Browsing by Author "Cordova, Cary, 1970-"
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Item Building identity : The Miami Freedom Tower and the construction of a Cuban American identity in the post-Mariel era(2012-05) Rafferty, Jennifer Ashley; Cordova, Cary, 1970-; Menchaca, MarthaThe Miami Freedom Tower was built during the 1920s and then used during the 1960s as a processing center for newly arriving Cuban refugees. This report will demonstrate the ways in which a particular, powerful segment of the Cuban American community used the tower as a means to establish for themselves a more positive, Euroamerican identity in the wake of the Mariel boatlift and in the context of national debates over immigration in the 1980s and 1990s. By first looking at the U.S. government’s establishment of Cuban American identity during the early Cold War as positive and ideologically aligned with the United States and then examining the ways in which that identity was challenged in the 1980s and 1990s, this report demonstrates that national and ethnic identities are constantly in flux. Further, it is necessary to break down and fully analyze the ways in which the identities of immigrant groups are framed both externally by the press, popular culture, and the government and internally by their own goals, conceptions, and histories.Item Documenting against erasure : deindustrialization and the camera in the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier(2014-08) Zelt, Natalie Marie; Cordova, Cary, 1970-Amid contemporary catastrophizing about industry and the practice of photography, American artist LaToya Ruby Frazier began her photographic series Notion of Family (2002 to present) as a means of documenting the effects of economic and environmental decline in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Located nine miles south of Pittsburgh and the site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill, the contemporary landscape of Braddock and the experience of its citizens mark a liminal place between the stark abandonment of completely deindustrialized sites and a continued battle with the environmental and social effects of surviving in industry’s wake. By photographing herself, her mother, her grandmother, and cousins and documenting the vicissitudes of her lived experience, Frazier uses the camera to resist real and insidious attempts at the erasure from the landscape and history of Braddock and from photographic discourse. Her work is a complex form of autobiography generated to be both representative of herself and to speak to a larger narrative about the impact of deindustrialization on marginalized communities. She uses the historical tension between absence and presence to make histories, realities and subjectivities present against the cultural and environmental forces striving to render them absent.Item "History should be told as a fact": Elena Zamora O'Shea's reconstruction of the Texas past(2010-05) Pasternack, Natasha Miller; Cordova, Cary, 1970-; Gonzalez, John M.This report examines the life and works of Elena Zamora O'Shea, reading them as a form of resistance to the dominant narrative of Anglo conquest in south Texas.Item Modern displacements : urban injustice affecting working class communities of color in East Austin(2012-05) Gray, Amanda Elaine; Cordova, Cary, 1970-In this report I analyze both historical and contemporary urban planning policies enacted by the City of Austin, TX, through which I establish patterns of structural inequality affecting working class communities of color residing in East Austin. I examine early 20th-century urban beautification initiatives, along with the Progressive era segregationist project of the modern city. Austin city planners solidified segregation along racial lines with the 1928 Master Plan, which mandated the systematic displacement and relocation of African American and Mexican American communities to Austin’s Eastside, along with all “objectionable industries.” Today, East Austin working class communities of color continue to experience unequal burdens of environmentally hazardous industry in their neighborhoods. I examine initiatives implemented by the local grassroots environmental justice organization PODER and their fight for the health and safety of East Austin residents of color in combination with their protest against gentrifying urban planning policies and practices. Through an analysis of the PODER Young Scholars for Justice documentary, Gentrification: An Eastside Story, I look at the ways in which gentrification has changed the East Austin urban cultural landscape. This report aims to shed light upon spatial and racial social geographies that have contributed to the nearly century long battle East Austin residents have waged against discriminatory urban planning policies resulting in educational segregation, environmentally racist industrial zoning, and contemporary displacement of working class communities of color for city profit.Item Social violence, social healing : the merging of the political and the spiritual in Chicano/a literary production(2012-05) Lopez, Christina Garcia; Cordova, Cary, 1970-; Limón, José Eduardo; Lieu, Nhi; Perez, Domino; Cox, JamesThis dissertation argues that spiritual and religious worldviews (i.e. Mexican Catholicism, indigenous spiritualities, and popular religion) have historically intersected with social and political realities in the development of Mexican origin communities of the United States. More specifically, as creative writers from these communities have endeavored to express and represent Mexican American experience, they have consistently engaged these intersections of the spiritual and the material. While Chicano/a criticism has often overlooked, and in some ways dismissed, the significant role which spiritual and religious discourses have played in the political development of Mexican American communities, I examine how the works of creative writers pose important questions about the role of religious faith and spirituality in healing the wounds of social violence. By placing literary texts in conversation with scholarship from multiple disciplines, this project links literary narratives to their historical, social, and political frameworks, and ultimately endeavors to situate literary production as an expressive cultural product. Historical and regional in approach, the dissertation examines diverse literary narratives penned by writers of Mexican descent between the 1930s and the current decade. Selected textual pairings recall pivotal moments and relations in the history of Mexico, America, and their shared geographical borderlands. Through the lens of religion and spirituality, a broad array of social discourses emerges, including: gender and sexuality, landscape and memory, nation-formation, race and ethnicity, popular traditions, and material culture.