Lygia Fagundes Telles's novel "As meninas" portrays the oppressive social atmosphere of Brazil's authoritarian military dictatorship in a way that few other novels accomplish. Though the novel eschews the documentary "romance-reportagem" mode famously adopted by other writers from the period, "As meninas" provides a…

The explosion of interest in the recovery of historical memory in Spain seeks to address many decades of silence and forgetting during the years of the Franco dictatorship and afterwards. Working with trauma theory, Michel Foucault's understanding of silence as discourse, as well as queer theory's exploration of silence as strategy and power, this…

Detective fiction--with its roots primarily in Europe and the United States--was slow to catch on in Brazil, where national authors did not attempt more than small forays into the genre for most of the twentieth century. This was due in large part to the particularities of Brazilian society, in which law enforcement agencies, rife with corruption,…

In her 2010 novel "Sangra por la herida," the Cuban novelist, poet, and essayist Mirta Yáñez constructs a panoramic view of metropolitan Havana, following the model of Latin American fiction starting in the 1980s based on a revised version of the detective novel. "Sangra por la herida" functions best as a narrative that…

Pablo Larraín's film "No" (2012) has been widely viewed and reviewed both at home in Chile and internationally. Some reviewers have focused on the film's representation of the triumph of hope and optimism over tyranny. Others have criticized the film's historical inaccuracy, citing a list of details that the film either got wrong or left…

Chilean novelists born during the 1970s who experienced as children the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are reappraising how the dictatorship may have harmed its second-generation survivors. Initially most of these writers ignored politics, focusing instead on blighted intimate relationships, and those few who did explore the aftereffects of…

By the mid-1920s, the feminist movement was gaining strong support within Cuban society, at the same time that Cubans were growing discontent with the repression and corruption of Gerardo Machado's dictatorial regime. Within this context, women writers like Ofelia Rodríguez Acosta fused the feminist fight for women's rights with a nationalist…

The long-running Spanish television program "Cuéntame cómo pasó" represents not only a wildly successful series for Radio Televisión Española, but also an excellent example of the project of historical memory. Premiering in 2001 (but set, in the first season, in 1968), the story of the multigenerational Alcántara family forms a…

This article directly resulted from the teacher/researcher experience, describing new analyses resulting from subtitling a film for curriculum incorporation: "Tango feroz, la leyenda de Tanguito" (1993). Set in Argentina in the sixties and loosely based on the life of José Alberto Iglesias Correa, also known as Tanguito, this film…