This dissertation examines the work of Ignacio Padilla (Mexico City, 1968) from two complementary perspectives. First, by going against the dominant critical view of Padilla's works as apolitical and uninterested in national or regional problems, I demonstrate how Padilla's fictions serve as a space of continuity for key literary and intellectual traditions in Mexico and Latin America. By setting Padilla's work in the context of his Latin American precursors as well as his contemporaries, I show how his oeuvre not only reevaluates topics such as modernity, colonialism, cultural diversity, and cosmopolitanism, but also how it relies on literary traditions such as the narrative of the Mexican Revolution, the Novel of the Dictator, essays on national identity, Magical-Realism and others. Secondly, I explore Padilla's conception of the role of the writer and of literature in contemporary societies, concentrating on his idea that a great work of literature generates profound reflection only when it historically, socially and politically implicates its reader. I follow this theory to show Padilla's socio-political commitment, and particularly, his concern with different aspects of Mexican history and culture from the 1980's to the present. In Padilla's works, there is a constant interest in examining the changes that occurred in Mexico due to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980's, especially regarding the relationship between intellectuals and the Mexican State, the artistic engagement with the social events that happened in Mexico City after the catastrophic earthquake of 1985, and the urgency to redefine the concept of nation and citizenship in Mexico after the democratic transition of the year 2000. The study of the works of Ignacio Padilla in light of his precursors and contemporaries illuminates an era of Mexican history, culture and literature from 1985 to 2015.

My dissertation studies a broad corpus of writers’ diaries in twentieth-century Latin American literature, and examines how the diary genre has developed in the region. I show that the diary has enjoyed historical continuity and has matured in contact with Latin American and foreign literary traditions.

I propose the concept of the ‘diario de escritor’ (writer’s diary) in order to systematize the presence and function of the diary in Latin America through the articulation of a critical framework that encompasses diaries published by their authors in the 20th and 21st centuries. By drawing on a wide variety of theoretical approaches to the diary as an essentially complex and hybrid genre, including reception theory and hermeneutics, I discuss the diary’s structural and literary implications in Latin America.

In my first chapter, I focus on the works of Rufino Blanco Fombona (Venezuela), Federico Gamboa (Mexico), Mario Levrero (Uruguay), Julio Ramón Ribeyro (Peru), and Ricardo Piglia (Argentina). This chapter analyses scenes of reading presented in Latin American diaries and focuses on the inter-textual mechanisms used by the writers to link their diaries to Europe’s diary-writing tradition. I show that Latin American diarists’ engagement with European diary forms allowed them to enhance the rhetorical possibilities of their writing.

The second chapter is a product of my research at Princeton University’s Firestone Library, where I consulted the manuscripts of the diaries, notebooks, and personal papers of José Donoso (Chile), Alberto Girri (Argentina), Augusto Monterroso (Guatemala) and Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina). This archival research helps me to analyze the diaries’ transitions from manuscripts to published works. By analyzing the process of rewriting, I discuss the restitution of diaries as literary works capable of transforming the idea of genre in literature. I also argue for a proper place for so-called “fragmentary writing” in contemporary diaries.

My third chapter examines representations of travel in the diaries of Mario Levrero (Uruguay), César Aira (Argentina), Andres Neuman (Argentina), and Eduardo Lalo (Puerto Rico). This chapter focuses on the diarists’ practice of rethinking writing through travel. I propose that contemporary writers’ diaries, in the context of travel, transform the genre into a hybrid form close to the short novel, the fragment, and the essay. These diaries convert the traditional idea of travel into an interior experience in which the exploration takes place in the writing.

My final chapter analyzes the metaphors of illness (cancer, AIDS, and arthritis) and the representation of corporeal fragility in the diaries of Gonzalo Millán (Chile), Pablo Pérez (Argentina), and María Luisa Puga (México). Through the analysis of metaphoric and obscene language, I discuss the representation of corporality as a material sign of the disease and as a space of transformation of identity.

This dissertation focuses on key ideological and aesthetic debates that arose in the mid-1960s in response to and within the Cuban Revolution. In the 20th century, revolutionary struggle and national liberation lie at the core of ideological confrontations between (neo)colonies and traditional imperial powers, and in the Western Hemisphere Cuba was at the vortex of a war of ideas that was being waged between the United States and the Soviet Union on the one hand, and between traditional imperial powers and revolutionary or independence movements on the other. In these conflicts the cultural sphere became an intensely contested terrain. In the first of four chapters, I attempt to demonstrate the liberal, anti-Communist orientation of the Latin American literary journal Mundo Nuevo, by analyzing the content of four articles on the Vietnam War that were included in the second issue (August 1966). In the controversy surrounding the indirect CIA support for Mundo Nuevo, Cuban and Latin American critics of the journal have referred to the four texts as an ideological concession by the editor, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, while supporters point to the articles as an example of the journal's willingness to critique the policies of Washington from a position of Cold War neutrality. I argue that neither position is accurate because the criticism of the war that was articulated in three of these four texts reflects an assimilation of the ideological narrative promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom since its foundation in 1950. In the second chapter, I review a debate on the novel of the Cuban Revolution between Cuban literary critics José Antonio Portuondo and Ambrosio Fornet that was published in La Gaceta de Cuba in 1964 and 1965. The older Portuondo defends a relatively provincial position against the more cosmopolitan perspective of the younger Fornet. While both of these Cuban critics defended the Revolution against counterrevolutionary cultural projects such as Mundo Nuevo, the literary aesthetic defended by Fornet overlaps partially with Emir Rodríguez Monegal's promotion of Modernist and avant-garde literary tendencies. The third chapter, which is an analysis of the second novel published by Santiago writer José Soler Puig: En el año de enero (1963), attempts to highlight a kind of silent debate within the cultural sphere of the Cuban Revolution. I hypothesize that due to the inclusion of very critical voices in this novel, which reflects the societal tensions brought about by the socioeconomic policies implemented by Fidel Castro in 1959, the author was marginalized by the new cultural institutions. In the fourth chapter, I review two important debates from 1966 in which a young, militant Jesús Díaz rejects—as degenerate, impoverished or counterrevolutionary cultural manifestations—not only the incipient, subaltern literary movement of El Puente, represented in the debate by Ana María Simo, but also the populist, folkloric poetry of Jesús Orta Ruiz.

My dissertation examines the production of Ju?rez as an apocalyptic symbol of the future of the neoliberal world in the representations of journalists, graphic narrators, and contemporary artists. While trying to report on the effects of free trade and the War on Drugs, some of these authors recycle old stereotypes about the border and frame border people as violent and disposable, creating what I call a border muselmann, an unresponsive entity incapable of responding to his/her own plight. I maintain that the frequent comparisons of the maquiladora model to Nazi concentration camps tends to be iatrogenic; rather than shedding light on the precarious situation of the workers, it frames their existence into a pre-ordained and inescapable future of gloom. These narratives also contribute to the creation of a social imaginary that justifies violent military and high impact policing as a solution to social problems. However, I also analyze other works that attempt to explore new ways of assembling information and producing Ju?rez as an arena of thought and not just a death world. My dissertation is organized in four chapters. In the first one, I expose how journalist Charles Bowden launched a powerful set of frames to represent Ju?rez as a gulag and a laboratory of the future, portraying this city as a “worst-case scenario” to borrow a phrase from Claire F. Fox. In the second chapter, I review how Ju?rez has become a complex arena of reflection about the neoliberal model and how this has produced alternative ways of thinking about the representation of violence, its consequences and ways to combat and resist its structural sources. In this chapter I document how Ju?rez is a site of thought and resistance. The third chapter is dedicated to the analysis of how graphic narratives about Ju?rez are also heavily based on stereotypes about the local people. I examine how the artists who have travelled to the city to report on a crisis conceive of themselves. By thinking of themselves as rescuers of the Other, these graphic narrators contribute to an uneven distribution of rights. They reinforce the idea that local residents are either victims or perpetrators, waiting to be rescued from themselves. Finally, in chapter four I examine the work of Teresa Margolles, vis-?-vis the ideas of authors such as Eyal Weizman and Astrid Erll, in order to explore new ways to speak about violence without falling into the formulas that reproduce and reinforce stereotypes. In this final section, I try to demonstrate that this artist?s methods of working with human and social remains, allow for an assemblage of voices that can speak and render certain forgotten lives as grievable. At the same time, I contend, some of her pieces have the potential to become mnemonic artifacts that can carry testimony about grief, tragedy and resistance.

In this dissertation I examine the roots of one of twentieth-century Latin America’s most crucial literary exchanges, namely, that between the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and his Mexican counterpart Octavio Paz. Specifically, I focus on their initial point of contact in 1937, when the much younger Paz sent his recently published poem Ra�z del hombre to his idol Neruda, then living in Paris where he was organizing the Congress of Antifascist Writers in the context of the Spanish Civil War. While Neruda never elaborated on his appreciation for Ra�z del hombre beyond the cryptic detail in his memoir of having identified in it “un germen verdadero,” it is understood that he invited Paz to the Congress based on his positive reading. Therefore, and in light of the gaping hole in the Neruda-Paz scholarship whereby no systematic examination of this first point of contact exists, I offer a speculative “Nerudian reading” of Ra�z del hombre to understand why such an ostensibly apolitical erotic poem appealed to a poet who, at the time, was undergoing a dramatic transformation toward an aesthetic of revolutionary commitment.

Arguing for a generous conception of poetic influence based on Harold Bloom’s paradigm whereby a successor might exert power over his predecessor, I suggest that Neruda registers the influence of Ra�z del hombre—and betrays a certain anxiety toward that influence—in “Oda de invierno al R�o Mapocho” (1938), his first socially engaged poem in a Latin American setting. In that poem, Neruda returns to the aesthetic of natural eroticism that he had cultivated in Residencia en la tierra in order to locate the potential for revolutionary salvation in the topography of Latin America. At the poem’s conclusion, the speaker exhorts Chile’s Mapocho River: “que una gota de tu espuma negra / salte del l�gamo a la flor del fuego / y precipite la semilla del hombre!” With the slight change from “ra�z del hombre” to “semilla del hombre,” in my opinion, Neruda offers at once a tacit confirmation of his positive reading of Paz’s work, and a rhetorical exercise of power to reclaim for himself the residenciario poetics that his successor had made his own in his emergence as a formidable newcomer to the world of Hispanic poetry.

In Chapter I, I offer an extended introduction to the dynamics surrounding Neruda and Paz’s initial encounter, primarily in the form of an analysis of Paz’s importance in the early years of Neruda’s transformation from trench warfare poet in the Spanish Civil War to committed Latin Americanist poet par excellence. To strengthen my argument regarding Paz’s contributions in Neruda’s trajectory, I introduce a reading of Harold Bloom’s theory of poetic influence. I also discuss how Paz’s emergence as a strong poet in the context of Neruda’s ascendant celebrity in the Spanish-speaking world likely induced a certain anxiety in the Chilean. The chapter concludes with a comparative analysis of Paz’s �No pasar�n! and Neruda’s “Galope muerto.”

In Chapter II, I offer a Nerudian reading of Ra�z del hombre in order to identify the implicit radicalism of Paz’s poem, the raison d’�tre of which critics tend to elevate as an eroticism stripped of political meaning. To do so I read the poem’s celebration of love as the root of man in a context of ruins as a metaphor for the revolutionary solidarity required in the struggle against fascism.

In Chapter III, I explore the centrality of “Oda de invierno al R�o Mapocho” within both Neruda’s late-1930s transformation and his broader poetic trajectory. Arguing that the poem offers a commentary on the debate du jour regarding pure versus committed poetry, I discuss how the poet engages not only with Paz, but also with the voices of Francisco de Quevedo and Rainer Maria Rilke. In this way I demonstrate how Paz’s treatment in Ra�z del hombre of those poets’ respective and optimistic understandings of death inspired Neruda’s hopeful vision for a revolutionary future in Latin America as well as his commitment to an aesthetic of engagement.

Following a brief Conclusion, I end my dissertation with an English translation of Ra�z del hombre as it appears in its entirety in Paz’s 1999 Obras completas.

The 1990s marked a turning point in the context of the U.S-Mexico border. Even though the militarization was just beginning to materialize along the urban areas with the purpose of securing the United States southern border from unwanted immigration and narcotics traffickers, the image of a war zone and fear was also emerging in the imaginary of its citizens. Most notably, the military strategies implemented to deter undocumented migrants had arduous consequences in the lives of those still attempting to cross. This study examines non-fictional narratives such as literary journalism, testimony, personal essay and the Spanish cr�nica that document the journeys of Mexican and Central American migrants making their way to the United States after the systematic intensification of U.S-Mexico border security. Known as the “funnel effect” of border enforcement, undocumented migrants were pushed to take more isolated and dangerous routes such as the desert terrains in Arizona and Texas where peak temperatures have taken thousands of lives of those attempting to cross. For Central American migrants crossing through Mexico, the dangers are multiplied. Each year, tens of thousands are victims of human rights violations, including abuse, extortion, kidnapping, sexual assault, and death. In my dissertation, I argue that the authors in this study offer a political and literary agenda that moves away from the negative framework associated with the “illegal” migrant portrayed in mainstream media in order to inform a disengaged reader—the imagined addressee. The migrant journey stories herein reveal the ‘real--lived experiences’ of human suffering, death but also resistance to get to their destination where in many cases, families, relatives and/or friends wait for them. Crafted with humanistic intentions, their alternative discourse attempts to bridge the experiences of the “other” and the reader by employing certain narrative strategies associated with non-fiction and the thematic of crisis. In that sense, the literary representations are imagined to compel and instigate empathy and model a social and responsible action to their readership. I maintain that though conceived with good intentions, some of the authors’ narratives discussed herein offer problematic representations, where the reader might feel distanced or disengaged from the “other” subject, preventing the engagement with a hypothetical solution.

This study addresses how literary production might influence the process of human rights claims in the subject of contemporary undocumented migration. With its theoretical origins rooted in non-fiction scholarship, my dissertation contributes to the study of another creative platform to bring awareness of human rights abuses to the disengaged reader and potentially impact political and social discourse.

This dissertation explores the interaction between visual, cinematic, and literary landscapes by examining how this dialogue is used to both establish and question racial, gender, and national identity. Rather than being simply a detail or a decorative element, I see these visual and literary representations of the landscape as essential components of an exploration of otherness and belonging in Mexican novels, film, and visual arts. Through an analysis of the relationship between literary and visual landscapes, my project will contribute to a growing body of literature on the intersection of word and image in the Mexican landscape by scholars such as Larrucea Garritz, an area of study often overlooked by literary scholars.

The first chapter explores the relationship between the lithographs and photographs found in the 1911 edition of Tomochic, by Heriberto Fr�as, and the text. I argue that the illustrations underscore the dichotomous portrayal of the villagers and their landscapes in the novel, forcing the reader/viewer to confront opposing views of Mexico’s north. In my second chapter on Los de abajo by Mariano Azuela, Jos� Clemente Orozco’s illustrations of the Mexican Revolution depict scenes of violence in aninhospitable landscape while Diego Rivera’s celebratory illustrations show the revolutionaries in a benign setting. The illustrations emphasize opposing elements of the novel’s portrayal of the revolutionaries as alternatively civilized and barbaric, illustrating different sides of the author’s framing of the revolutionaries and their landscapes. My third chapter looks at Pedro P�ramo by Juan Rulfo and the 1967 movie adaptation directed by Carlos Velo, where I argue that the movie facilitates the audience’s gaze over Susana’s sexualized body rather than focusing on Susana’s own imagined spaces foregrounded in the novel. In my fourth chapter on Gringo viejo by Carlos Fuentes, I explore how the novel depicts fluid and constantly changing landscapes, where the boundaries between the U.S. and Mexico are blurred and questioned. Yet, the film Old Gringo, directed by Luis Puenzo, prioritizes the English-speaking audience’s somewhat stereotypical gaze over Mexico, rather than attempting to replicate the novel’s approach. The last chapter on Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli investigates how the protagonist’s stepson—who narrates the second half of the novel— takes pictures of people and of the landscape on a family trip to the Mexican—United States border that are included in the novel. The photographs represent a youthful way of looking at the landscape more akin to that of the migrant children, but the son is also separated from these children by situation, nationality, class, and language, raising questions about how the suffering of migrant children can be ethically represented by a more privileged subject.

Twentieth century Mexico was a period of monumental shifts and changes. The century began in earnest with the Mexican Revolution in 1910 under the banner of free and fair elections without reelection. What proceeded were massive social upheavals and violence, ending with the new constitution of 1917. This new constitution guaranteed newfound rights as well as limited the power of millenarian institutions like the Catholic Church in Mexican lands. Tensions from the overt attack on religious freedoms culminated with the 1926-1929 Cristero War. During this short three-year period the Mexican Revolution was put into question, so much so, that it nearly ended the revolutionary process. The Cristero War was a moment in Mexican history in which religious freedom as well as community preservation were hard-fought. This process had massive consequences in the development of Mexico; yet it is seldom talked about in official narratives. It led to the creation of the PRI and the PAN, the centralization of power in Mexico City and other significant social changes. Yet there is a marked silence in political and social discourse when talking about the Cristero War, despite it being ever-present in literature.

“Memorias construidas, traumas colectivos, comunidades destruidas: la manifestación y mitificación de la Guerra Cristera (1926-1929) en Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez y Jesús Goytortúa Santos” (Constructed Memories, Collective Traumas, and Destroyed Communities: The Manifestation and Mythification of the Cristero War (1926-1929) in Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez and Jesús Goytortúa Santos) analyzes how Rulfo, Yáñez, and Goytortúa remember the Cristero War in their narratives. The dissertation argues that despite the strong censorship that the Cristero War received, to the point of not forming part of the official state narratives, authors such as Juan Rulfo, Agustín Yáñez, and Jesús Goytortúa Santos have participated in the preservation of the collective memory of the conflict through their narratives. This dissertation explores the connection between generational trauma, memory, and the impacts on community following the Cristero War and how it manifests in Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955), Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1955) and Las vueltas del tiempo (1973), and Jesús Goytortúa’s Pensativa (1945). The dissertation is structured around three guiding concepts: trauma, the impacts of trauma on people in communities (chapter 1), how community preservation and protection form part of the Cristero narrative (chapter 2), and how memories and collective memory are created and preserved through Cristero semiotics (chapter 3). My research utilizes five novels and a short story written in Spanish and published and/or written in the decades after the Cristero War. Ultimately, I claim that these fictions written in the post-war era have been fundamentally informed by the experiences of the Cristero War and bridge a vital gap in Cristero Studies and Mexican history in general: the human experience of the war and the diverse actors. I encourage a rereading of these works to bring light to a seldom talked about sociohistorical period in Mexican Studies.

The study and analysis of these works through the lens of the Cristero War offer an exceptional insight on the impact of the war on Mexican Culture. While the Cristero War has remained in large part housed within Mexican Regional Studies, most of the research has primarily focused on the historiographic work, while little has been done in the area of literary and cultural studies. Although most critics of Cristero Studies agree on the need to study the impacts of the Cristero War in cultural productions, the official narratives continue to argue that the war itself was not important or simply a reactionary footnote in the annals of Mexican history. Nevertheless, this dissertation argues that the Cristero War was an exceedingly important period in Mexican Development, providing nuanced readings of important literary works to demonstrate and prove how the Cristero War impacted each author and how each author contributes to how the Cristero War is remembered. My work fully centers the war, putting it into dialogue with other periods of Mexican history. My dissertation is, therefore, an original contribution to the ever-growing field of Cristero Literary Studies.

My dissertation examines how Mexican and Brazilian authors depicted Los Angeles shortly before, during and after the Second World War. By delving into a variety of texts — ranging from poetry to letters and travel memoirs —, produced in the first half of the twentieth century about Los Angeles by Mexican and Brazilian writers, I contend that their perspectives, coming from the periphery, challenge the dominant discourse about the city. I argue that while American and European writers have been at the center of the collective imaginary of Los Angeles, writers from Latin America have for the most part been excluded from this discourse and discussion. By ignoring representations by Latin American and Brazilian authors, critics have left out important and distinct ways in which the city has been imagined and articulated.

Under their gaze, Los Angeles’s polychromatism is unveiled and the effervescence of the city becomes tangible. Xavier Villaurrutia, unabashedly, brings to the fore the beguiling homosexual night life of Los Angeles, while Octavio Paz, casting his gaze on the pachuco, highlights the city’s restlessness and singularity. Raul Bopp, moreover, gives prominence to Los Angeles’s racial and cultural richness, deeming it as the single most important feature of the city. Refusing to see Los Angeles in extremes, Erico Verissimo showcases the full spectrum of human experience found in the city. Vinicius de Moraes, likewise, makes a point of displaying the city’s humanity.

Furthermore, I maintain that paying heed to these representations reveals a stimulating and complex picture of Los Angeles that was at times antithetical to the dominant discourse, and which in turn allows for a reformulation of how the city has been mythicized. The body of my study consists of writings by Octavio Paz, Erico Verissimo, Vinicius de Moraes, Raul Bopp, and Xavier Villaurrutia, as well as American and European writers such as Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, John Fante and Nathanael West.

This dissertation explores the treatment of urban spaces in Latin American dirty realist fiction from the 1990's to the present, focusing on the works of Guillermo Fadanelli (Mexico), Fernando Vallejo (Colombia), and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (Cuba). Whereas Fadanelli centers his works in the megalopolis of a Mexico City straining under the pressures of rapid modernization and development, Gutiérrez depicts a Havana crumbling during the economic crises of the Special Period, and Vallejo portrays Medellín as utterly degraded by drug trafficking and its associated violence. All three authors, however, employ the gritty, almost visceral dirty realist style to best depict poverty-stricken societies populated by unexceptional individuals in a quest for survival in a rapidly transforming and decaying urban landscape. This dirty realist space is thus primarily defined by abjection and the uncomfortable coexistence of a focus on distinctive local minutia and the homogenizing effects of global, postmodern consumer society, a phenomenon accompanied by the proliferation of non-places as defined by Marc Augé. In these non-places, the meta-narratives of family, religion and nation that previously marked spaces of identity formation no longer function, leaving a sense of purposelessness. While there exists some nostalgia for the spaces that produced and reproduced these previous narratives, these spaces also prove to be marginalizing and have contributed to the city's current state of violence and decay. In light of the negative meanings ascribed to earlier spaces of individual and community identity formation, the evacuation of all meaning from these spaces has a positive connotation. Even though the manner in which these dirty realist authors are conceptualizing the urban space shows this new space to be decadent, empty, and violent, its transitional nature and the questioning of previous narratives that it implies open room for the creation of a new type of space that could grow to be more inclusive, even if this is never accomplished within the narratives themselves.