Fictionalizing Juárez : feminicide, violence, and myth-making in the borderlands

textIn the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio.Mexican American Studie

Brownian motion meets Riemann curvature

The general covariance of the diffusion equation is exploited in order to explore the curvature effects appearing on brownian motion over a d-dimensional curved manifold. We use the local frame defined by the so called Riemann normal coordinates to derive a general formula for the mean-square geodesic distance (MSD) at the short-time regime. This formula is written in terms of $O(d)$ invariants that depend on the Riemann curvature tensor. We study the n-dimensional sphere case to validate these results. We also show that the diffusion for positive constant curvature is slower than the diffusion in a plane space, while the diffusion for negative constant curvature turns out to be faster. Finally the two-dimensional case is emphasized, as it is relevant for the single particle diffusion on biomembranes.Comment: 16 pages and 3 figure

Notes on noncommutative supersymmetric gauge theory on the fuzzy supersphere

In these notes we review Klimcik's construction of noncommutative gauge theory on the fuzzy supersphere. This theory has an exact SUSY gauge symmetry with a finite number of degrees of freedom and thus in principle it is amenable to the methods of matrix models and Monte Carlo numerical simulations. We also write down in this article a novel fuzzy supersymmetric scalar action on the fuzzy supersphere

Problem Identification and Task Engagement Using the LIBRE Problem Solving Tool: A Case Study of Three Bilingual Teacher Candidates

Bilingual Latino students engage multiple languages, cultures and environments as they pursue educational and professional goals. For this underrepresented group, pursuing a post-secondary degree is a “lucha” (fight) to negotiate the complex interplay of historical, educational, and cultural variables and achieve academic success. Because Bilingual Latino teacher success is incumbent upon successfully negotiating and overcoming linguistic, cultural and educational challenges, examination of problem solving and goal setting is necessary to provide insight into the types of barriers and facilitators that this group experiences and the ways in which they overcome obstacles. An in-depth case study of three bilingual teacher candidates illustrates the use of the LIBRE problem-solving tool as a culturally responsive activity involving a sequence of problem identification, analysis, solution generation, and evaluation to facilitate problem resolution. The case studies examined herein illuminate self-reported social-cultural contextual challenges, solutions, goals, and engagement through explicit problem solving and shows the primacy of familia and cultura in these women’s lives, problem-solving, and decision making. Implications for teacher educators and bilingual Latino teacher candidates are discussed

Curvas de absorción de nutrimentos como estrategia para el manejo sostenible y eficiente de la fertilización del tomate industrial en Azuero

Con el objetivo de determinar la dinámica de absorción de nutrimentos en el cultivo de tomate industrial variedades IDIAP T7 e IDIAP T8 en tres tipos de suelo con tres niveles de arcillas de la región de Azuero, se realizó un ensayo con suelos de tres localidades con historial tomatero. Para ello, se llenaron 288 macetas (96 por tipo de suelo) con suelo de las tres localidades seleccionadas con cuatro repeticiones por tratamiento, en ellas se sembraron plántulas de tomate de 21 días de germinadas que recibieron el plan de fertilización que se le recomienda al productor; se realizaron muestreos de tejidos en cada una de las etapas fenológicas de importancia. Se logró determinar la producción de materia seca, el rendimiento del cultivo, la extracción de nutrimentos en cada etapa fenológica, las curvas de absorción para cada nutrimento, el análisis de regresión estableció las ecuaciones y mostró los coeficientes de determinación que van de 70% para la absorción de Fe en suelo con bajo contenido de arcillas, hasta 95% para Mn en suelo con alto contenido de arcillas para la variedad IDIAP - T7 y 66% para Cu en suelo bajo en arcillas hasta, 96% para K en suelo con alto contenido de arcillas para la variedad IDIAP - T8; también, se logró determinar la extracción relativa de nutrimentos y se estableció el orden de importancia de los nutrimentos para cada variedad y para cada suelo con diferente contenido de arcillas