Suchergebnisse

From Ruins to Ruin is a family saga told as a collection of linked short stories, not in chronological order. When Gonçalo and Beatrice meet near their respective hometowns in Portugal, they are driven by impulse and romanticism. The collision of these characters proves to be less than romantic. Beatrice feels trapped by her overprotective parents and is looking for an opportunity to leave, but Gonçalo is not the ticket she'd hoped for. Hardened by an early life of loss, loneliness, and poverty, Gonçalo is cruel and abusive. From Ruins to Ruin is an exploration of the way pain and suffering, when left to fester, are inherited by our children. Beatrice and Gonçalo's three children each absorb the hostility their parents displayed towards each other and themselves: Raquel struggles to love her body, Olivia struggles in abusive relationships, and CJ struggles handling relationships with women in his life. Their individual conflicts are, of course, informed by their experience as first-generation children growing up in America, the same way their parents' conflicts were influenced by their own respective upbringings. From Ruins to Ruin is still missing several perspectives that I have begun working on. I plan to include stories exploring Beatrice's parents, siblings, and extended family, which further inform Beatrice's character as well as her children's. The environment that shaped each character—time period, location, political climate—informs each character's story, which led to my decision to format this narrative as a collection of short stories. The inspiration for this collection began in 2016, when I noticed that our country's increasing embrasure of the far-right had not only removed the inhibitions of the most bigoted people in the United States, but also begun to inform the way the students I tutored at my undergraduate university's writing center understood and reacted to the world around them. Those in positions of power embraced this normalization, and often times used the fascist rhetoric of "family ...

The article is a study of the Bernardo Vega's manuscript focusing on the Hispanic discourse of desire that runs across the entire document and tends to defeat its stated purpose of building a Puerto Rican national memory. This Spanish ancestry pride surprisingly takes shape not in the island, but in New York. It is a Hispanic identity built abroad, in the exile, unlikely to find a local Puerto Rican counterpart. Vega's construction of the fictitious Farallón family saga, written to enhance his version of the Puerto Rican exile experience, attempts at capturing the liberal democratic tradition he extracts from Spanish historical accounts and assumes a shared pride of a common origin among Spanish speaking people. The thinking and acting subject in this manuscript is usually the New York Spanish speaking group, or, in more radical moments, the Spanish speaking tobacco workers. ; El artículo es un estudio del manuscrito de Bernardo Vega que enfoca la forma en que el deseo de lo español atraviesa prácticamente la totalidad del documento y en cierta medida derrota el objetivo declarado de abonar a una "memoria nacional puertorriqueña." El orgullo de lo hispánico crece y se consolida en Nueva York. Es un hispanismo identitario forjado en el exilio, incapaz de encontrar paralelo en el ámbito insular puertorriqueño, al cual pretendía dirigirse. Su construcción de la saga familiar de los Farallón, con la que adorna y trata de hacer más jugoso su relato de la experiencia de los puertorriqueños en Nueva York, intenta rescatar la "España democrática, humana y luminosa que queremos todos los que en el mundo hablamos español y sentimos orgullo de nuestro origen." El sujeto pensante y actuante es "la colonia de habla española", o, en momentos más radicales, "los tabaqueros de habla española."

Ethnic affinity voting is the term for when political party candidates with an ethnic minority background receive a larger share of the vote in ethnically dense neighbourhoods. This study is one of the first to provide a detailed test for ethnic affinity voting during a national election in an open-list proportional representation system, with the same ballots in every polling station. It tests the conditions under which ethnic affinity voting is greater, studying the proportion of votes for ethnic minority candidates at neighbourhood level in the Netherlands in 2017, when a minority-interest party entered parliament and the traditional ethnic vote for the social democratic party (PvdA) imploded. This study disentangles party and candidate effects and finds evidence for (general and specific) ethnic affinity voting at candidate level. Even though ethnic minority candidates attract fewer votes, they perform better in neighbourhoods where more minorities live, especially when the group size of co-ethnics is larger. Ethnic affinity effects are relatively strong for candidates affiliated with minority-oriented and left-wing parties, and absent or negative for ethnic candidates of right-wing parties. Moreover, whether male or female ethnic candidates are more likely to attract the ethnic vote also depends on the ethnic background and party affiliation of the candidate.

In her transnational plays Lenin's Shoe (2010) and Aliens with Extraordinary Skills (2010), Romanian American playwright Saviana Stănescu explores discourses of capitalist market economies, democracy, postsocialism, and gender that overlie the geographies of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the United States. Staging these discourses predominately by way of the embodied performances of US migrant women from Eastern Europe, Stănescu's plays raise questions about the relationship between (post)socialist nations and the United States, and about the attendant ideologies of socialism and capitalism in the post-9/11 moment. These female characters drive change as well as navigate it, showing that gender is central to the creation, embodiment, and performance of knowledge. The focus on women protagonists as primary producers of a transnational knowledge—one that bridges US and (post)socialist histories—counters the idea that postsocialism, and especially postsocialist feminism, has remained invisible in the West, where Eastern Europe is assumed to be in the process of becoming like the West rather than representing an inherently different space, with its own set of (post)socialist knowledge.

Elena immigrated to the United States in 2002 from Guatemala. Guatemala suffered many injustices. May people lived in extreme poverty and the government was very corrupt. It was difficult to have a good life there. I first met Elena at an organization in Cincinnati where I helped her learn English. After I met Elena, I learned that she is thirty seven years old and has lived in the United States for fifteen years. She currently works cleaning houses at night and attends classes during the day. She attended the university in Guatemala and studied business, and eventually wants to pursue her career here. Elena lives alone and most of her friends are also Latino. She dedicates most of her time to working, leaning English, and working on her health. When meeting her, I quickly learned how kind and humble she is as a person. She cares profoundly for other people and is committed to justice. It was an honor to meet her and to see her life and her past.