Telling and being told: storytelling and cultural control in contemporary Mexican and Yukatek Maya texts

All across Latin America, from the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico to the presidential election of Evo Morales, an Aymara, in Bolivia, indigenous peoples are successfully rearticulating their roles as political actors within their respective states. The reconfiguration of these relationships involves massive social, cultural, and historical projects as well, as indigenous peoples seek to contest stereotypes that have been integral to the region's popular imagination for over five hundred years. This dissertation examines the image of the indigenous storyteller in contemporary Mexican and Yukatek Maya literatures. Within such a context, Yukatek Maya literature means and must be understood to encompass written and oral texts. The opening chapter provides a theoretical framework for my discussion of the storyteller in Mexican and Yukatek Maya literatures. Chapter 2 undertakes a comparison between the Mexican feminist Laura Esquivel's novel Malinche and the Yukatek Maya Armando Dzul Ek's play How it happened that the people of Maní paid for their sins in the year 1562 to see how each writer employs the figure of the storyteller to rewrite histories of Mexico's conquest. The following chapter addresses the storyteller's function in foklore, juxtaposing a number of works in order to show the full scope of oral literary traditions. The fourth chapter examines how traditional storytelling structures the narration of contemporary events as seen in two stories I recorded in Santa Elena, Yucatán, in 2007, as told by the Yukatek Maya Mariano Bonilla Caamal. In the fifth chapter I analyze the use of the figure of the storyteller in one text each by female Yukatek Maya authors, María Luisa Góngora Pacheco and Ana Patricia Martínez Huchim, and show how these authors use this traditional figure to construct a Maya modernity. The appendices include transcriptions of oral stories and interview excerpts. The Maya have used oral literature and Maya language to maintain their culture since the conquest, and this dissertation focuses on the figure of the storyteller to demonstrate the complex relationship between oral and written texts in 21st-century Yukatek Maya literature

The Parallel Rural Community Curriculum: is it a transferable model?

Deaki

The Stable Poor and Criticism of Poverty Area Agencies

International and cross-cultural research concerning populations living in poverty have uncovered similarities in attitudes and behaviors associated with participation in society\u27s institutional systems. One of these similarities is that feelings of alienation are an inevitable reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class-stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society (Lewis, 1966:21). These feelings, in turn, have led poor people in general to withdraw from participation in community life, including the community\u27s institutions charged with the task of delivering services associated with physical welfare. The central task of this paper is to report findings that suggest that the degree of social stability among a poverty sample is inversely associated with favorable attitudes toward a public clinic\u27s nurse practitioner program charged with the task of treating infants

Homer1a-Dependent Crosstalk Between NMDA and Metabotropic Glutamate Receptors in Mouse Neurons

A large number of evidences suggest that group-I metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluR1a, 1b, 1c, 5a, 5b) can modulate NMDA receptor activity. Interestingly, a physical link exists between these receptors through a Homer-Shank multi-protein scaffold that can be disrupted by the immediate early gene, Homer1a. Whether such a versatile link supports functional crosstalk between the receptors is unknown.Here we used biochemical, electrophysiological and molecular biological approaches in cultured mouse cerebellar neurons to investigate this issue. We found that Homer1a or dominant negative Shank3 mutants that disrupt the physical link between the receptors allow inhibition of NMDA current by group-I mGluR agonist. This effect is antagonized by pertussis toxin, but not thapsigargin, suggesting the involvement of a G protein, but not intracellular calcium stores. Also, this effect is voltage-sensitive, being present at negative, but not positive membrane potentials. In the presence of DHPG, an apparent NMDA "tail current" was evoked by large pulse depolarization, only in neurons transfected with Homer1a. Co-immunoprecipitation experiments showed interaction between G-protein betagamma subunits and NMDA receptor in the presence of Homer1a and group-I mGluR agonist.Altogether these results suggest a direct inhibition of NMDA receptor-channel by Gbetagamma subunits, following disruption of the Homer-Shank3 complex by the immediate early gene Homer1a. This study provides a new molecular mechanism by which group-I mGluRs could dynamically regulate NMDA receptor function