Mester

Mester LII (contents)

On behalf of the Editorial Board of Mester, the academic journal of the graduate students of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California (Los Angeles), I am honored to introduce its fifty-second issue. Mester LII welcomed submissions for articles, essays, and interviews written in Spanish, Portuguese, and English from transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches related to Identity and Borders. Mester LII also encouraged submissions focused on – but not limited to – the representation of Identity(ies) through Migrations, Language, Belonging, and Borders in the 21st Century. We invited submissions that explore the relationship between (re)formulating and (re)imagining the complexities of identity and its representation in contemporary times, where mobilizations and migrations challenge the dominant identity discourse in space and time.

This article studies the depiction of gender in Iberian and Sephardic chapbooks. It showcases liminal experiences of women in the context of warfare and conyugal relationships. Women shift between passive and active performances where they often trangress imposed gender roles.

This article considers the video-performance “Manaus: Uma cidade na aldeia” by Uýra Sodoma. Divided into four acts, each part of the video-performance exemplifies a rupture with an anthropocentric model of modernity that privileges the human as the sole locus of experience, and it shows how indigenous healing through remembering renounces the naturalization of oppositions such as nature/culture, human/nonhuman. In my analysis, I present Uyra as an alter-political and decolonial figure, meaning that she both presents a path forward that is not necessarily predicated on adversarial schemas, and that she prefers to “contar outras histórias” by physically becoming something else, her body serving as the immanent/imminent site of perspectival differentiation. The video-performance points to the messiness of memory, history, colonial violence, and other forms of being and achieves a different outcome for the rivers, the frogs, and the trees, as well as for indigenous communities within and beyond Brazil.

El 3 de abril de 1983, Sendero Luminoso asesinó brutalmente a 69 personas en Santiago de Lucanamarca y pueblos aledaños. Este ensayo analiza dos documentales que tratan sobre la consecuencias de esta masacre: Tarea pendiente (2003), de Carlos Cárdenas, y Lucanamarca (2008), de Carlos Cárdenas y Héctor Gálvez. En la primera parte, se muestra cómo estos documentales se producen en dos momentos irruptores de la memoria del Perú posconflicto y son representativos de su género. En la segunda parte, centrándose en Lucanamarca, se muesta cómo, a pesar de compartir cierto espíritu de responsabilidad social con otros documentales sobre el conflicto armado interno que se produjeron y estrenaron en la década del dos mil, Lucanamarca presenta una narrativa contrahegemónica pues se aleja de la narrativa de una “memoria cívica”.

El Libro centroamericano de los muertos es el segundo de una trilogía con la que Balam Rodrigo, poeta chiapaneco, reconstruye el tránsito de migrantes centroamericanos en su paso por México. El poemario está emparentado con la crónica de viajes no solamente por la inclusión de Las Casas como coautor del texto sino en la misma organización de los capítulos, que organizan los poemas a manera de recorrido por los ‘reinos’ de Centroamérica. En este ensayo me propongo investigar ¿qué funciones cumplen las referencias intertextuales con las que dialoga el poemario?, ¿cómo se configura el espacio en el texto? Y finalmente, ¿qué relación tienen estos dos elementos con la propuesta política de Rodrigo? Propongo que el Libro centroamericano de los muertos produce discursivamente el territorio extendiendo los límites geográficos, lingüísticos y literarios para (re)configurar una imagen de Centroamérica, que trasciende las fronteras políticas a través de la figura del migrante. Para el análisis parto del planteamiento de Deleuze y Guattari y de Edouard Glissant.

In March of 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic, provoking uncertainty around the world. In particular, the pandemic produced instability in domestic workers’ employment in Mexico. During the surge of COVID-19, such instability revealed the marginal importance that Mexican society has placed on the lives of domestic workers, especially on their health, independence, and labor rights. This uncaring attitude and impassivity triggered a spiral of instability where the domestic worker’s emotional and socioeconomic state fluctuates in the face of historical events. Through literature and film, the domestic worker’s spiral of instability phenomenon is confirmed in the unfavorable situations that occurred in The Corpus Christi Massacre in 1971, evidenced in Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma (2018), returning the domestic worker to everyday life, revealed in Elena Poniatowska’s “Esperanza número equivocado” (1979) and Andres Clariond Rangel’s Hilda (2014) and, again, placing the domestic worker in a state of instability during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 explained through press report interviews. I will compare the aforementioned works to the domestic workers’ situation in Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify the oppressive conditions described in literature and film and to highlight the urban numbness that has lessened solidarity.

Se propone un análisis de los entornos hostiles que enfrenta actualmente la juventud, en su núcleo familiar, en el ámbito escolar y en su lugar de origen que provocan  la deserción escolar, el desarraigo familiar y  la migración.  Una  reflexión que surge a partir del contacto con las personas estudiantes de educación básica y media superior en México y desde el contacto con poblaciones de alta marginación en zonas urbanas e indígenas del país, se plantea un análisis desde la experiencia docente y formativa, se propone observar con  una mirada  respetuosa y compasiva  hacia la población juvenil que desde un discurso adultocéntrico se  desacredita su papel en nuestra sociedad, se propone abrir las puertas a una nueva perspectiva de juventudes con identidad propia, como agentes del cambio en sus comunidades de origen, papel que legítimamente les pertenece como personas y como ciudadanos.

Biutiful da entrada a una gama de interpretaciones con relación a la inmigración y a la memoria histórica en la España contemporánea. Mediante una serie de técnicas fílmicas, Alejandro González Iñárritu entrelaza la vida de los inmigrantes senegaleses y chinos con la de los ciudadanos españoles en una Barcelona oscura, fuera de la imagen turística e icónica de la ciudad, pero dentro de los parámetros de la realidad sin perder el sentido de los elementos ficticios. El propósito de este trabajo es analizar cómo Uxbal, el personaje principal y alter ego de González Iñárritu, se convierte en la conexión entre los distintos ‘espectros’ de la sociedad española: los inmigrantes y los ‘fantasmas’ no tan lejanos de la Guerra Civil que aún marcan el presente en España. Biutiful tiene como premisa plantear una secuencia de denuncias que ha prevalecido en el imaginario hacia la recepción de estos espectros como el otro invisibilizado, sin embargo, ¿se requiere acaso de una mirada extranjera para lograr establecer esta tan necesitada visibilización?

Undoubtedly, the study of language and identity holds tremendous value as it enables us to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying identity construction and address the current issues faced by multilingual and historically marginalized communities in Latin America and the United States.

The aim of the present research is to analyze the linguistic landscape (LL) and Catalan heraldic imagery of the 2022 Diada, Catalonia’s National Day. The theme and language(s) of all Diada signage were systematically coded, along with other semiotic elements such as colors and heraldic emblems. A qualitative content analysis complemented this quantitative coding scheme and reveals that Independence was the dominant theme in signage, followed by Betrayal, Solidarity, and Catalan Cultural Identity. The targets of Betrayal messages were pro-independence Catalan politicians who, in the eyes of those partial to secession, have failed to make good on their promises in the five years following the contentious Catalan independence referendum. The quantitative analysis points to an overwhelming preference for the pro-independence estelada over the less politically-charged senyera. Heraldry-theme relationships show the senyera to be most represented in signage pertaining to Catalan Cultural Identity. This adumbrates that it is still an appropriate symbol for claiming ethnocultural group membership, though La Diada semiotics overall emphasized political rather than cultural statements. The LL and heraldic data from the 2022 Diada shed light on the evolution of secessionist sentiment and the role of traditional Catalan symbols in the tense socio-political climate of post-referendum Catalonia.

This articles discusses the impact that video games can have on student identification in the L2 classroom through contextualization and narration. It also presents a few examples of various forms of identification through students' creation of avatars in the video game The Sims. The discussion hopes to inspire future studies and discussions on video games and identity in the language classsroom.

Teaching pronunciation using computer and mobile-assisted technology has steadily increased over the past two decades (Olson, 2014; Galazci, 2016, Kochem, 2022; Tseng et al., 2002, Lan, 2022). Furthering our understanding of the impact that teaching pronunciation using technology has on students is vital to continue developing tools to support student-oriented pronunciation goals, especially since prior research elucidates the critical role that pronunciation has in maintaining the flow of interactions in communication, increasing student’s confidence, and even in the process of identity-construction in a second language (Jenkins, 2004; Chapelle, 2003; Foot et al., 2017; Almusharraf, 2022). While several studies have investigated the efficacy of pronunciation training remotely or via distance CALL (Engwall et al., 2004; Rogerson-Revell, 2021), little is known about how students feel about using these tools to practice pronunciation training during class time. Since pronunciation instruction is slowly becoming a staple in foreign/second language curricula (Derwin et al., 2017), research evaluating students’ attitudes and reactions to in-class pronunciation activities has the potential to provide valuable insights into students’ willingness to participate in pronunciation training and the overall efficacy of pronunciation interventions in the classroom which harness technological advances for teaching.

Salvador de la Torre is a Mexican-born Texas-raised artist, educator, and storyteller based in Southern California.