Casal, Lourdes

Author(s):  
Laura Lomas

Lourdes Casal (1936–1981), award-winning poet, fiction writer, editor, social psychologist, and activist, contributed to the articulation of multiple interdisciplinary fields including Cuban studies, Latina/o, Latin American, black, and women’s studies, yet her work has not received the attention it deserves because she published different kinds of writing in two languages, each directed to disparate, sometimes conflicting or overlapping, audiences. Alternatively, it could be said that her writing addresses an emergent readership more visible today decades after her death, who see—as she did—the need for dialogue across disciplinary, linguistic, and political divisions. Although Casal has remained in print primarily in Latina/o literary anthologies, Casal made her living as a social scientist and a psychology professor, and she remained engaged with Cuba through editorial work and what scholars call today “publicly engaged scholarship.” Casal’s work exemplifies a transnational attention to both homeland (Cuba) and residence (New York) that has become a distinguishing quality of Latina/o literature. In 1978, Lourdes Casal defined herself in “Memories of a Black Cuban Childhood” as learning to assert herself as an “Hispanic Black” (p. 62). In an interview with Margaret Randall that prefaces translations of her poetry into English, she defines herself as a “Latina,” and she asserts her claim to speak as a Cuban, despite living outside the island. During the Cold War, this combination of identifiers constituted a paradox, which Casal asserted both against the mainstream of the Cuban exile community and against heteronormative cultural nationalisms. Casal’s bilingualism and skillful diplomacy provided her with the salvoconducto to weave across multiple borders, despite the walls that became almost impossible to scale after the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 and Cuba began relocating people to the Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP) camps in the mid-1960s. A queer feminist of African, Chinese, and European descent, Casal’s writings and editorial projects map the participation of a diverse group of Cuban exiles in the articulation of latinidad; yet even as she becomes legible in certain ways, she remains largely illegible, precisely because she ventured into uncharted, sometimes life-threatening, border spaces, in step with an unexpected ideological itinerary.

Author(s):  
Danylo Kravets

The aim of the Ukrainian Bureau in Washington was propaganda of Ukrainian question among US government and American publicity in general. Functioning of the Bureau is not represented non in Ukrainian neither in foreign historiographies, so that’s why the main goal of presented paper is to investigate its activity. The research is based on personal papers of Ukrainian diaspora representatives (O. Granovskyi, E. Skotzko, E. Onatskyi) and articles from American and Ukrainian newspapers. The second mass immigration of Ukrainians to the US (1914‒1930s) has often been called the «military» immigration and what it lacked in numbers, it made up in quality. Most immigrants were educated, some with college degrees. The founder of the Ukrainian Bureau Eugene Skotzko was born near Western Ukrainian town of Zoloczhiv and immigrated to the United States in late 1920s after graduating from Lviv Polytechnic University. In New York he began to collaborate with OUN member O. Senyk-Hrabivskyi who gave E. Skotzko task to create informational bureau for propaganda of Ukrainian case. On March 23 1939 the Bureau was founded in Washington D. C. E. Skotzko was an editor of its Informational Bulletins. The Bureau biggest problem was lack of financial support. It was the main reason why it stopped functioning in May 1940. During 14 months of functioning Ukrainian Bureau in Washington posted dozens of informational bulletins and send it to hundreds of addressees; E. Skotzko, as a director, personally wrote to American governmental institutions and foreign diplomats informing about Ukrainian problem in Europe. Ukrainian Bureau activity is an inspiring example for those who care for informational policy of modern Ukraine.Keywords: Ukrainian small encyclopedia, Yevhen Onatsky, journalism, worldview, Ukrainian state. Keywords: Ukrainian Bureau in Washington, Eugene Skotzko, public opinion, history of journalism, diaspora.


Author(s):  
E. Dabagyan

The author puts forward and substantiates a thesis about the transformation of Brazil into an important actor of the international relations. This becomes possible because a number of factors, including the well-designed, multi-tasked and balanced foreign policy strategy. It was founded during the military regime. Then, it was maintained and developed by the civilian Brazilian governments, primarily by such an outstanding figure as the president L. da Silva. His successor D. Rousseff s in a short period of time managed to gain a solid international reputation. She successfully copes with the mission to lead Brazil into the club of world’s great powers. To perform this task Brazilian government constantly makes efforts to strengthen relations with the neighbors on the Latin American continent, to gradually smoothen tensions with the United States. Also, it closely works with the countries of BRICS, contributes to building bridges between the South and the North, as well as actively participates in the activities of international organizations and the settlement of contentious issues in the world.


Author(s):  
Rosina Lozano

This epilogue briefly identifies some of the major changes in Spanish language politics since World War II. These include community shifts in activism. For example, the Chicano Movementreclaimed the language and advocated for culturally affirming bilingual education programs. The epilogue also turns to federal support for Spanish instruction with the 1968 Bilingual Education Act and with the 1975 extension to the Voting Rights Act that provides federal protection for ballots in languages other than English. Spanish is no longer a language of just the Southwest and there are major populations of Spanish speakers in cities like Chicago, New York, and Miami today. In 2013, tens of millions of U.S. residents spoke Spanish in their homes. Spanish language perseverance in the United States is due to a long history of Latin American migration to the country. It began as a language of settlement and power in the nineteenth century and has transformed into a language often deemed as foreign or un-American. Spanish is an American language historically and this book has recovered that history.


2019 ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Susana Sueiro Seoane

This chapter analyzes Cultura Obrera (Labor Culture), published in New York City from 1911 to 1927. Pedro Esteve, the primary editor, gave expression to his ideas in this newspaper and while it represented Spanish firemen and marine workers, it reported on many other workers’ struggles in different parts of the world, for example, supporting and collecting funds for the Mexican revolutionary brothers Flores Magón. This newspaper, as all the anarchist press, was part of a transnational network and had a circulation not only in many parts of the United States but also in Latin American countries, including Argentina and Cuba, as well as on the other side of the Atlantic, in Spain and various European countries.


Author(s):  
William B. Meyer

If the average citizen's surroundings defined the national climate, then the United States grew markedly warmer and drier in the postwar decades. Migration continued to carry the center of population west and began pulling it southward as well. The growth of what came to be called the Sunbelt at the "Snowbelt's" expense passed a landmark in the early 1960s when California replaced New York as the most populous state. Another landmark was established in the early 1990s when Texas moved ahead of New York. In popular discussion, it was taken for granted that finding a change of climate was one of the motives for relocating as well as one of the results. It was not until 1954, though, that an American social scientist first seriously considered the possibility. The twentieth-century flow of Americans to the West Coast, the geographer Edward L. Ullman observed in that year, had no precedent in world history. It could not be explained by the theories of settlement that had worked well in the past, for a substantial share of it represented something entirely new, "the first large-scale in-migration to be drawn by the lure of a pleasant climate." If it was the first of its kind, it was unlikely to be the last. For a set of changes in American society, Ullman suggested, had transformed the economic role of climate. The key changes included a growth in the numbers of pensioned retirees; an increase in trade and service employment, much more "footloose" than agriculture or manufacturing was; developments in technology making manufacturing itself more footloose; and a great increase in mobility brought about by the automobile and the highway. All in one way or another had weakened the bonds of place and made Americans far freer than before to choose where to live. Whatever qualities made life in any spot particularly pleasant thus attracted migration more than in the past. Ullman grouped such qualities together as "amenities." They ranged from mountains to beaches to cultural attractions, but climate appeared to be the most important, not least because it was key to the enjoyment of many of the rest. Ullman did not suppose that all Americans desired the same climate. For most people, in this as in other respects, "where one was born and lives is the best place in the world, no matter how forsaken a hole it may appear to an outsider."


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Browitt

The novel Lucas Guevara, written by the Colombian exile, Alirio Díaz Guerra, was first published in New York in 1914. It is considered to be the earliest novel about Latin American immigration to the United States written in Spanish. This fact alone merits its study. A second edition was published in 2001 along with a critical-biographical introduction, which presents the novel as the precursor of a developing genre of Hispanic immigrant literature centred on the naïve Latin American migrant who arrives in the United States inspired by the opportunities which the metropolis supposedly affords, but who nevertheless suffers a series of misfortunes because of the inability to adapt to the new culture. On the level of overt content, the novel is a lachrymose, stereotypical and conventional denunciation of the supposed evils of an amoral US society and the libertine and materialistic values underpinning it. But on a much deeper level, a picture emerges of Díaz Guerra himself as a displaced, disenchanted intellectual exile who suffers (or has suffered) an acute cultural and class anxiety in the transition from a patrician Arcadia to the heart of capitalist, industrial modernity. Through a reading of the narrative voice, and by extension the implied author, we witness his difficult coming to terms with a highly-charged New York society (in comparison to his homeland), not only because of the sexual liberation brought on by secular modernization, but also because of the close proximity of volatile, eroticised bodies on the over-crowded Lower East Side of New York, the scene of the novel and Díaz Guerra’s point of entry into the United States. The novel also provides an occasion to contrast how Díaz Guerra deals with the condition of exile, in contrast to that most emblematic of Latin American political refugees, José Martí.


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