This dissertation focuses on the Inquisition trials of cryptoJews in New Spain. In 1589, Francisca de Carvajal, her son Luis and daughters Catalina, Leonor and Ysabel, were arrested in Mexico City for keeping Jewish traditions. On Sunday, December 8, 1596, they were burnt at the stake in the city market. Francisca de Carvajal was a descendant of Portuguese Jews that converted to Christianity in 1496. While it is true that convert identities were diverse, I claim that Francisca, her family and friends were cryptoJewish (secretly Jewish) because they passed on a Jewish memory. In the medieval period, this was done through liturgy (prayers, songs and texts) and rituals (holidays and extra fast days). By examining the minutes of the hearings, and the comments of the inquisitors on the margins, the confessions of converts and accusations of their friends and family, I study with great detail the cultural and identity features of this persecuted minority group in New Spain. Chapter one examines the Jewish holidays of the Sabbath, Passover, and Yom Kippur that conversos observed, and the extra fast days they also identified as Jewish. Examples of the liturgy include Luis’ cryptoJewish siddur (prayerbook) based on Jewish texts extracted from a Christian bible, and Leonor’s recital of the Song of Moses before inquisitors. Chapter two looks at the abstention from pork and pork products (when possible), food preparation for the Sabbath, and knowledge of ritual slaughter as cryptoJewish identifiers. For example, Francisca defatted and bled her meat. Chapter three analyzes the secret languages, prayers, texts, and songs that Francisca, her family and friends used as part of their liturgy. While some of the prayers and songs were Sephardic in origin, others were cryptoJewish renditions composed by Luis de Carvajal, appropriated from Christian texts. Chapter four identifies the moment conversos learned about their secretly Jewish identity and began to receive instruction as their Bar/Bat Mitzvah event (which differed greatly from the celebration in normative Judaism). They not only waited —for example— for the Messiah but believed that the Messiah would come and free them from their captivity in the lands of idolatry. In conclusion, this dissertation argues that conversos preserved some Jewish liturgy and rituals, created new ones, and utilized Christian sources for a true cryptoJewish experience.

While Roque Dalton, José Emilio Pacheco, and Nicanor Parra are among the most well-known poets of their respective countries, their works have rarely been put in conversation with each other due to the fact that they were produced in and responded to specific social and cultural contexts. But a close reading of key texts reveals that they engaged in rigorous and even controversial critique of dominant ideas around politics and art. My dissertation argues that by attending to these poets’ use of irony it becomes clear that they utilize it as a tool that allows them to examine and question dominant political ideologies and esthetic precepts without resulting in reductive and formulaic answers. The three main areas discussed in this project are 1) the critical approach to the poet and poetry, 2) the exploration of leftist political ideologies and critique of dogmatism in the left as well as of the United States and its disproportionate influence abroad and, 3) the use of masks and characters as a way to create productive tension within a text.

This project began with a simple observation, that the vast archive of Mexican poetry, is brimming with ruin poetry, poems written about a specific site of indigenous ruins or some other material ruin, or verses that use the idea of ruins as a metaphor or symbol by which the poet comments on Mexico’s political or social state of affairs. This dissertation explores three tropes of twentieth century Mexican poetry as they relate to ruins: the modern city as a ruinscape and maker of ruins, the ruins of disaster, both man-made and natural, and the concept that contemporary poetry in indigenous Mexican languages serves as a form of resistance through which indigenous peoples in Mexico struggle against cultural ruination. The introduction features ruin poetry by José María Heredia, José Juan Tablada, and Efraín Huerta, which serves as examples of more traditional verses about ruins. Chapter 1 examines the presence and characterization of the modern city over time in the works of Ramón López Velarde, Manuel Maples Arce, Salvador Novo, Xavier Villaurrutia, Efraín Huerta, and Eduardo Lizalde, who at the end of the century reads the city as a modern ruin. Chapter 2 focuses on José Emilio Pacheco and Jorge Humberto Chávez’s poetic reactions to natural and man-made disasters, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the surge of violence in northern Mexico, related to the drug trade, during Felipe Calderón’s presidency. Chapter 3 explores the poems of Natalio Hernández, Jun Tiburcio, and Alberto Gómez Pérez, who write poetry in their respective indigenous languages, Nahua, Totonac, and Tzotzil, as a form of cultural resistance to political practices that would marginalize their languages and cultures to the point of extinction. Within the verses of these aforementioned poets, I found that ruins and ideas about ruins function as a particularly adept critical tool through which Mexico’s poets criticize, critique, or simply respond to their nation’s state of affairs and circumstances.

La poesía estudiada aquí abarca tres distintas áreas geopolíticas y tres momentos de crisis: a. la segunda mitad del siglo XX argentino, con una inestabilidad política, con fluctuaciones que oscilaban entre Peronismo, anti-Peronismo y golpes de Estado. argentino lleno de Peronismos, anti-Peronismos y golpes de Eestado; b. el golpe de Eestado que instauró a Augusto Pinochet como dictador de Chile e inauguró el Neoliberalismo en la región; y, c. la llamada Guerra contra el narco y la consecuente proliferación de la violencia como horror y espectáculo al principio de este siglo en México. La poesía creada en esos contextos, e incluida aquí, desancla la bipolaridad compromiso-autonomía poniéndola en juego y en jaque lúdico. Al hacer esto, las propuestas poéticas arrojan pistas y perspectivas sobre la poesía y el papel del poeta vis-a-vis la sociedad y los sucesos históricos y, por ende, lo político, lo ético, e incluso, lo epistémico-cultural. Más que guiarse por una unidad o continuidad teórica o conceptual, mi trabajo busca explorar diversas propuestas dentro de este marco general de literatura que se compromete, tanto con lo social como con su propia autonomía.

En “La superficie política de una poesía pensante”, analizo a contrapelo, proponiendo una lectura desde la óptica del compromiso sociopolítico, Poesía vertical de Roberto Juarroz (Argentina), que abarca casi 40 años y 14 poemarios—todos con el mismo título. La segunda sección, “Paisaje, geografía y cuerpografía” identifica la poesía de Raúl Zurita (Chile) como un juego hermenéutico basado en la conjunción del Zurita biográfico con el Zurita gráfico, así como en la materialización de la memoria en la geografía-paisaje chileno. Finalmente, “Zombis, Antígonas y barbarie: la poesía mexicana ante la narco-violencia”, explora las propuestas poéticas de Jorge Humberto Chávez, Luis Felipe Fabre, Román Luján, María Rivera y Sara Uribe que buscan encarar el horrorismo de la narco-violencia por diferentes medios como el pastiche, la desapropiación, el humor, la denuncia; es decir, ya sea con técnicas conceptualistas u otras más convencionales.

El rasgo común más importante de todos estos proyectos, es la reformulación de la figura del autor, particularmente como sujeto poético; en circunstancias sociales críticas, el sujeto poético se ve variablemente contradicho, desestabilizado, descentralizado o abolido. De hecho, un título alternativo para esta tesis bien podría ser Representaciones y transmutaciones del sujeto poético en poesía de compromiso—siendo compromiso un término en disputa cuya definición varía conforme a cada obra.

Una de las características de la narrativa colombiana de mitad del siglo XX es la necesidad de describir todas las injusticias socio-políticas mediante una emergente voz de minorías, de esa otredad, registrada a través de la literatura. Las novelas estudiadas en esta tesis ofrecen una visión plural de identidades genéricas como expresiones de la marginalidad, con respecto a los discursos hegemónicos de la nación. El objetivo de esta disertación es precisamente analizar estos discursos disidentes tanto en el teatro como en la novela. La elección de dos áreas con especificidad distinta responde al deseo de presentar dos tipos de "discurso" de las minorías genéricas. Mientras en la novela, se realiza una elaboración narrativa donde se incursiona en las subjetividades genéricas, los espacios que ocupan y sus relaciones con los presupuestos de la nación, en los textos teatrales se incorporan prácticas discursivas y performativas que construyen un imaginario social revelador de las relaciones sociales y los proyectos culturales incluyentes/excluyentes de estas subjetividades, teniendo en cuenta una diversidad de rasgos y tratamientos de códigos teatrales que corresponden al contexto histórico.

Los autores estudiados revelan los varios niveles de tensión entre el discurso oficial de la nación que proclama igualdad entre sus ciudadanos y el discurso disidente desde la perspectiva de minorías genéricas. En las novelas de mujeres, el discurso femenino ha logrado agencia pasando de una interioridad a una búsqueda de identidad en donde la mujer empieza escribiendo sobre ella misma, interrogando valores, explorando aspectos de lo desconocido, a la vez que registra hechos históricos nacionales desde el ámbito privado de la casa, la cocina, la cotidianidad elaborando una visión contestataria de la nación. En los textos de temática gay, se desarrollan subjetividades homosexuales que exploran su identidad a través de los espacios urbanos, reinscribiendo nuevas cartografías con su deseo homoerótico y presentando, a su vez, una perspectiva disidente con respecto al imaginario nacional, sus íconos y sus discursos oficiales. Las/los autoras/es son agentes de cambio al otorgarle voz a esas minorías genéricas que poseen la carga representacional de la nación colombiana signada de hibridez.

This dissertation examines the relationship between marginalized individuals and space as it is represented in a selection of 20th century Mexican novels. I focus on analyzing the differences and inequalities expressed within specific ethnic (indigenous), gender (feminine), sexuality (homosexual) and socioeconomic categories (the working class). I rely on national and urban theoretical discourses in order to distinguish and delineate the voices and minority perspectives that are ever present in Mexican culture. I argue that the individuals in these novels become subjected to multiple forms of marginality which ultimately shape the types of cartographies they construct. Additionally, I demonstrate how in the novels: Balún Canán, Oficio de tinieblas, Los albañiles, Chin chin el Teporocho, El vampiro de la Colonia Roma and Las púberes canéforas, these alternative discourses challenge and subvert the ethical values established and legitimized by an institutionalized patriarchal order. By constructing these cartographies they are not only able to survive within the spaces they inhabit but also contest and problematize pre-established notions of Mexico's national identity.

In addition to analyzing urban spaces, I examine the interstices of domestic space; a place of reception and rebellious subversion of patriarchal regulations in the novels: Los recuerdos del porvenir, Como agua para chocolate, Dos Mujeres and La cresta de Ilión. I also focus on female characters who venture outside the private sphere of the home and into "public" spaces previously inaccessible to them in Hasta no verte Jesús mío, La insólita historia de la Santa de Cabora and Duerme. Ultimately, these novels reconfigure the parameters of traditional gender identities and demonstrate how various characters' subjectively create new meaning by re-mapping and dismantling the fixed and unitary nature of the official national discourse which they re-appropriate.

Early gender and sexuality scholars established that the Isthmus Zapotec societies organize around womanhood and tolerate gender and sexual variance. However, their literary tradition has been dominated by male authors, and Zapotec women and sexual variant authors were only able to find the right conditions to see their literary works published only after the turn of the twenty-first century. Historically, there have been many reports of domestic violence and trans/homophobia accounts that the well-known description of the matriarchal nature of the Zapotec people has come into question. The dissertation delineates the expansion of both the Western and the Zapotec literary traditions by analyzing contemporary Zapotec works that challenge colonial notions of gender and sexuality by sharing the perspectives and lived experiences of Zapotecs living in the present. These texts foreground how these Indigenous writers negotiate and navigate the borders of gender and sexuality between Zapotec cosmovision and the modern views of the hegemonic Mexican society. A theoretical consideration of these literary works using the perspective of Coloniality of power can help reframe the relationship between colonialism and gender and sexuality. In addition, a reading o f these works based on kab’awilian (double gaze) strategies will be useful to describe how these authors negotiate their existence between the mainstream Mestizo culture and their Zapotec cosmolectics; as well as to exist between the normalized patriarchal violence of Mexican and Zapotec cultures and the solidarity safe spaces they can find in the communities they choose to love. One of the main arguments is that these literary works offer a deeper first-person insight to the nuances of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in an Indigenous nation from Oaxaca, México, than any other of the works produced about their people and their culture by multiple artists, scientists, and writers. The dissertation examines the works of writers from two different generations. I named the first generation “Guie’ Xhuuba’” (isthmus jasmine) and includes Natalia Toledo Paz, Irma Pineda Santiago, Víctor Cata, Gerardo Valdivieso Parada, and Lukas Avendaño. The next generation of zapotec writers is called “Siadó’ Guie’ Ru’” (morning flower, sunrise) and includes the works of Yadira del Mar, Elvis Guerra, and Paula Ya López.