghosts,” and that complicates Juanita’s resolute self-identification with Andalusia. Similarly, we unmask Juanita’s andalucismo and disavowal of her ties to Gibraltar as a late-colonial fantasy of an erstwhile “Spanish” Tangier that was never entirely Spanish, but is rather a city whose numerous “ghosts,” including the Rock, cannot be extirpated from its literary memory.

My dissertation argues that contemporary urban spaces such as the city of Barcelona are metaphorically being prostituted. To understand this approach I propose a concept that is new to the fields that I am investigating: the prostitution of urban space. The prostitution of urban space is a global phenomenon developing in the twenty-first century, in which local governments in alliance with powerful financial companies invest in cities and convert them into consumable products.

The totality of the city (streets, monuments, buildings, culture, identity) is converted into an easily consumable product directed at the global economic system and the foreign visitor, eager customers that desire to consume the metropolis rapidly, as a luxurious, pleasant, and fun commodity. This often results in violent gentrification practices that evict residents from their homes, erasing multicultural histories of communities and peoples. The foreign visitor or tourist then enjoys the services that the metropolis offers, pays his dues, and consumes the exotic, seductive, and clean city, a product especially designed for him. In this scheme, governmental officials and financial and real estate groups act as pimps, or procurers of the prostituted metropolises.

My dissertation examines how authors negotiate with the prostitution of urban space developing in Barcelona through movies, documentaries, theater plays, short stories, graphic novels, and art exhibits. Documentaries like La extranjera (2015) by Miguel Ángel Blanca, theater plays like Barcelona, mapa de sombras (2004) by Lluïsa Cunillé, and short stories such as “La ofrenda” (2013) by Teresa Solana create alternative urban visions for the city of Barcelona, which defend strategies to control tourism, give public space back to citizens, and strengthen the historical and cultural characteristics of the city.

I have discovered that the materials advocate for the necessity of change, and indicate the direction and the values that the city should follow in the future. They defend the idea of a democratic, historically and culturally rich city, with regulatory policies to control tourism, and the development of strategies to give public space back to residents. Tourism, then, is not categorically opposed in their works. In fact, in most of the cases these authors understand it as a part of the identity of current Barcelona, but they nonetheless emphasize the need for control and regulation of the industry. They also endorse an economic system that, instead of focusing on the interests of global financial corporations, supports working-class, low-income inhabitants.

I propose that these artistic and cultural reactions have been successful in raising awareness on the prostitution of urban space in Barcelona; however, I have found that the city continues to relentlessly promote her global image. While still dependent on tourism, the current local government is marketing the metropolis under a new narrative, which promotes the city as a multi-cultural, feminist and democratic space. This implies that the prostitution of urban space will continue in the city albeit the critiques and social responses analyzed in this dissertation, especially under a neoliberal economic system that perpetuates all forms of consumption and commodification.

War discourse is inherently contradictory. This dissertation aims to deploy and develop dialectical criticism to account for the impact of the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), or Paraguayan War, in the literature of the four combatant nations – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Literary criticism classifies the war as a turning point in these countries’ national history and the modes of representation of collective experiences. However, it comes up short in examining how this change happened and the consequences of these new forms of depicting reality. I ask in what ways a conflict that killed up to 1 million people reshaped representation and literary discourse. How did these new art manifestations assist in understanding the devastation of war? My objective is to clarify the salient points of a critical moment in history and identify their legacy. On the one hand, the war caused a search for words, and, on the other, there is an abundant textual production about the topic. Many of these texts only became available in recent decades, thanks to the reopening of archives after the end of military dictatorships and digitalization of rare documents. Based on Literary Criticism, Historiography, and studies on race and nation-building, I analyze canonical works of art and rediscovered texts. Writers such as Machado de Assis, Carlos Guido y Spano, and Juan E. O’Leary demonstrate how war literature played a fundamental role in political discussions. Besides, the expansion of caricature at the time caused a surge of satirical poetry. Literary conventions shaped the way the collective memory assimilated facts and historical figures. This study informs our theoretical understanding of art and society. It evaluates how much of these wartime discursive conventions still play a role in the four neighboring countries’ political relations.

A new fabrication process where a titanium coping, with a gold colored titanium nitride outer layer, can be reliably fused to porcelain; however, the marginal adaptation characteristics are undetermined.

The purpose of the study was to compare the clinically acceptable marginal adaptation (CAMA - defined as a marginal gap mean of ≤ 60 μm) rates of cathode-arc vapor-deposited titanium and cast base metal copings to determine whether the titanium copings would produce a higher CAMA rate than the cast base metal copings.

Thirty-seven cathode-arc vapor-deposited titanium copings and 40 cast base metal copings were evaluated using an optical microscope. Fifty vertical marginal gap measurements were made of each coping, and the mean of these measurements was used to form the gap score. A 1-tailed t test was used to compare the CAMA rates, and the Satterthwaite t-score was used to analyze the consistency of the coping adaptation (α =.05).

CAMA was achieved by 24 of the 37 (64.86%) titanium copings compared to 19 of the 40 (47.50%) base metal copings. A 1-tailed t test produced a Z-score of 1.533 (1-tailed P=.063), which allowed acceptance of the study hypothesis with only a modest risk of a Type I error.

Cathode-arc vapor-deposited titanium copings exhibited a higher rate of CAMA compared to base metal copings.

To determine the relationship of poor asthma control to bronchodilator response (BDR) phenotypes in children with normal spirometry.

Children with asthma were assessed for clinical indexes of poorly controlled asthma. Pre- and post-bronchodilator spirometry were performed, and the percent BDR was determined. Multivariate logistic regression assessed the relationship of the clinical indices to BDR at ≥ 8%, ≥ 10%, and ≥ 12% BDR thresholds.

There were 510 controller naïve children and 169 on controller medication. In the controller naïve population the mean age (± 1 SD) was 9.5 (3.4); 57.1% were male, 85.7% Hispanic. Demographics were similar in both populations. In the adjusted profile, significant clinical relationships were found particularly to positive BDR phenotypes ≥ 10% and ≥ 12% versus negative responses including younger age, (OR 2.0, 2.5; P < .05), atopy (OR 1.9, 2.6; P < .01), nocturnal symptoms in females (OR 3.4, 3.8; P < .01); β₂ agonist use (OR 1.7, 2.8; P < .01); and exercise limitation (OR 2.2, 2.5; P < .01) only in the controller naïve population.

The BDR phenotype ≥ 10% is significantly related to poor asthma control, providing a potentially useful objective tool in controller naïve children even when the pre-bronchodilator spirometry result is normal.

Application of pulsed radiofrequency (PRF) currents to the dorsal root ganglia (DRG) has been reported to produce relief from certain pain states without causing thermal ablation. In this study, we examined the direct correlation between PRF application to DRG associated with spinal nerve injury and reversal of injury-induced behavioral hypersensitivity in a rat neuropathic pain model.

Neuropathic lesioning was performed via left L5 spinal nerve ligation on male adult Sprague-Dawley rats. Once the injured rats had developed tactile allodynia, one group was then assigned to PRF treatment of the L5 DRG and another group was assigned to the sham treatment to the DRG. Behavioral testing was performed on both the control and treated paws using the von Frey filament test before the surgery and at indicated days. The resulting data were analyzed using a linear mixed model to assess the overall difference between the treatment groups and the overall difference among the study days. Cohen's d statistic was computed from paired difference-from-baseline scores for each of the 14 study days after treatment and these measures of effect size were then used to descriptively compare the recovery patterns over time for each study group.

Spinal nerve injury resulted in the development of behavioral hypersensitivity to von Frey filament stimulation (allodynia) in the hindpaw of the left (injury) side. Mixed linear modeling showed a significant difference between the treatment groups (P = 0.0079) and a significant change of paw withdrawal threshold means over time (P = 0.0006) for all 12 animals. Evaluation of Cohen's d (effect size) revealed that the PRF-treated animals exhibited better recovery and recorded larger effect sizes than the sham-treated animals on 10 of the 14 post-PRF treatment days and exhibited moderate-to-strong effects posttreatment at days 8 to 10 and at and beyond day 32.

Findings from this study support that PRF of the DRG causes reversal of nerve injury (spinal nerve ligation)-induced tactile allodynia in rats. This allodynia reversal indicates that nonablative PRF acting via modulation of the DRG can speed recovery in nerve injury-induced pain.