This cross-national study examined preparation for and psychological functioning following Hurricane Georges in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and the United States. Four to five weeks after the storm made landfall, 697 college students (222 men, 476 women) completed a questionnaire assessing demographic characteristics, preparation, social support, resource loss, and symptoms associated with acute stress disorder. Location, resource loss (especially personal characteristic resources) and social support accounted for a significant portion of psychological distress variance. The findings support the conservation of resources stress theory (Hobfoll, 1989, 1998). Implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common dementia affecting one in nine people over 65. Only a handful of small-molecule drugs and the anti-β amyloid (Aβ) antibody aducanumab are approved to treat AD. However, they only serve to reduce symptoms of advanced disease. Novel treatments administered early in disease progression before the accumulation of Aβ and tau reaches the threshold where neuroinflammation is triggered and irreversible neuronal damage occurs are more likely to provide effective therapy. There is a growing body of evidence implying that mitochondrial dysfunction occurs at an early stage of AD pathology. The mitochondrial enzyme amyloid-binding alcohol dehydrogenase (ABAD) binds to Aβ potentiating toxicity. Moreover, ABAD has been shown to be overexpressed in the same areas of the brain most affected by AD. Inhibiting the Aβ–ABAD protein–protein interaction without adversely affecting normal enzyme turnover is hypothesized to be a potential treatment strategy for AD. Herein, we conduct structure–activity relationship studies across a series of functionalized allopurinol derivatives to determine their ability to inhibit Aβ-mediated reduction of estradiol production from ABAD. The lead compound resulting from these studies possesses potent activity with no toxicity up to 100 μM, and demonstrates an ability to rescue defective mitochondrial metabolism in human SH-SY5Y cells and rescue both defective mitochondrial metabolism and morphology ex vivo in primary 5XFAD AD mouse model neurons.

This study approaches Pedro Henríquez Ureña's linguistic work on Dominican Spanish by situating it in the political context in which it emerged. Henríquez Ureña's travels, work and publications encompass many parts of the Spanishspeaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. Linguists have generally tended to descriptively review Henríquez Ureña's contributions to Spanish American dialectology and have avoided any critical examination of the conditions of production of his linguistic work. My study attempts to fill this gap by conducting a critical examination of these works against the relevant political, cultural and intellectual currents of the period. Specifically, I apply the semiotic concepts of 'iconization' and 'erasure' which are instrumental in the analysis of ideological phenomena. Iconization and erasure are language ideological processes that link language to social behavior and linguistic forms to social images, while eliminating or omitting sociolinguistic complexity. After a discussion of the ways in which these semiotic strategies have been employed and interpreted by scholars, I demonstrate Henríquez Ureña's own implementation of them. I show how his linguistic work is a discursive site where race and identity in the Dominican Republic are both constructed and debated.

In Puerto Rico, the defense of Spanish and discussions of bilingualism have been conditioned by the island’s local politics and its relationships with the United States. Previous research has looked at how identity politics and specific political players produced arguments in favor or against various language proposals. Yet, questions regarding the complex ideological nature of the language debate in Puerto Rico remain to be examined with greater focalization and critical scrutiny. To this end and employing an interdisciplinary approach to issues of language and linguistic representation, I explore the ideological complexity of bilingualism in Puerto Rico during several decades from the perspective of the politics of language and by taking into account the phenomenon of symbolic violence. I argue that particular metaphors of language exemplify the link between symbolic and material violence in the context of this society’s struggles for political self-determination.

Este análisis se centra en los procesos de construcción de las fronteras etnolingüísticas de los dos estados-nación que comparten la isla de La Española. En el contexto del siglo XX, los políticos y los filólogos dominicanos unieron sus esfuerzos para crear una tupida red de escuelas que tenían el español como idioma de instrucción, prohibir el uso del creole, cambiar el nombre francés o creole de numerosos lugares por otro nombre en español, y producir un corpus de textos que describieran y representaran el adecuado panorama lingüístico dominicano. Las prácticas de alfabetización y las prácticas discursivas estaban empeñadas en el propósito de hispanizar las comunidades fronterizas. Mi acercamiento a la transformación sociopolítica de esta región cursa a través del análisis de las representaciones de las prácticas del discurso y las correspondientes políticas lingüísticas del Estado dominicano hacia las comunidades bilingües y multiculturales en los años treinta y cuarenta del pasado siglo. En el examen de estos problemas interrelacionados, aplico las herramientas analíticas provenientes de la investigación sobre el discurso lingüístico y las ideologías del lenguaje (Arnoux y Del Valle, 2010; Irvine y Gal, 2000; Woolard, 2008) y las perspectivas de los estudios de frontera (Wilson y Donnan, 2012; Houtum y Naerssen, 2002). Mi pregunta básica es si, en el caso de la frontera dominicano-haitiana en el siglo XX, la diferencia lingüística se representó en el discurso metalingüístico con el doble propósito de crear una identidad dominico-hispánica y avasallar las identidades dominico-haitianas que arraigaban en aquel entonces.