Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish
My name is Karem Lissette Delgado. I earned my PhD in 2023 from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in Spanish literature, with an emphasis on Latin American Studies. I research Spanish and Latin American Jewish literature, particularly sixteenth century Converso literature from New Spain (present-day Mexico). The courses I offer correlate with Women's Studies, Gender Studies, History, Comparative Literature, Culture Studies, Religious Studies and Jewish and Holocaust Studies, by bringing diversity and inclusion to fields of Spanish and Portuguese and Hispanic Studies.
This intersection between Latin America and Spain is evident in my first publication, where I analyze “la batalla” by Juan Gelman (1930-2014) from his poetry book com/posiciones (1986), for Hispamérica. Even though Juan Gelman wrote a vast amount of political texts throughout his career, a decade after his son Marcelo Ariel and pregnant daughter-in-law María Claudia’s kidnap (August 26, 1976) by the Dictatorship (1976-1983), Argentinean-Jewish journalist and poet Juan Gelman rewrites a vast array of medieval Jewish poems by Yehudah HaLevi (1085/6-1140), Salomón Ibn Gabirol (1021-1058) and Samuel HaNagid (993-1055) in com/posiciones. Despite Juan Gelman’s exile from Argentina and the disappearance of his son and daughter-in-law, and grandchild, or perhaps because of these circumstances, I argue that “la batalla” is a cabalistic metaphor about the act of Creation.
In my second publication, I wrote a review for The Lima Inquisition: The Plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth Century Perú by Ana E. Schaposchnik for the Sephardic Horizons Journal. She examines the secret (crypto) Jews on trial by the Inquisition in 1639, in Lima. Although she describes the event from a Christian perspective, explaining the order of the trial included questioning, torture, verdict and outcome, like flogging, exile, and burning at the stake at the Auto General de Fe would regulate society and eliminate heresy, she also writes about the experiences of cryptoJewish inmates. For example, she analyzes the interactions between crypto-Jews in the jail cells, their relationships with the Jewish community of Amsterdam founded by crypto-Jews, the efforts they made to receive more favorable outcomes, and their identities. For instance, cryptoJews on trial in Lima were mostly Portuguese converso merchants and their families, many of whom had lived in other Spanish colonies, like New Spain (present-day Spain), and that gave cities in Spain, Portugal or Brazil as their places of birth.
My most recent publication is "The Feminine Jewish Turn in Gloria Gervitz’s Migraciones” for Latin American Jewish Studies. In Migraciones, a single long poem written over the course of forty-three years, Mexican poet Gloria Gervitz addresses “themes of exile” and “immigrants” as forms of “Jewishness,” as “an ethic, a way of being in the world”. I contend that this ethic is expressed through what I call the feminine Jewish turn—the female existence of the poetic voice and other female characters that encompasses Jewish mysticism, rituals, prayers, memory, and identity, and is, above all, female in gender. For instance, the poetic voice lays the foundation to her Jewish grandmother’s emigration from Eastern Europe by highlighting women’s role in Kabbalah. With the help of letters and old photographs, the poetic voice reconstructs her grandmother’s memory of the Shoah and immigration to Mexico to present an expressly feminine Diaspora experience.
I am currently in the process of publishing chapters of my dissertation. I have submitted “Women’s CryptoJewish Memory in Sixteenth Century Mexico City” to The Sixteenth Century Journal and I am in the early process of consideration.