Errant Family Ties: Migratory Identities in Latina and Hispanic Caribbean Cultural Production

214 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.This dissertation examines how contemporary cultural production from Hispanic Caribbean and Latina female voices have altered patterns of the traditional family unit and a modern conceptualization of the nation-state. In the literary trajectory of Latin American and Caribbean cultures, the family has functioned as the allegory of nation formation. Moreover, both nation and family have been delineated within territorial demarcations of space. In this sense, I affirm that contemporary female authors and film makers from the Hispanic Caribbean challenge the productivity of the traditional family unit and of a sense of nationhood reduced to the islands. The physical movement to the United States or to other Caribbean islands offers alternative romances and alliances constructed through homosexuality, through the contact with individuals from the same country of origin, or of other ethnicities, races, and nationalities. Also new family patterns framed through adoption are being built by the characters. Nevertheless, these new alignments presuppose ephemeral relations that fade away in the geographical spaces of the islands once the protagonists return, for one reason or another. That is, the physical movement that allows them to become emancipated and autonomous opens up spaces of new commitments that are however interrupted in the insular spaces. On the other hand, the transnational context does not present a whole picture of hopeful and liberatory social practices since, at some points, female, homosexual, transgender or racial identities face social constrictions in the host culture. By providing a detailed analysis of homosexual, transgender and racialized female migratory patterns and their relation to the traditional family unit and the nation, I contribute to a remaking of cultures that mirrors contemporary processes of globalization and of uneven relation between historically identified First and Third World countries. As I argue, Hispanic Caribbean cultural production reflects the new realities of the transnational Caribbean even as it attempts to reshape traditional associations between nation and family. In this direction, my dissertation dialogues with other disciplines concerned with current contexts of migration that envision changes in family patterns and alternative forms of kinship. As it is in the case of the literary and cinematic production from the Hispanic Caribbean, global, social and ethnographical studies gradually reflect new family dynamics and the struggles suffered by individuals who necessarily or voluntarily migrate. I am mainly interested in the transformations undergone within literary and cinematic projects of nationhood and family when the characters return to their places of origin. Could we envision a hopeful futurity or do we attend to a reaffirmation of traditional paradigms on nation and family? Therefore, my dissertation develops a new dimension of literary and visual criticism that similar to other disciplines projects contemporary patterns of female, homosexual and transgender migrations in the Hispanic Caribbean.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD