On the eighth of October, 1622, Lope de Vega finished "La nueva victoria de don Gonzalo de Córdoba." This "comedia" recounts a Spanish victory in the Battle of Fleurus, one of several military triumphs that encouraged hope and excitement during the early years of Philip IV's reign. The battle had occurred in late August of…

Following several calls in recent scholarship for increased attention to the study of the Central American diaspora in the United States, this article offers readings of Honduran-born author Roberto Quesada's novels "Big Banana" (1999) and "Nunca entres por Miami" (2003). Written in New York City, where he has resided since…

The poem "Ritmos negros del Perú" by Afro-Peruvian writer Nicomedes Santa Cruz recovers Afro-Peruvian history and agency through the retelling of the journey of a mythical grandmother. Through the retelling of her story, the poet claims blackness and African roots as pillars of Peruvian culture. In so doing, Santa Cruz opens the door not…

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…

Portuguese is the fifth most-spoken language in the world, with about 260 million speakers (and growing to an expected 400 million by 2050), the third most spoken in the West, the most widely spoken in the Southern Hemisphere, an official language in 9 countries and other regions. It is present in Europe, South America, Africa, and parts of Asia.…

Newspaper coverage of the Canudos War dehumanized the "sertanejos," portraying them in such a way that empathy or grief for their suffering was inaccessible to the Brazilian readership. Euclides da Cunha, a war correspondent for the newspaper "O Estado de São Paulo," was amongst those who contributed to the state's war…

Historically, black women's hair has been a site where power and social relations are defined. In Puerto Rico, cultural production has been critical in perpetuating as well as in contesting the prevailing white European ideal of beauty and its impact on women's hairstyling practices. Nevertheless, the link between aesthetic preferences and the…

By reimagining William Faulkner's 1954 visit to Brazil, Antônio Dutra's "Dias de Faulkner" (2008) establishes a creative dialogue with Faulkner's "oeuvre" while also inquiring into the author's enigmatic personality. In the process Dutra's narrative invites us to reflect on the complex and contradictory relationship between the…

Based on practical reflections on the role of language educators and Portuguese language learners in diasporic communities in the state of California, this short-form article shares academic contributions from the Luso-Brazilian Studies Program at the University of California, Davis, to underrepresented groups in Lusophone communities amidst the…

Cervantes's "novela" creates a complex protagonist due in part to the involvement of the slaves' destructive and creative energies: a linguistic and erotic paradox. Linguistically the female slave foregrounds the historical dichotomy between "ladinos" and "bozales" and the related problematic of conversion,…

In his "Relación de Texcoco," Juan Bautista de Pomar (c. 1535-90) takes a political and moral stance against Spanish colonialism in Texcoco and the entire viceroyalty of New Spain. Responding to the "Instrucción y memoria's" (1577) request for information about the history and cultural practices of local populations, Pomar…

This paper examines the trajectories of two characters in Laura Antillano's short story, "Tuna de mar" (1991), as they navigate interrelated systems of power and attempt to position themselves closer to, or further away from, the margins. Set in the late eighteenth century, the tale features a female protagonist who escapes prostitution…

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 current study explores the function of physical space as a metaphor for freedom and sexual expression in Benito Pérez Galdós's novel Tristana (1892) and Luis Buñuel's loose filmic adaptation (1970). The female walk, a foundational activity in the formative process of the subject, will serve Tristana as a path towards emancipation and freedom,…

Ventura García Calderón (1886-1959) was a Peruvian man of letters and a diplomat who was at the center of the hispanophone community in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. Known as a proponent of Spanish American literature, García Calderón achieved a global celebrity for his dramatic, colorful, and ironic short stories. These…