Los Pasos Research Articles

Design of a service project that provides a model for interprofessional collaboration and layered learning within the refugee and asylum seeker community

Background: Development of an interprofessional service outreach within the refugee and asylum-seeker population gives pharmacy trainees the opportunity to develop healthcare skills and gain cultural awareness. Programme description: The interprofessional team prepared for the medical service trip through meetings, gathering supplies, and engaging in fundraising events. The team partnered with Siguiendo los Pasos de Jesús (SPJ) and Annunciation House while observing and partaking in service. A retrospective review of medical records was completed to develop the research project. Evaluation: A team of nine participated in a service project providing medical care and support for asylum-seekers. Layered learning and the importance of interdisciplinary communication were demonstrated within the team. The most common medical ailments for patients were respiratory, gastrointestinal diagnoses and headache/pain. Future plans: Service outreach offers the experience of caring for underserved populations and increases awareness of cross-cultural development, which is transferable in any clinical setting.

Gold and gold-bearing volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits of the Central Cuba

Background. Volcanogenic massive sulphide deposits (VMS) are the most important sources of Cu and Zn; they account for a large share of the world production of Pb, Ag, Au, Se, Te, Bi and Sb, as well as small amounts of many other metals. The polymetallic VMS deposits of economic value of varying degrees are known in the rocks of the Los Pasos Cretaceous Formation, Cuba.Aim. To show the potential of the Cretaceous volcanic deposits of Central Cuba for gold, silver, copper, zinc and lead deposit prospecting.Materials and methods. The study characterises the San Fernando, Independencia, Antonio, Los Cerros VMS deposits and the Boca del Toro and El Sol ore occurrences located in the Los Pasos Formation. The similarities and differences in the mineral and elemental composition and structures of the ores of these objects are described, which underlie the assessment of their economic importance.Results. The latitudinal zoning of VMS and noble metal mineralisation of the Central Cuban ore region is outlined. In the west, copper-VMS deposits with accompanying gold ore objects prevail. In the east, copper-zinc VMS deposits with barite and gold-silver objects are widespread.Conclusions. It is necessary to assume the different erosional sections corresponding to the blocks of the Cretaceous volcanic arc of Central Cuba, which is larger in the west and smaller in the east. Proceeding from the presence of veinlet gold ores, their confinement to tectonic zones and the lack of correlation between noble and chalcophile metals at the San Fernando deposit, as well as significantly different gold-silver ratios in the considered ore objects, it could be assumed that some of the gold-silver ores were formed after VMS. The obtained Au/Ag ratios are close to the ores of the high sulphidation type (high sulphide ores) from similar ore regions of Venezuela and the Kur-il island arc. In this regard, one can expect hidden gold deposits in the west and gold-silver deposits in the east of the studied area.

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago

Reviewed by: Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago Charlotte Rogers Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2021. 274 pp. Can literature literally shape the landscape? In Fictional Environments, Victoria Saramago explores this question and others in a thoroughly researched and elegantly written examination of canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American [End Page 819] novels. The impressive breadth of this book, which analyzes João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: Veredas, Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Clarice Lispector's A cidade sitiada, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Amazonian fiction, is matched by the depth of its engagement with ecocritical theory and the extensive critical bibliographies on each of these well-studied authors. Saramago argues that the fictional texts in her corpus do not merely reflect each author's vision of the physical biome, but rather that they serve as "sites for the production of knowledge about, imaginations of, and interventions in Latin American environments" (5). In doing so, she stakes a significant claim for the ongoing importance of studying canonical novels through innovative theoretical and methodological lenses. Most importantly, by showing how literature informs ecological perceptions, Fictional Environments points out the agency, and therefore the urgency, of literary works on our rapidly changing planet. A major contribution to Latin American literary studies, this book is also essential reading for scholars of the broader field of environmental humanities interested in how literature configures physical spaces and collective imaginations. Fictional Environments proposes that these iconic novels published from the 1940s to the 1960s sparked ecological imaginaries, inspired the creation of conservation areas, and contributed to environmental policies even before the advent of organized environmentalist movements in Latin America. Deforestation, a hallmark of the ecological history of the South American continent that accelerated rapidly in the period she studies, forms the backdrop against which varying forms of extractivism, agricultural industrialization, and urbanization play out. The complex, mimetic relationship between the physical landscape and the fictional realm during times of ecological change lies at the heart of Fictional Environments. Saramago offers sure-footed explanations of the shifting role of mimesis in literary studies, including Auerbach's classic text and Timothy Morton's concept of ecomimesis. The author makes her own original contribution to this field in coining the term "reverse mimesis" to indicate how physical environments have been shaped to more closely resemble literary texts in national parks and conservation areas. At the same time, Saramago shows, referential reality becomes a painfully spectral presence in literary works as deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization make the contemporary landscape diverge sharply from its earlier fictional representations. Rather than organizing her study according to language, geography, or temporality, Saramago divides the book into three sections: "Conservation," "Development," and "The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction." In each section, Saramago offers a bird's-eye view of the literary texts' reception history and socioecological context, and occasionally swoops down to perform close readings of key ecological entanglements in the works themselves. Special credit is due to the editors of the Flashpoints series at Northwestern University Press for retaining the original Spanish and Portuguese quotations in addition to English-language translations, which deepens the richness of Saramago's analysis. "Conservation" consists of two chapters examining how Grande sertão: Veredas and Los pasos perdidos distill environments in fiction and simultaneously shape preservation efforts. For example, the famous sertão is now the site of extensive soy, [End Page 820] corn, rice, and eucalyptus monoculture plantations, and the larger savannah biome known as the cerrado is predicted to disappear entirely by 2030. Saramago's argument for reverse mimesis is strongest in this first chapter, which shows how the Guimarães Rosa Tourist Circuit, the Manuelzão Project, and the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park each attempt to make their protected area imitate the sertão of the novel. This remarkable intervention "challenges the very notion of literary representation as a one-way process" (33). Los pasos perdidos, Saramago proposes, is one of several works (including Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Richard Schomburgk's Travels in...

Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder ed. by Jennifer Smith

Reviewed by: Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder ed. by Jennifer Smith Alexander M. Cárdenas Smith, Jennifer, editor. Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder. Bucknell UP, 2019, Pp. 236. ISBN 978-1-68448-032-6. Modern Spanish Women as Agents of Change: Essays in Honor of Maryellen Bieder is a collection of eleven essays that present new approaches to assess Spanish writers’ and social activists’ literary and political contributions to feminism in nineteenth-century Spain. As Jennifer Smith points out in the Introduction, this collection is a tribute to the prolific academic Maryellen Bieder, one of the most relevant scholars of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, whose influential works on female Spanish writers, such as Emilia Pardo Bazán and women writers who lived through the Spanish Civil War, revolutionized literary criticism by exploring issues of female identity, feminist discourse, the interplay of gender and nationality, among others. In chapter 1, Akiko Tsuchiya examines María Rosa Gálvez’s and Faustina Sáez de Melgar’s antislavery plays titled “Zinda” (1804) and “La cadena rota” (1879), respectively. As the author reveals, these plays gravitate around themes regarding gender, race and colonialism. Tsuchiya focuses, in particular, on the ways in which the female playwrights strategically deployed Romantic and neo-Romantic melodrama as a means to advocate for the rights of the colonized, the slave, and women. Christine Arkinstall relates in chapter 2 the impressive academic life of journalist, fiction writer and women’s rights activist Sofía Tartillán (1829–1888). In particular, she analyzes the ideological background that shaped Tartillán’s writings, which fiercely defended, among other rights, women’s education. Influenced by the values of Enlightenment, Realism, Krausism, Freemasonry and Republicanism, Tartillán fought for women’s inclusion in the Spanish political sphere as primary “educators of future citizens and makers of national well-being” (47). In chapter 3, Roberta Johnson explores the intertextuality among Carmen de Burgos, Georg Simmel and Gregorio Marañón with respect to defining the nature and social and individual effects of fashion. In her description of Burgos’s conception, Johnson is able to identify similarities but also radical differences with Simmel’s social interpretation and Marañón’s biological understanding of fashion. In her feminist essay La mujer moderna y sus derechos (1927), Burgos expounds fashion as closely tied to feminism, as a means through which women could emancipate themselves from patriarchal and heteronormative rules and create their own sexually empowering image. Fashion, moreover, undermines class distinctions. Susana M. McKenna studies in chapter 4 Emilia Pardo Bazán’s literary theory as drafted in “Apuntes,” which is the prologue to Los pasos de Ulloa (1886), and the ways in which such a theory in fact reflects narrative techniques (such as the framing device), metaliterature, intertextuality, and reading modalities constructed in Pardo Bazán’s fiction, especially the story “El baile del Querubín” (1891). For McKenna, the unfounded defense of the traditional over the modern and the socially accepted enclosure of women in the domestic sphere, both of which are handled with irony in the story, in fact correspond to real situations that Pardo Bazán experienced and fought to change in her fiction. In chapter 5, Linda M. Willem deploys Armine Kotin Mortimer’s concept of the second story in her analysis of some of Pardo Bazán’s stories. In the two pairs of stories explored here, namely “Presentido” (1910)—“En coche-cama” (1914) and “Confidencia” (1892)—“Madre” (1893), Willem is able to postulate that the second story in each set (published at a later date) reveals a new approach to a theme already taken in its counterpart. Furthermore, they require an active reader who could fill in the gaps, question the reliability of the narrators, distinguish between framing and embedded narrations, and find the hidden and true resolutions [End Page 291] of the conflicts in each story. Denis DuPont explores in chapter 6 the parallelisms between Pardo Bazán’s novel Dulce sueño (1911) and the French Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novels À rebours (1884), Là-bas (1891), En route (1895), La cathédrale (1898...

Notes on the Trip to the Great Savannah

In July 1947, the Cuban Author Alejo Carpentier traveled from his home in caracas to the sparsely inhabited interior of venezuela, visiting the country's tropical forests and its great plains. At the time, Carpentier was known principally as a music critic and newspaper columnist for El Nacional in Venezuela and Carteles in Cuba; he had yet to publish El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World; 1949), which would launch his career as a novelist and earn him international renown. Carpentier later wrote a novel about a trip much like the one he took in 1947. In the now-canonical Los pasos perdidos (The Lost Steps; 1953), a failed composer finds inspiration by traveling from a cosmopolitan city to the tropical forests of South America. Carpentier's creativity was similarly sparked by his trip to the Venezuelan wilderness, as his travel diary Notas del viaje a la Gran Sabana (Notes on the Trip to the Great Savannah) makes clear. Notas is the only contemporary account of the journey written by Carpentier, who later made contradictory statements about the details and even the number of trips he took. Beyond its documentary value, the travel diary reveals that Carpentier's experience was deeply enmeshed with his readings, a characteristic that also marks the narrator-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, Notas is of broad ecocritical and historical significance because it makes clear the extent to which the forests and plains of South America were changing during Venezuela's boom in oil drilling and gold mining in the 1940s. Inspired by what he witnessed in Venezuela, Carpentier created the central drama of Los pasos perdidos out of his protagonist's desire to inhabit what the author called the “mundo del Genesis” (“world of Genesis”) at a time when extractive industries were rapidly transforming the economies, ecologies, and societies of the region (“La Gran Sabana” 32).

Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura by José Jurado Morales

Reviewed by: Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura by José Jurado Morales Joan L. Brown Jurado Morales, José. Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura. Visor, 2018. Pp. 256. ISBN 978-8-49895-196-7. José Jurado Morales, Catedrático de Literatura Española at the University of Cádiz, Spain, is a leading expert on canonical Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite (1925–2000). Among his books are one definitive volume on her short stories and another on her novels. Carmen Martín Gaite, el juego de la vida y la literatura presents nearly two decades of original scholarship on Martín Gaite's literature. As with his earlier books, this collection demonstrates Jurado Morales's talent for synthesizing her work. New and compelling ideas are rooted in a profound knowledge of Martín Gaite's life and literature and enhanced by a sweeping command of international scholarship and literary theory. A bonus for the reader is Jurado Morales's direct and engaging style. Although the term "page-turner" is not usually applied to volumes of literary criticism, it is an appropriate descriptor for this one. The book opens with a preliminary chapter entitled "Carmen Martín Gaite: de la vida a la literatura." This introduction previews the volume's contents; it also reveals Jurado Morales's personal introduction to the author, when he first read her 1958 novel Entre visillos as a university student—a discovery that will resonate with many readers. Six thematic divisions organize the book's fourteen chapters. Fittingly, the first section is entitled "El fundamento autobiográfico." The opening chapter, "Tentativas autobiográficas," supplies a portrait of the woman who "vivió para escribir y escribió para sentir que vivía" (12). The next chapter, "Experiencia vital y escritura poética," traces the autobiographical content of Martín Gaite's poetry over time, and the third chapter, "Viaje a El cuarto de atrás," offers a succinct overview of her celebrated autobiographical novel from 1978. Section 2, "Amistad y literatura: Ignacio Aldecoa," features two essays on the relationship between Martín Gaite and Aldecoa. "A modo de homenaje: Esperando el porvenir" is an incisive review of Martín Gaite's 1994 memoir of the generation of mid-century, and "Los pasos encontrados de Martín Gaite e Ignacio Aldecoa" is a revelatory exploration of Aldecoa's impact on Martín Gaite. Generational connections are further developed in section 3, "Etapas de aprendizaje: cuentos del medio siglo," whose two chapters focus on the author's short stories. In "'Un día de libertad,' primer cuento de Martín Gaite," Jurado Morales finds characteristics in her first short story that will typify all of her future work, and "Algo más que cuentos de mujeres" demonstrates how Martín Gaite's stories contain some of her most transcendent social criticism. Part 4, entitled "El arte de pensar," presents four chapters related to narrative. "La entrada en el castillo: una poética del lector" defines Martín Gaite's relationship with her readers and with writing itself. In "Vivir el tiempo," time and temporality are analyzed across the author's fiction and nonfiction. The third essay in this section, "Sobre Los usos amorosos del dieciocho en España," elucidates the affinities between Martín Gaite's historical scholarship on the eighteenth century and her creative writing, demonstrating how both fields are informed by identical concerns. The final essay in this group, "La narrativa de Martín Gaite o la esencia misma del ensayo," also makes new connections across genres, showing how Martín Gaite's novels enact conceptions of literature and narration that are rooted in conventions of the essay. The last phase of Martín Gaite's career is the subject of Section Five, "Las novelas de supervivencia." In "De vida y literatura existencial: Lo raro es vivir" Jurado Morales traces the existential aspects of this 1996 novel, and in "Mundo interior y sociedad posmoderna: Los parentescos" he explores reflections of postmodern Spain in Martín Gaite's last, unfinished novel, published in 2001. The volume closes with part 6, "Texto sobre texto." This section contains...

Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje by Jens Andermann

Reviewed by: Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje by Jens Andermann Brendan Lanctot Andermann, Jens. Tierras en trance. Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje. Santiago de Chile: Metales Pesados, 2018. Jens Andermann’s latest book engages in a reinterpretation of Latin American modernities from the post-human present, by focusing on cultural production whose work, we might say, is the earth itself. Its five central chapters consider a wide-ranging corpus in rough chronological order. This sequence begins with the filmmakers, poets, and automobile pioneers who crisscrossed the interior of the continent in the 1920s, and concludes with present-day cinema and bioart. The intervening chapters consider, respectively, architecture, (neo)regionalist literature from Quiroga to the memoirs of Central American guerrillas, and land art, installations, and performances by figures that include Hélio Oiticica, the Ciudad Abierta collective, and Ana Mendieta. There is not enough room in a review of this length to enumerate the many artifacts that Andermann examines over the course of more than 400 pages, but the summary above points to how Tierras en trance traverses disciplinary boundaries in order to demonstrate how different forms of human inscription trace and undo the conventional partitions between subject and landscape, culture and nature, and techne and poiesis. An underlying premise for this interrogation appears in the form of a rhetorical question that most directly concerns the structures and gardens examined in the second chapter: “¿Por qué no hacerle a un edificio o un parque, entonces, las preguntas que le haríamos a un poema o un cuadro, preguntas acerca de las historias que narra sobre ese lugar, y de cómo lo acomoda a nuestras miradas y nuestros cuerpos para que lo habitemos?” (141). That is, in spite of the relatively autonomous fields that condition the cultural practices that precede what Andermann coins the “giro ambiental” of the latter half of the twentieth century, there is a kind of discursive economy by which they articulate variants of a common experience: the trance or in-corporation that uproots bodies and places from preexisting forms of belonging and relating. Bringing art, architecture, film, and literature into dialogue, Tierras en trance argues that the reconfiguration of landscape that took place as state power was ascendant toward the beginning of the twentieth century has gradually ceded to new modes of agency that arrest and explode the limits between human and non-human. This shift is neither linear nor cohesive, as Andermann takes care to stress the affinities (or “vibrations” as he calls them) linking works from different disciplines and historical periods, as well as the contradictory visions of contemporary works. For example, the final of section of chapter three, “Días de la selva: del Putumayo al Quiché,” demonstrates that, while the memoirs of Central American guerillas share apparent ideological affinities, plots, and settings with Che Guevara’s Pasajes de la Guerra revolucionaria, a biopolitical reading reveals a deeper and deeply ambivalent relationship to the human-nature interface elaborated in novelas de la selva such as La vorágine and Los pasos perdidos. Indeed, the incessant return to the [End Page 1037] liminal sites of exploration, exploitation and extraction is central to the book as a whole, from Roberto Burle Marx’s repurposing of an old fazenda as a sort of “landscape laboratory” (168–72), to Robert Smithson’s photolog of his mirror installations in the Yucatan, to the pampa of Albertina Carri’s films (to trace yet another arbitrary trajectory). These engagements do not passively represent prevailing modes of land use, but instead rehearse and enact alternate ways of relating to the earth. Take, for example, the contrast Andermann draws between Andrea Juan’s Antarctic performances known as Sur Polar (Arte + Ciencia), initiated in 2008, and Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares’s Forest Law – Selva jurídica (2014), a project inspired by a lawsuit filed by the Kichwa community against the Ecuadorian government and an Argentine petroleum company. Juan’s project, whose immediate audience is restricted to the small scientific community permitted on the Antarctic base, figures art as a kind of privileged witness to a sequestered natural environment, held in reserve in times of climate change...

시원의 세계를 찾아 떠나는 아나바시스: 알레호 까르뻰띠에르의 『잃어버린 발자취』와 유토피아적 비전

시원의 세계를 찾아 떠나는 아나바시스: 알레호 까르뻰띠에르의 『잃어버린 발자취』와 유토피아적 비전

Los Pasos de López (Mexican elections 2018: a commentary)

Los Pasos de López (Mexican elections 2018: a commentary)

The Power of the Archive in El negro Francisco by Antonio Zambrana

During most of the 19th century, an important body of literary works appeared outside of Cuba criticizing the institution of slavery on the island, the system’s inherent violence, its sexual practices, and its repercussions on the white population. Among the most famous works published at the time were Sab (1841), by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and Cecilia Valdés ([1839] 1882), by Cirilo Villaverde. In this essay, I would like to explore a lesser known novel that was published by a Cuban writer of the following generation—El negro Francisco (1875), by Antonio Zambrana y Vazquez—in order to understand the principal role of the legal and anthropological archives in the novel, as well as the author’s use of newspaper reports and advertisements. How are these texts and styles intertwined in the novel to criticize institutional slavery on the Island? How does the authorial voice appear in the novel when we consider a tradition present since the beginning of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas—which reached the 20th century with novels such as Los pasos perdidos (1958) by Alejo Carpentier? I would base my arguments on Roberto González Echevarría’s interpretation of Latin American novel in Mito y Archivo, una teoría de la narrativa latinoamericana, in which he employs basic concepts of US critical anthropology in order to re-interpret various aspects of 19th century Latin American history.

CULTURAL ADAPTATIONS OF EVIDENCE-BASED HOME-VISITATION MODELS IN TRIBAL COMMUNITIES.

The Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (Tribal MIECHV) Program provides federal grants to tribes, tribal consortia, tribal organizations, and urban Indian organizations to implement evidence-based home-visiting services for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) families. To date, only one evidence-based home-visiting program has been developed for use in AI/AN communities. The purpose of this article is to describe the steps that four Tribal MIECHV Programs took to assess community needs, select a home-visiting model, and culturally adapt the model for use in AI/AN communities. In these four unique Tribal MIECHV Program settings, each program employed a rigorous needs-assessment process and developed cultural modifications in accordance with community strengths and needs. Adaptations occurred in consultation with model developers, with consideration of the conceptual rationale for the program, while grounding new content in indigenous cultures. Research is needed to improve measurement of home-visiting outcomes in tribal and urban AI/AN settings, develop culturally grounded home-visiting interventions, and assess the effectiveness of home visiting in AI/AN communities.

Del escrito ensayístico Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva de Alejo Carpentier y de su proyección en su novela Los pasos perdidos: de un eufónico viaje a la semilla

La proliferación de escritos teóricos e investigaciones en torno a la figura de Alejo Carpentier y su novelística se hizo hecho notorio a lo largo de los años 60, 70, 80 e inicios de los 90. Tras un aplacamiento de dicha fiebre en las postrimerías del anterior siglo, el interés por el autor rebrota con la celebración del centenario de su nacimiento (2004). Con todo, cabe apuntar que resulta pobre y exiguo el número de acercamientos de tipo interdisciplinario que se han practicado para con la ensayística de índole musicológica del autor. En el presente artículo procedemos, por un lado, a diseccionar, analizar y presentar el ensayo inédito de Carpentier Los orígenes de la música y la música primitiva, cuya importancia, como una significativa parte de la ensayística musicológica del autor cubano, ha sido devaluada por los integrantes del aparato crítico; y a examinar, por otro lado, cómo el ensayo sirve al autor como teoría programática para la consolidación de su novela Los pasos perdido.

Wagner and Schoenberg in the New World: The Legacy of German Musical Romanticism in Los pasos perdidos

Alejo Carpentier's voyages to the Amazon in 1947 and 1948 gave him plenty of inspiration to write his novel Los pasos perdidos. However, the premise of the novel (the problems of the Latin American composer) predates these Amazonian expeditions. By examining the novel alongside several essays and cronicas, in this article I present Carpentier's hope for the Latin American artist's ability to create freely: disengaged from the pressure of having to either conform to European traditions or fully embrace Latin America's myths and natural landscape. In doing so, I analyze Carpentier's complex views towards Richard Wagner, which are informed by Nietzsche, and I ultimately propose that for Carpentier, the model for Latin American composers is Arnold Schoenberg, despite the disinterest expressed towards his compositional techniques by the unnamed protagonist in Los pasos perdidos.

The Bibliographical Collections and Archives of the Fundación Alejo Carpentier, Cuba

The great Latin American novelist Alejo Carpentier was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 26 December 1904, to a French father and Russian mother. Some years later, the family settled in the outskirts of Fdavana, Cuba. Carpentier's literary and musical sensibility became apparent from a very early age. In 1922, he began his journalistic career. Fie was imprisoned for some weeks during the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado and, in 1928, after being given Cuban nationality, he was able to move to France where he joined the Surrealist group. In Paris, he became a correspondent for Cuban magazines and also wrote for French and Latin American publications. It was during this period that he concluded his first novel, iEcue-Yamba-O!, which was first published in Spain. In 1939 he returned to Cuba where he continued his journalistic work, also publishing some short stories and undertaking research for what would later become La musica en Cuba (1946).1 In 1945, he moved to Venezuela in order to work in radio, which gave him more time for journalism and literary production. It was during this period that some of his most significant works were published: El reino de este mundo (1949); El acoso (1956); Guerra del tiempo (1956); and Los pasos perdidos (1953). It was also where he wrote El siglo de las luces (1962).2 After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, he settled permanently in Cuba and took up several cultural posts (this is also where El siglo de las luces was first published). In 1966, he was appointed to a diplomatic post in France; it was there that he collated and published a large number of his essays, as well as writing his last novels: El recurso del metodo (1974); Concierto barroco (1974); La consagracion de la primavera (1978); El arpa y la sombra (1979).3 Carpentier died in Paris on 24 April 1980. During his lifetime, he received many national and international awards, including the international Cino del Duca World Prize and the Spanish Miguel de Cervantes Prize for literature in the Spanish language. He is considered to be one of the most representative Latin American authors of the twentieth century and one of the first writers to be recognised in the Latin American 'boom'.The Fundacion Alejo Carpentier (FAC) was created by the writer's widow, Lilia Esteban Carpentier, who bequeathed before her death all her goods, including those inherited from her husband. In 1982, she established the Centro de Promocion Cultural Alejo Carpentier (Alejo Carpentier Centre for Cultural Promotion) which in 1993 became the FAC. The FAC is a cultural NGO whose principal objective is to disseminate the life and work of Carpentier through the following areas of action: by supporting Cuban and non-Cuban research on this topic; by publishing, in Cuba and elsewhere, Carpentier's oeuvre, both known and hitherto unpublished; by conserving and restoring the bibliographical collections and archives; and by generally disseminating the archives through organising conferences, postgraduate courses and exhibitions. The FAC is based in two headquarters: the first, in the Habana Vieja area of the Cuban capital, is located in the mansion which was the inspiration for the house inhabited by the protagonists of El siglo de las luces (intelligently restored thanks to the efforts of the Oficina del Historiador de La Habana [Office of the Historian of Havana]); the other headquarters, where the directorate is located, is the former residence of the novelist and his wife, where the latter lived until her death in 2008, located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana.4The FAC has negotiated publishing agreements with publishers in many countries around the world, which help the writer's work become known in many different languages. In Cuba, the most important relationship with publishers is maintained with Editorial Letras Cubanas, under the Instituto Cubano del Libro (Cuban Book Institute), which has established the Biblioteca Alejo Carpentier (Alejo Carpentier Library). …

Mario Vargas Llosa and the novela de la selva

This article considers the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa's four Amazonian novels within the context of other twentieth-century works set in the region, especially the Latin-American novela de la selva, or jungle novel. Vargas Llosa's employment of techniques such as shifting, unreliable narrators, irony, parody and intertextuality are similar to jungle novels such as José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine, Rómulo Gallegos' Canaima, and Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos. Moreover, the presentation of Amazonia as a site of adventure, unbridled sexuality, violence and injustice clearly links Vargas Llosa's works to the Latin-American telluric novels of the 1920s and 1930s, despite the author's proclaimed low opinion of that genre. In fact, Vargas Llosa composes a literary wilderness that reveals his fractious and long-standing relationship with the novela de la selva. By examining the Peruvian writer's novelistic production over the course of fifty years, this article shows that Vargas Llosa's depiction of Amazonia pays a complicated homage to the jungle novel of the early twentieth century.

Mineralogy, geochemistry and sulfur isotope characterization of Cerro de Maimón (Dominican Republic), San Fernando and Antonio (Cuba) lower Cretaceous VMS deposits: Formation during subduction initiation of the proto-Caribbean lithosphere within a fore-arc

The volcanic-arc Lower Cretaceous Maimón (Dominican Republic) and Los Pasos (Cuba) Formations, representative of the oldest magmatism recorded in the Caribbean island arc, host most of the known volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) deposits in the Greater Antilles. On the basis of new lithogeochemical data, basalts of the Maimón Formation are classified as fore arc basalts (FAB), boninites and less abundant low-Ti (LOTI) and normal island-arc tholeiites (IAT), and those of the Los Pasos Formation as LOTI and IAT. Felsic volcanics from the two formations are geochemically analogous and present mantle-type (M-type), boninitic and tholeiitic signatures, classifying as FIV-type, typical of post-Archaean VMS-bearing juvenile volcanic suites. This lithogeochemical data is indicative of formation in a fore-arc environment just after subduction initiation in association with initial extensional regimes and associated boninitic and tholeiitic melts that originated in the shallow mantle. Within this tectonic framework, rocks of the Los Pasos Formation and associated VMS deposits likely formed at a slightly later stage than those of the Maimón Formation.Primary syngenetic ore mineral assemblages from VMS deposits in the Cerro de Maimón (Maimón Formation), San Fernando and Antonio (Los Pasos Formation) are similar. They are composed mainly of pyrite in a matrix with variable proportions of chalcopyrite, sphalerite and tennantite. However, variable metamorphism and deformation have imprinted distinct deformation/recovery textures on the three deposits. Relict sedimentary-diagenetic sulfide growths are preserved only in Antonio ore in the form of local framboidal and colloform growths and microcrystallite textures. Spongy texture, dominant in the Antonio deposit and sparse in San Fernando ores, along with overgrowths of pyrite are interpreted as representative of syn-depositional hydrothermal replacement. Annealing texture among pyrite grains and rotated pyrite porphyroclasts with adjacent asymmetric pressure shadows, combined with cataclastic textures in Cerro de Maimón ore denote higher metamorphic grade and more intense deformation. Syn-metamorphic sulfide recovery/recrystallization led to the remobilization of trace elements and subsequent crystallization of discrete minerals (galena, tellurides, tetrahedrite, arsenopyrite/löllingite, Ag-sulfosalts and electrum).The chemical composition of sphalerite from the three deposits suggests ore formation in a sediment-starved environment. Estimated minimum venting fluid temperature calculated from the composition of sphalerites from stratiform mineralization in the three deposits is in the range of 242 to 302°C. Tennantite crystals from the three deposits returned low Sb and Ag contents, typical of VMS mineralization formed in juvenile intraoceanic island-arc settings. A broad trend towards Sb enrichment in stratiform ores in the San Fernando and Antonio deposits parallels lower concentration of Se and As and higher contents in the more incompatible Sb, Te and Bi in galena with respect to Cerro de Maimón. These nuances in ore geochemistry are in good agreement with the slightly more primitive setting of formation of VMS mineralization hosted in the Maimón Formation, as indicated by the lithogeochemistry of the volcanic host rocks.The sulfides from Cerro de Maimón display δ34S values of −1.3 to +3.0‰, whereas those from the San Fernando and Antonio deposits were in the range of −0.5 to +7.0‰ and of 0.0 to +5.8‰ respectively. The relatively narrow scatter of δ34S suggests homogeneous fluid sulfur composition and similar physico-chemical conditions during the ore forming processes, and is consistent with sulfide derived from the inorganic reduction of seawater and/or from a magmatic source.Although the three deposits are classified as non-auriferous, significant Au contents are described in Cerro de Maimón ore (to 7.6g/t) and in intermediate (to 1.44g/t) and upper (to 0.88g/t) mineralized zones of the San Fernando deposit. Gold, probably precipitated as invisible gold during exhalative mineralization, shows evidence for later metamorphism- and deformation-triggered remobilization and re-precipitation as subordinate electrum. Solid-state mechanical transfer was apparently the dominant upgrading mechanism in the Cerro de Maimón deposit whereas liquid-state chemical transfer would have governed the upgrading process in the San Fernando deposit.

El cinema transgenèric d'Isaki Lacuesta i el diàleg amb Miquel Barceló

Summary: This study deals with the figure of Isaki Lacuesta, a young filmmaker from Girona, and his already prominent role within Catalonia’s new cinema. Lacuesta’s cinema relies as much on new academic tenets as it does on a redefinition of the avant-garde cinema once espoused by some of the members of the Barcelona School during the sixties and seventies of the 20th century. A brief survey of Lacuesta’s trajectory via his feature films to date allows us to formulate an initial inflection point, a kind of artistic continuum that could be summarized in the figure of the “trace,” understood in its double archeological and rhetorical sense. It is the trace left by the mysterious passage of myth both in its historical and its imaginary aspects. This study attempts, ultimately, to offer an analysis of El cuaderno de barro (The Mud Notebook, 2011), and Los pasos dobles (Double Steps, 2011) that emphasizes their dual vertebration and their simultaneous creation and that proves the polymorphous and transgeneric nature that characterizes Lacuesta’s entire work. [Keywords: Isaki Lacuesta; avant-garde; trace; trangeneric cinema; New Catalan Cinema]

Marvelous realism in the Caribbean: a second look at Jacques Stephen Alexis and Alejo Carpentier

In 1943 the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) visited Haiti for the first time, an experience which inspired his novel El reino de este mundo and his controversial theory of marvelous realism. During the trip Carpentier gave a speech entitled “L'evolution culturelle de l'Amerique Latine” that was heard by a young Haitian writer named Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922–1961). Most critics who have studied the literary relationship between the two writers have concluded that Alexis' approach to Haitian culture and identity draws heavily upon the ideas from Carpentier's theory of marvelous realism. However, I argue that Alexis' “Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” can be read as a critique of Carpentier and an effort to break from the path he had established by creating a more grounded form of marvelous realism for the Haitian context, one with a strong social commentary. These divergent positions are reflected in the fiction of the two writers; whereas Alexis's novels concentrate on key historical events in Haiti in the twentieth century and emphasize the need for societal change via Marxist revolution in the future, Carpentier's texts look to events in Europe and Latin America in the recent past and cast a more skeptical eye on the consequences of revolutions. I trace the development of these ideas through Carpentier's two essays on marvelous realism and his novels El reino de este mundo, Los pasos perdidos, El siglo de las luces, and La consagración de la primavera and in Alexis's essay on Haitian marvelous realism and his three novels Compère Général Soleil, Les arbres musiciens, and L'espace de un cillement.

Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss by Brian L. Price (review)

Reviewed by: Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss by Brian L. Price Magdalena Perkowska Price, Brian L. Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 189 pp. ISBN: 978-113700-847-3. Since the publication in 1993 of Seymour Menton’s Latin America’s New Historical Novel, this literary genre has received a considerable amount of critical attention. While the tendency among the first wave of criticism was rather encompassing in its intent to define Latin American historical fictions, more recent studies tend to have a reduced scope and focus on national or regional historical reconstructions. Brian Price’s Cult of Defeat in Mexico’s Historical Fiction. Failure, Trauma, and Loss clearly belongs to this second trend, cleverly negotiating its place among earlier studies on the Mexican historical novel (Guerrero 2008; Osuna Osuna 2008) and on failure in Mexican literature (Ochoa 2005). It explores “the rhetoric of failure in Mexico’s historical imagination” (3) in six novels published between 1982 and 2008. All of them deal with the nineteenth century and reconstruct foundational moments in Mexico’s history: the independence movement and the nation-building process. The study is composed of a short but dense introduction, four chapters, and a brief conclusion. The introduction sets forth the historical, critical and theoretical framework for the terms rhetoric of failure and failure narratives. Price contends that the rhetoric of failure, which is “predicated upon the notion that Mexico got off to a bad start and has never fully recovered its footing” (14), is a “deliberate narrative choice” (4) by authors who seek to “highlight, reinterpret, and even poeticize perceived cultural, political, and social shortcomings” (4). Failure narratives are nationalistic, that is, grounded in the nation’s guiding fictions, and although authors engage with failure for diverse reasons and in different ways, these narratives always imply a need for reinterpretation of the past that leads to “a conscious criticism of the present” (16). This connection between the past and the present is the central aspect of Price’s approach to failure narratives and their rhetoric. By distancing himself from the once dominant “deconstructive postmodern analysis of the internal mechanisms of [historical] fiction” (17) and turning instead to E. Runia’s theorization of the unconscious [End Page 149] repetition of the past in the present, Price intends to focus on “how the novel responds to the contemporary problems” (16), that is, on what makes it “a vital and active participant in the present” (17). Conceiving the selected novels as a configuration that articulates a truth (A. Badiou), the author then proposes to examine four different uses of failure in recent historical fiction written in Mexico: corrective, recuperative, instructive, and redemptive or paralyzing. The corrective use of the rhetoric of failure is presented through an analysis of Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s last novel, Los pasos de López (1982), read as a selfreflective and subversive correction of official history. Price situates his discussion of the novel in a triple context: Hidalgo’s insurgency and its interpreters (Alamán, Sierra, Luis Mora, Vasconcelos, and Krauze); the evolution of Ibargüengoitia’s oeuvre, in particular, his construction of a critical subjectivity and of “a self-ironizing voice” (40) in the Excelsior articles; the post-Tlatelolco disillusionment with unfulfilled revolutionary promises and the beginning of the 1980s crisis. Price reads Los pasos as an alternative version of independence in which laughter, parody and history combine to reveal a “comedy of errors” (49) or a “massive theatrical flop” (57) that later became idealized and mythicized for the purpose of statecraft. Ibargüengoitia’s reinterpretation thus restores “elements of the real history that have been hidden by myth” (47). The second chapter explores the recuperative use of the rhetoric of failure, represented by Fernando del Paso’s celebrated novel Noticias del Imperio (1987) on the French invasion in 1861 and the short-lived Second Empire under the Archduke Maximilian and his consort Carlota. Price names this use recuperative because, as he claims, besides articulating “a sustained critique of empire” (62), del Paso’s novel rectifies a failure of the hegemonic liberal historiography about the Second...

Dialectical Geographies in Contemporary Chilean Literature: The Case of Diamela Eltit’s Narrative Production

WITHOUT a doubt, spatial representations are as multifarious as life itself. From the seemingly real depictions of space in texts such as Alvar Nunez's Naufragios and Bernal Diaz's Historia verdadera, (1) to more imaginary representations of space such as Cadalso's Cartas, Celine's Voyage and Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, or even litero-ethno-sociological portrayals of the likes of Carrio de la Vandera's Lazarillo or Claude Levi-Strauss's ethnographic Tristes Tropiques as well as the purely literary journeys of critics such as Guy Davenport's brilliant The Geography of the Imagination, it would appear as if space's fate, of necessity, is to be the victim of representation and even theorization (think of Blanchot, Lefebvre or Jameson, for instance). It would appear, moreover, that engravings in general, followed by the first photograph and especially the public introduction of photography in 1839, (2) immensely enriched the possibilities of spatial representation, directly or indirectly enabling, in the case of Latin America, the creation of the deliciously intimate geographies of the modernist novel (De sobremesa, Amistad funesta) as well as the wide-open locales of texts bent on inscribing the nation (La voragine, Dona Barbara), as Carlos Alonso has noted regarding the so-called "novelas de la tierra." Now, if in narrative representation in general space perennially oscillates between what could be called an outside and an inside, one might safely argue that Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit privileges enclosed settings. (3) At the same time, it could be said that, to a large extent--and leaving aside the well-known themes of her works--, (4) she confects an aesthetics of space. What I wish to analyze here is the way in which, in this aesthetics of space, even in the most claustrophobic of terrains, and as paradoxical as it may seem at first, there is a constant tension between the inside and the outside, the local and the global, the national and the transnational. The tension present in her first novels, nevertheless, starts to dissipate in Mano de obra (2002), being mercilessly overtaken in Impuesto a la carne (2010)--her most recent novel--by a neoliberal Biopower too strong to combat. If in Pedro Lemebel's urban chronicles there is a relatively clear distinction between the local and the global, (5) and if in Alberto Fuguet's narrative there is a patent confirmation of the cultural transformations brought about by globalization especially among the affluent members of Chile's capital, (6) in Eltit's novels we witness the trajectory from what might be called a "national-Chile" to a "post-national nation." My analysis centers its attention foremost on Jamas el fuego nunca (2007) and Impuesto a la carne, even though it also alludes, in passing, to Mano de obra. First, however, a brief overview of some critical assessments concerning spatial representation in Eltit's previous narrative output is warranted. Attention has been brought to the presence of "no-exit" type spaces, or "anti-espacios" (Olea, "El cuerpo" 89), in Eltit's works, as well as to "[e]l problema de los limites" (Kirkpatrick 42) that characterizes her aesthetics of space. One critic underscores the nefarious effects that power and violence have upon interpersonal relationships in general, and between mother and son or mother and daughter in particular, at the very heart of the private sphere of the home (Llanos 110). Regarding "la plaza" in Lumperica (1983), Eltit's first novel, some have seen it as an essentially ritualistic and sacred site for the construction of a new type of community, the community of the socially and politically destitute (Tafra 49; Avelar 170), while others, on the contrary, have seen it as "una metafora de la comunidad ausente" (Ortega 53) and even as a prison (Brito, Campos 122) where public space has been colonized by "el luminoso" (Donoso 255). Concerning Por la patria (1986), Eltit's second novel, the multiple geographies that populate the text, that is, "el bar," "el erial," "el barrio," and "el galpon" have been construed, metaphorically, as propitious spaces to build a Latin American feminine identity (Arrate 150). …