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Despite a wide-ranging literature on the ‘post-neoliberal’ shift in Bolivia post-2006, there has been limited attention to women’s working lives. Furthermore, literature on urban indigenous women’s work in Bolivia, as with the Andean region more widely, has centred on highland women’s work as (informal) market venders and traders, while lowland indigenous women as economic subjects have been largely invisibilised. Through a qualitative case study with Guaraní and other low-income women in peri-urban Santa Cruz de la Sierra, this thesis explores how lowland indigenous women have been incorporated as economic citizens during this ‘process of change’. Through a feminist political economy perspective, the thesis adopts an assemblage lens to interrogate how intersectional labour market stratification is reproduced or shifting. Developing the concept of the ‘gender-ethnic assemblage of labour’, the thesis argues that despite new women’s rights legislation, development planning continues to marginalize and misrecognise (low-skilled) women’s labour and the gendered work of social reproduction, with implications for the persistence of unequal gender norms around work and limits to women’s substantive economic citizenship. Yet, Guaraní women are further disadvantaged in comparison with other low-skilled women given the specific socio-spatial and material configuration of labour in the peri-urban area and city. Unlike other diverse peri-urban women or the paradigmatic highland market vender of the Andean literature, Guaraní women are generally not traders or street venders, but often work in casual, paid labour. This uneven assemblage encourages the circulation of racialised representations of Guaraní women as new forms of gendered ethnic-class differentiation are set in place. Despite new equalities legislation reducing the worst direct racist abuse, subtle forms of (embodied) status distinctions persist, highlighting reconfigured ‘power-geometries’ of ethnicity and race at work through misrecognition. However, the new legislation has resulted in some limited compliance with women’s labour rights and possibilities for decent work. Furthermore, an important shift in citizen-subjectivities has taken place, symbolically challenging entrenched forms of colonial-patriarchal-classed power, with material effects for women’s agency. Despite limited opportunities for collective action, Guaraní women exercise constrained agency at work through some ambiguous acts of economic citizenship.

This is an investigation of the epic poetry produced in and about the Ibero-American world during the early modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in trilingual perspective: in addition to the more familiar Spanish- and Portuguese-language texts, consideration is also––and, for the purposes of the thesis, above all––given to material in Latin. Latin was the third of the international literary languages of the Iberian imperial world; it is also by far the most neglected, having fallen between the cracks of modern disciplinary boundaries in their current configurations. The thesis seeks to rehabilitate the Latin-language component as a fully-fledged member of the Ibero-American epic tradition, arguing that it demands to be analysed with reference not only to the classical and classicising traditions but to those same themes and concerns––in this case, the centre|periphery binary––as are investigated for counterparts when in Spanish or Portuguese. The crucial difference is that––while the ends may be the same––the means of thematising these issues derive in form and signifying power from interactions with the conceptual vocabularies and frameworks of the Greco-Roman epic tradition. How is America represented and New World space figured––even produced––in a poetic idiom first developed by ancient Mediterranean cultures with no conception whatsoever of the continent of the western hemisphere? At the core is one such long neglected Ibero-American Latin-language epic by a figure who lived across the Iberian imperial world: the 'De Invento Novo Orbe Inductoque Illuc Christi Sacrificio' (Faenza, 1777) by Catalan-born Jesuit José Manuel Peramás. Peramás’s epic––which has never been the subject of a literary-critical study before––is offered as a test case: an exercise in analysing a Latin-language Hispanic epic qua Hispanic epic and setting it into Ibero-American literary-cultural context. This is to be understood in relation to the field of so-called ‘New World poetics’: an at present emergent zone of inquiry within Iberian colonial studies which until now has been developing almost completely without reference to the Latin-language portion of the corpus.

The thesis is a study of a Guaraní community (comunidad) situated in the Department of Santa Cruz in the southeastern lowlands of Bolivia. The thesis uses the concept of ‘comunidad’ as a focus of investigation. While this concept is one that is familiar and firmly embedded in contemporary discourses throughout Bolivia, the meanings which different people and interest groups attach to it and the purposes which they ascribe to it are far from unanimous. Apart from the physical and legal entity, comprising a group of people, the land on which they live, and the legal title for its ownership, a comunidad is a multifaceted and multilayered complex of diverging and sometimes competing ideas, desires and agendas. Questioning the concept of ‘comunidad’ in this way opens up new perspectives on what people are doing and why that could easily be overlooked in continuing to assume that we know what we are talking about when talking about a ‘comunidad indígena’ in Bolivia today. The thesis explores the case of Cañón de Segura by eliciting and bringing together the various claims and perspectives that impact on the lives of its inhabitants (comunarios). Starting with a historical overview to situate the comunidad within Bolivian and Guaraní history, the thesis moves into an ethnographic discussion of the comunarios’ own perceptions and meanings of ‘comunidad’, followed by an exploration of various outsiders’ perspectives on the same topic that impact on the comunarios’ lives in different ways. The aim of the thesis is to illustrate the overlap and entanglements between these different positions in order to show how the different perspectives on the meaning and purpose of a Guaraní ‘comunidad’ all contribute to shape the actual realities of people’s lives ‘on the ground’.

The Argentine province of Corrientes has long been a site of intense language contact. There Spanish is spoken alongside Argentine Guarani, a historically and linguistically distinct variety of Guarani which has been maintained to the present day despite centuries of ideological hostility. Via data collected from fieldwork in Corrientes from 2017-2020 and analyzed within the framework of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 1967; Bernard 2006), I provide analyses of language ideologies, language use, and language transmission in the province of Corrientes, with specific focus on the rural interior where bilingualism in Spanish and Argentine Guarani is widespread. The combination of historical attempts of the Argentine national government to curtail Guarani’s use and hostile ideologies toward cultural ties to indigeneity, stemming culturally and legislatively from Buenos Aires, has created a complex sociolinguistic situation which is reflected in who speaks what language to whom and when, the high degree of mixture between the two languages, the social value assigned to contact features, and complex transmission patterns for both languages. An analysis of the language ideologies surrounding Argentine Guarani shows that pervasive negative ideologies co-exist alongside language maintenance, contrary to the more common ideology-practice paradox in which speakers of minority languages hold positive language ideologies while shifting to the majority language. Positive ideologies linking Guarani to local cultural aspects are also present and, in some regions, on the rise in the wake of recent legal recognition of the language at the provincial level. Patterns of language use resemble those described in other minority language contexts; Spanish is the language of school, of church, of ceremonies, and of institutions generally, and Guarani is the language of the home, of jokes, of gossip, and of intimacy. Such diglossic patterns have created an affective connection between speakers and Guarani, something reflected in the social value of Argentine Guarani contact features in Correntino Spanish. Analysis of a unique corpus of Correntino Spanish internet memes illuminates the link between Guarani-origin loanwords and Correntino culture and identity. Guarani loans in Correntino Spanish are shown to have undergone enregisterment (Agha 2003), i.e. they are used and understood by speakers in ways which link them to a web of Correntino cultural characteristics and “Correntinoness” generally. Finally, such connections between ideology, affect, language use, and institutional forces manifest themselves in varying patterns of language transmission. While the theme of the past century has largely been one of language shift away from Argentine Guarani, resulting in the loss of the language in population centers, the isolated rural regions have been characterized by maintenance to the present day, evidenced by the geographically varied reports of school children learning Spanish as a second language in large numbers. The vitality of the language can be accounted for via approaches to language attitudes which privilege affective bonds between speaker and language and which treat such bonds as separate, albeit related to, ideological stances.

School principals in rural Paraguay face several challenges in administering accessible and equitable educational opportunities to their students. The nationwide education reform effort in Paraguay has not been able to counteract challenges, perpetuating the disproportionate number of rural students dropping out, or being pushed out, of the education system. Moreover, education is often underfunded throughout the country and worsens in poor rural areas. This study provided insights into how these principals’ lived experiences shape their humanity and how this is linked to their school leadership practice. What I came to understand was how school principalship is also about “becoming human”, connected to land and community over time, and how these elements shape their leadership practice. I utilized life histories as the methodology to answer the research question. The concept of humanity is rooted in the Guarani understanding of the word yvypóra, a decolonizing epistemology to study school principals. To do so, I examine the life histories of five school principals in rural Paraguay. Through their narratives, I illustrate through life stories examples of the yvypóra of these five school principals of two agricultural schools in rural Paraguay. When I was analyzing their lived experiences, I identified that their way of being human was informed by their land and their community. Thus, I argue school principals are learners from the land and their community, shaping their humanity as the spirit of the land [yvypóra] to lead their agricultural schools in Paraguay. By having a decolonial approach, the conceptual framework of yvypóra expands how context matters in school leadership, thinking of how the context – land and community- informed their leadership practice in rural Paraguay. Keywords: school leadership; decoloniality; Guarani; agricultural schools; Latin America; Paraguay; narrative inquiry

Previous work on language change in contact situations has treated lexical borrowing and grammatical borrowing as discrete phenomena (Appel and Muysken 1987, Thomason 2001, Campbell 2013). Claims that lexical borrowing needs to occur before grammatical borrowing (e.g. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988) or that grammar can be borrowed without any lexicon (e.g. Aikhenvald 2002) are often mentioned in the literature. This dissertation explores the interplay between grammatical constructions (in the sense of Goldberg 2006) and lexical elements in intense contact situations. More specifically, it addresses the following research question: Are grammatical constructions borrowed independently from the elements contained in said constructions? To answer this question, the present research project analyzes the influence of Spanish on Paraguayan Guaraní, both languages spoken in South America, which have been in intense contact for five centuries. The research question is addressed via three empirical studies using a 40-hour corpus of sociolinguistic interviews (Labov 2001). The first study focuses on the motivations to borrow verbs and the effects that the adopted elements have in the internal organization of the recipient language (see, for instance, Haspelmath 2009). The main finding of this study is that loan verbs coexist with their native-origin counterparts in part because they occur in different grammatical constructions. The second study explores differential object marking, and the factors that favor the occurrence of -pe, a human direct object marker. Results show that younger, more Spanish-dominant speakers, have a higher usage rate of the feature, and that -pe suffixes to loans more frequently than to native-origin nouns. The third study compares the behavior of the polysemous verbal prefix je- among loan verbs and among native-origin verbs. It was found that the primary function of je- is as middle-marker (MM). Even more striking is that more than half of the hosts are loan verbs, and only a quarter of je-prefixed verbs are of native-origin. Results from the DOM and MM studies suggest that the Guaraní locative postposition -pe and the reflexive marker je- underwent contact-induced grammaticalization (Heine and Kuteva 2003) to become an object marker (LOC > DOM) and a middle marker (REFL > MID), respectively. Both grammaticalization processes were triggered by loans, which entered the language as parts of larger constructions: in the case of –pe, of the [Verb + DOM + HumanOBJ] construction; and in the case of je-, of the [Middle Marker + Verb + Oblique] construction. These borrowed constructions, whose slots were initially favored by loans, became more productive and started recruiting native-origin elements. In sum, the studies show that lexical and grammatical borrowing are not discrete phenomena. The overall findings support the hypothesis that changes occur in constructions (Bybee 2015), that terms that are frequently used together in the donor language (constructions) will be borrowed together by the recipient language (Backus 2013), and that grammatical replication originates in everyday communication (Heine and Kuteva 2010). Finally, this dissertation also contributes to expanding our methods to examine contact phenomena involving a major colonial language and a language of indigenous origin.

In 2005 the largely indigenous country of Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) Party. Morales ran on a promise of re-distributing wealth, to aid in the development of one of Latin America's poorest countries. Morales' first term in office marked a historical achievement for the indigenous movement in Bolivia, and sparked social change in the country. The government also experienced a momentous achievement through the re-writing of the Bolivian constitution, acknowledging the country's multi-ethnic and pluri-national character. Although his social, domestic and foreign policies have been controversial, particularly in the United States, Morales was re-elected to serve a second term in 2009. This research analyzes the outcomes of Morales' policy changes during his first term in office, from 2006-2009 to examine how the election of the MAS has impacted the marginalized status of indigenous people in Bolivia.

Differential Object Marking (DOM), the marking of some but not all direct objects in a given language, is active in over 300 languages around the world. I examine the distribution of DOM in Paraguayan Guaraní by evaluating transitive clauses in a corpus of naturally-occurring Guaraní data with respect to several factor groups. I find animacy and topicality to have the strongest relationship with object-marking frequency and show that human topical objects are frequently marked, while non-human and/or non-topical objects are infrequently marked. I then examine a Guaraní corpus published in 1640, prior to substantial Spanish contact, and do not find any clear instances of DOM. This supports the hypothesis that DOM evolved in Guaraní as a result of Spanish influence, though I also show that DOM is not distributionally equivalent in Spanish and Guaraní today. The relevance of topicality to DOM in Guaraní is unaccounted for by the two main theories of DOM, what I call the "markedness approach" and the "transitivity approach," which only appeal to animacy and definiteness. Thus the current study motivates incorporating topicality into these theories.