Mexican American Parents of Elementary Students and Literacy Engagement: A Case Study of a Bilingual (Spanish/English) Parent Book Club Using Children\u27s Literature

This qualitative case study explored what occurred when seven Latinx parents and a bilingual coordinator engaged in a book club using the same historical fiction text as the school\u27s fifth grade classroom. Research questions focused on Book Club participation, connections to the focal text(s), and new learning. Data included audiotapes of the sessions, parent written/artistic artifacts, participant interviews, retrospective field notes, and reflective journal entries. Study findings suggest that positive partnerships between schools and parents can occur within familial text engagement opportunities built on existing relationships with school personnel; use of relevant literature, literacy activities that allow for parent choice and voice, drawing on cultural Funds of Knowledge and life experiences, the autonomy to ask questions and make inferences and connections, and facilitate learning for one another. Finally, the study improved perceptions that parents could better assist their children in learning due to new learning in literacy instruction and reading

Entrevista a Emilio Tuñón. La anatomía de las cuestiones primitivas

Medir el lugar Acercarse a tus proyectos sabe a saber del lugar, de su identidad, de su pasado, de su origen más primitivo. Parece que tus proyectos se inician en una negociación que media y que mide las distancias con aquel lugar para establecer lo que llamáis acuerdos... Measuring spaces Looking at your projects tastes of the knowledge of the place, its identity, its past and its most primitive origin. Your projects seem to begin with a negotiation that mediates and measures distances with that place to establish what you call agreements..

Analysis of mental imagery in children's silent reading

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona Maria-Mercè Marçal, Cristina Peri Rossi, and Flavia Company

How do queer texts engage traditional perceptions of family, nation, and the literary canon? How do readers and writers connect with their predecessors? Natasha Tanna explores lesbian and queer desire through three authors based in Barcelona, a key locus of queer cultural production. Her analysis of the Catalan Maria-Mercè Marçal (1952-1998), of Montevideo-born Cristina Peri Rossi (1941-), and of Buenos Aires-born Flavia Company (1963-) disrupts linear conceptions of time and challenges the centrality of textual and authorial origin to national literary historiographies. Whereas conventional understandings of genealogy emphasise a continuous line of inheritance traced from an origin, Tanna highlights the collaborative creation in these authors’ fragmented, transnational genealogies. A queer bringing together of disparate fragments suggests how we might navigate difference in an increasingly entwined, yet ever more fractious, world in which notions of ‘pure’ or ‘simple’ origins are often violently at odds with disordered and disorderly relationships between people, nations, and texts.PhD funded by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant no. 1376944)

Intensa: Writings in English and Spanish from a Feminist Immigrant

INTENSA: WRITINGS IN ENGLISH AND SPANISH FROM A MEXICAN FEMINIST is a bilingual work written in hybrid literature. The writings, in both English and Spanish, are free prose poetry and tell the story of its narrator through a feminist and immigrant point of view coming from a overwhelmingly majority catholic country, religion that does not view men and women as equals. The thesis details the narrator\u27s life through a feminist point of view as well as her relationship with her mother, her personal relationships, what it means to be an immigrant and what it is like for her, and many women, to live in a patriarchal society. The poems are originally written in Spanish and translated to English by the author in an attempt to embrace the bilingualism and fusion of cultures she experiences in her daily life

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationIn August of 2013, Roberto Flores and Alfredo Zárate, two Ciudad Juárez bus drivers, were killed while working. The murderer, according to eyewitnesses, was a woman between 30 and 50 years old. She purportedly wore a blonde wig and a baseball cap to conceal her identity. Eyewitnesses also told investigators that the murderer made remarks before killing the bus drivers, such as "you think you're so bad?" Ciudad Juárez was once considered the murder capital of the world, so the news of two more murders was hardly "news." Thus, this dissertation presents a case that demonstrates the normalization of quotidian violence-a process achieved through everyday cultural acts. Days after the murders, local news media received a confession. The author, who called herself Diana la Cazadora de Choferes (Diana, the hunter of bus drivers), claimed that she had vengefully murdered the bus drivers in response to the raped and murdered female maquiladora workers of Ciudad Juárez. This confession brought together a variety of discourses about maquiladora labor in Mexico, feminicidios (the unsolved murders of women in Ciudad Juárez), organized crime, and governmental impunity. From a rhetorical perspective, this confession also hinted at discourses of rhetorical agency, social movements, the rhetorical construction of truth and credulity, and the role of mythology within modernity. Throughout this dissertation, I take a variety of critical, cultural, and rhetorical approaches as I construct and contextualize "Diana," following McGee's (1990) fragmentation theory. McGee argues that "rhetors make discourses from scraps and pieces of evidence. Critical rhetoric [as opposed to rhetorical criticism] does not begin with a finished text in need of interpretation; rather, texts are understood to be larger than the apparently finished discourse that presents itself as transparent" (p. 279). Thus, in this dissertation I examine several scraps of discourse that together, point toward one rhetorical construction of Diana la Cazadora de Choferes-not a complete or finished construction, but one that is put forth toward a specific telos: the illustration of what I term retórica moribunda, precarious rhetorics of life and death in contemporary Mexico