When all men are either dead, exiled, thugs or zombies in a world ruled through violence and terror by a President-for-Life and his son, how is a young boy expected to come of age and forge his own identity? Le Goût des Jeunes Filles (On the Verge of Fever), a 2004 film about Fanfan, a 15-year-old boy, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on the same…[Read more]

This essay examines the uneasy relationship that Arturo Islas’s The Rain God has had with narratives of identity, focusing on how the representation of Felix’s sexuality makes him a problematic figure for certain strains of Chicana/o and queer studies. In other writings, Islas criticizes Quinto Sol, the chief publishing house of Chicano literature…[Read more]

This handout explains in clear and simple terms what a strong thesis statement should–and should not be. Examples of the four main types of ‘weak’ thesis statements are given, along with four corresponding ‘strong’ thesis statements. I have successfully used this handout in workshopping students’ thesis ideas.

“El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes” is one of the most important works of the Peruvian eighteenth century. This article examines the author’s critical perspective ––in his geographical and political journey through the viceroyalty–– in whose ideological position, called here “enlightened colonialism,” colonialist ideas meld with those of the pen…[Read more]

City Botany: Reading Urban Ecologies in China through Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke

This handout explains in clear and simple terms what a strong thesis statement should–and should not be. Examples of the four main types of ‘weak’ thesis statements are given, along with four corresponding ‘strong’ thesis statements. I have successfully used this handout in workshopping students’ thesis ideas.

Selected Topics in Applied Linguistics: How to Choose a Theory. I offer a critical exploration of some of the conditions involved in Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA), as well as of the paradoxical approaches in the theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives of ISLA.
The discussion proceeds with a very short…[Read more]

Analysis of debt of the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico from a psychoanalytic perspective using recent work by Eduardo Lalo as a point of departure for the analysis.