Privileged Mestizos: A Case Study of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl
Recent explorations of Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl’s writing have begun to set historical accuracy aside and to instead focus on what the author’s strategic retellings of the Aztec past reveal about his colonial reality. Ever-pertinent to this discussion is the matter of Don Fernando’s ‘identity’ - who he was racially, ethnically, religiously, and academically - but there is no one answer to these questions. As Joanne Rappaport asserts in The Disappearing Mestizo, applying the question of ‘identity’, with all its modern essentialist/constructivist connotations, to colonial actors is anachronic and insufficient. Don Fernando was what he needed to be in any given context. In his writing, he played around with what Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper refer to as social location (one’s economic, moral, political, legal, and class standing in relation to other members of society) and identification processes (a set of relational and contextual processes, both internal (I identify myself) and external (someone identifies me)) constantly. This essay merges the notion of social location with that of narrativity (the ontological dimension of narratives… the way in which narratives not only represent but, in an important sense, constitute social actors and the social world in which they act) and suggests the use of a new analytic term when exploring mestizo chronicles: narrative location, a process by which individuals are able to locate themselves socially via the narratives they perpetuate. Moreover, it seeks to outline how Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl employed his narrative location to retain and gain power within the Spanish colonial system, to put this rhetorical and legal strategy in conversation with those utilized more generally by the ‘male privileged mestizo’ described in Rappaport’s text.
In Press: The Hispanic Journal, Spring 2025
Conferences:
Shifting Languages, Evolving Cultures: Navigating Social, Literary and Artistic Dynamics - The University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
KFLC The Languages, Literatures and Conference - University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY
No lo soy
Written in Spanish, “No lo soy” details my experiences with imposter syndrome as an undergraduate student; I use a mix of anecdotes and data to explain the barriers that people within my ethnic demographic face when applying to and attending college. My personal setbacks are tied to a lack of cultural capital and a subpar pre-collegiate education. Cultural capital can be partially defined as the accumulation of knowledge used to demonstrate one's cultural competence. My parents were first generation immigrants; they therefore lacked this capital and were unable to help throughout my college-career. I had to navigate the system and find answers to questions like: How do I finance my education? Should I pursue a graduate degree? What do I need to do to prepare for graduate school applications? Moreover, I had to answer these questions while dealing with imposter syndrome, a sense of intellectual inferiority I felt relative to my classmates. After detailing how I came to terms with these issues, I reflect on those barriers I wasn’t subject to: language, citizenship, financial aid access, etc. and express the hope that becoming a professor will allow me to help students facing these same barriers.
Suggestions, Not Assertions: Childhood and Gender Constructions in Peter and Wendy and Pan’s Labyrinth
Whether a literary/filmic piece informs or entertains, it will never fail to impart ideas onto its audience; it’s in uncritically accepting these ideas that people fall into the dangers of indoctrination. Academics have written much on J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy’s atypical narration, but a lot of this work fails to emphasize how the narration leads to audience implication: the placing of the reader within the story, not just as a listener, but as a participant and co-narrator. It is exactly this feature of the novel that warrants a comparative analysis of it and Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth. I posit that audience implication in Peter and Wendy and Pan’s Labyrinth has a positive effect: the ideas presented about women, their motherly responsibility, their ever-infantile state, their innate sexual knowledge, and the ideas posed about children’s morality and the duration of childhood, are not presented as assertions, but as suggestions.
Under Review: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts
Conferences:
Social Science History Association 2021 Annual Meeting - Philadelphia, PA
Fresh from the Fight: Heroes, Tricksters and Villains in Children’s and YA Literature and Culture - Vancouver, BC
Hybrid Identities: Transmediality, Technology and Cultural Changes in Contemporary Times - University of Colorado Boulder
Las verdades subjetivas: La narración en La Amortajada
Contar historias sin incluir aquello que sentimos, es negar que vivimos bajo una misma condición humana. En La amortajada, María Luisa Bombal sitúa a su protagonista en un limbo - un espacio entre la vida y la muerte - y de esta manera exige que el lector acepte la existencia de las realidades subjetivas. Los elementos sobrenaturales de la historia y la voz narrativa cambiante - aquí en primera persona, acá en segunda, allá en tercera - sirven para enfatizar la validez e importancia de estas realidades; asimismo, tras la repetición, las preguntas retóricas, la yuxtaposición, y un lenguaje sumamente sensual, el lector aprende que la línea entre el odio y el amor es fina y que ambas emociones le prestan riqueza a una vida reinada por la pasión y la sensación.
La parodia y el humor en La maestra rural
La maestra rural por Luciano Lamberti incuestionablemente trata con el terror, la paranoia y el asco; sin embargo, sus elementos humorísticos destacan. Para analizar este uso simultáneo del horror y el humor, uno necesita empezar con la cuestión del género. Al emprender la pregunta de tal manera, podremos ver que el humor dominante de la novela es la parodia. En Gothic and the Comic Turn, Horner y Zlosnik definen la parodia como “a literary mode that, while engaging with a target text or genre, exhibits a keen sense of the comic, and acute awareness of intertextuality and an engagement with the idea of metafiction” (12). Bajo esta definición, se puede argumentar que La maestra rural opera como una parodia simultánea de dos géneros literarios que coinciden - la novela gótica y la ficción conspiranoica - entendido esto, podremos explorar cómo la parodia de Lamberti deriva de sus antecedentes e innova sobre los mismos para crear un mundo ‘uncanny’.