Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

For any country, having the infrastructure in terms of resources and the required expertise in execution allows it to implement programs with high economic and social impact. In Mexico there is a significant deficit in this area so it ranks number 62 in the infrastructure competitiveness index of the World Economic Forum due, among other factors, to the decrease in investment as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) since 2010. So the demand of resources where the National Infrastructure Fund (Fonadin) has a relevant role as a federal government public investment agency. However, 65 % of its resources have been assigned to non-recoverable support and, therefore, a new governance is required to make decisions on criteria of efficiency and financial viability.

Is the demand for green bonds different from the demand for conventional bonds? Previous analysis that compare financial returns between green and conventional bonds (Asian Bond Monitor, 2018; Ehlers and Packer, 2017; Reboredo, Quintela y Otero, 2017; Östlund, 2015, and Zerbib, 2016, 2019) show, in most cases, that green bonds have a lower return than conventional bonds. No study comparing such bonds has yet been done for Mexico. This study aims to close such gap, intending to identify if investors have a differentiated demand for green bonds with respect to comparable conventional bonds. Contrary to previous analysis that compare observed returns, we use the ask prices for green and conventional bonds issued either on the same date or with the same maturity by the same institution. The results suggest that the distribution on ask prices differ between green and conventional bonds. Additionally, there is a negative difference in their mean returns for bonds with the same maturity.

The figure of the tragic mulatta placed its origin in antebellum literature and was extensively used in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Much has been written about this literary character in a time when the problem of miscegenation was at its highest point, and when studies established that races were inherently different, meaning that the black race was inferior to the white one. Many authors have made use of this trope for different purposes, and Zora Neale Hurston was one of them. In her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston creates Janie, a mulatta that a priori follows all the characteristics of this type of female character who, however, breaks away from most of them. She overcomes all stereotypes and prejudices, those imposed on her because of her condition of interracial offspring, and is able to take charge of her own life and challenge all these impositions feeling closer to her blackness and celebrating and empowering her female identity. In this vein, storytelling becomes the liberating force that helps her do so. It will become the tool that will enable her to ignore the need of passing as a white person and provide her with the opportunity to connect with her real identity and so feel free and happy, breaking with the tragic destiny of mulatta characters. Keywords: storytelling, tragic mulatta, blackness, Hurston.  

According to Cartesian principles, in the seventeenth century the body was thought to be subordinated to the mind. Later in the eighteenth-century male authors of medical treatises supported the idea that the interaction of body and mind produced passion and could dangerously turn into mental breakdown. In all her novels Jane Austen showed an enormous interest in all matters concerning medical treatment. In Sense and Sensibility(1811), Austen emphasized illness and suffering by mixing physical health and mental disease with moral and philosophical doctrines. My contention in this article is that moralists, philosophers and thinkers such as Dr Johnson, William Blake, William Godwin, and Adam Smith collaborated with Austen to shape the idea that sensibility was no disease and sense no virtue; instead they propose that human beings, especially women, can obtain individual and collective profit and promote changes not only in the past but also in the present if they regulate their reason and feeling with a practical mindset. Key words: physical health, mental breakdown, medicine, moral thoughts, regulation of feelings.      

The aim of this research is to give an accurate account of how female stereotypes around the concept of hygiene and domesticity in early 20thC North American context influenced newly arrived Eastern European immigrants. Located in New York’s Lower East Side ghetto and determined by their Jewish background, these immigrants’ arrival caused them a cultural shock to the point that they started shaping their identities according to the new standard of beauty and cleanliness related to the Americanness they were eager to perform. For this purpose, Anzia Yezierska’s short story The Lost Beautifulness serves as a referent because it demonstrates the failure of Americanization as the prospective means through which the American Dream could be experienced, a credo which, according to the author, would only reinforce classist policies instead of cancelling them. To this effect, Yezierska depicts the actual consequences for these Jewish female immigrants after attempting to Americanize their private household spaces and maintain, thus, the standard of cleanliness necessary to validate their accurate adaptation to the American culture from their ghettoized and marginalized context. Keywords: Americanization, Anzia Yezierska, female stereotypes, whitening, domesticity, American Dream  

King Lear of Britain and Don Quijote de la Mancha, both old and frail, are dwellers of two very different worlds and eras. The ways they were devised and shaped by William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes generate nonetheless diverse similarities that emphatically expose crucial traits of the human nature.      The meaningful, more obvious dichotomies in the texts – such as Reality/Fantasy, Sight/Blindness, Truth/Falsehood, Loyalty/Treachery – frame the complexity of the protagonists and are metaphors of their antithetical features. On the other hand, their alienation, misapprehension and distortion of the surrounding realities turn them into wanderers on uneven, problematic paths, while their frail physical condition discloses a surface layer that encapsulates assertive individuals. This essay approaches Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ texts by focusing on such aspects, as well as on the respective contextualisation. Each work constitutes a challenging exemplum of a unique, proficuous broad age that wisely amalgamated the old and the new: amidst a multitude of cultural traditions, King Lear primarily embodies the expansion of Tragedy, while Don Quijote de la Mancha primarily materialises the transition to a new stage of Modernity. Keywords: Lear; Quijote; dichotomies; alienation; tradition; innovation  

Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), a contemporary classic nowadays, has raised the interest of all kinds of critics. Some of the most remarkable elements in the novel concern feminism, a movement with which the Canadian author has been highly committed. This paper deals with two specific aspects in Atwood’s work in relation to the aforementioned critical approach: gender and victimization. A thorough reading of the novel is thus done in order to detect and subsequently dissect the main instances of both aspects. Special attention is paid to female characters (Anna and the unnamed protagonist), hypersexualized and victimized in the patriarchal microcosms rendered in the story. Keywords: Atwood, feminism, gender, victimization, hypersexualization, patriarchy

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Pivoting around the epicentric character of Grace Stewart, our approach intends to cast a light on the imagery of phantasmagoria, violence and manipulation emerging from the univocal point of view in The Others so as to underline the keys of a necessary deconstruction of the dark mother's central voice in the discourse. Several resisting and peripheral readings as well as figurative marks —the chiasmus being a constant— evince the mother's role as a fallible and schizoid antagonist. Keywords: chiasmus, ghosts, the others, dark mother, Alejandro Amenábar, point of view

In this article I endeavour to encourage teachers of Secondary Education to use English literature in their English language lessons. Indeed, literature provides a huge amount of authentic reading materials, making the students practise extensive as well as intensive reading, which is crucial for the foreign language acquisition. Moreover, it is an enormous source of motivation, allowing students to give free rein to their imagination and enjoy their English lessons. The election of gothic fiction is linked to this latter purpose: the 19th gothic genre is generally well accepted by adolescents as it represents a way to reflect on themselves through a journey to “self-revelation”. The double personality/identity-theme of R. L. Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde fits well into their interests and their quest for self-knowledge. It offers them the chance to process what they are going through in this often unstable stage of their journey into adulthood by trying to figure out their place in the world.   Keywords: Reading skill, Literature in ELT, Gothic fiction, R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Double identity