Senior Honor Theses-Spring 2023

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

The award winning thesis can be read online by clicking on the thesis title

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Sylvia Molloy Memorial Award Presented for Excellence and Originality in an Honors Thesis Notes While Waiting Tables. A Brief Prospectus for a Videogame

Micah Feinberg, Spanish

Mentor: Urayoán Noel

Restaurants have been treated critically as an “ideal total social phenomenon,” a powerful, postmodern confluence of market logic and urban development and social practices, whose cultural contributions run the gamut from homogenizing to radical demonstrations of local power (Beriss and Sutton 2007, 5). Some studies have looked at the role ethnic restaurants play in providing safe spaces and opportunities for upward mobility for minority groups who form part of a larger social milieu and how the cultural narratives they establish interact with (or counteract) notions of “authenticity” as perceived by their clientele (Patric et al. 2011). Others have directed their attention to the gastronomical landscape of New York, noting how across the City, local geography and largescale immigration patterns have intersected to give rise to dense swaths of restaurants pulling from a diverse tapestry of global culinary traditions (Allison 2017).

This is first of all a study about a restaurant in New York City, about the knotted intersections of labor and language—of class, race and gender—that underpin the making of a cohesive cultural production designed to occupy the leisure time of the City’s diners. It is also a study of how creative digital strategies can offer a richer means of unknotting than can be achieved through words.

Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Honorable Mention-Sylvia Molloy Memorial Award

Divine Meditations: Representations of Religion, Clericalism, and Religious Imagery in Mexican Cinema (1917-2018)

Iván Brea, Spanish

Mentor: Laura Torres-Rodríguez

What do representations of Catholicism, clericalism, and religious imagery in Mexican cinema reveal about Mexican culture? How does the overall context of Mexico being one of the first Latin American countries to secularize yet has always maintained a majority Catholic population reflect itself in Mexican cinema? This thesis analyzes three distinct films, Tepeyac (1917), María Candelaria (1943), and ROCÍO (2018), through an angle seldom explored in Mexican cultural studies: that of religion. I argue that representations of religion in Mexican cinema work to reconcile and negotiate the position of religion while presenting Catholicism as a distinct mediating and universal force in Mexican society in relation to other postrevolutionary national discourses and projects such as indigenismo and mestizaje. This is primarily achieved through the emphasis on cinema as a mechanism that was used to reeducate the gaze of the religious spectator by fashioning religious imagery to cinematic imagery. In each chapter, I discuss the continual cinematic portrayal of the priest as a mediator, the relationship between religion and technology, and the transformation of the Virgin of Guadalupe into a cinematic image within these three films. Thus, I reveal how religion was an instrumental tool to educate a unique type of gaze of the Mexican citizenry due to the experience of the spectator from the silent film era to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. This survey of films illuminates how Mexican films produced diverse messages about the place and role of religion in order to produce a consolidated hemogenic Mexican identity.