Browsing by Subject "Borderlands"
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Item Autonomy road : the cultural politics of Chicana/o autonomous organizing in Los Angeles, California(2011-08) Gonzalez, Pablo, active 21st century 1976-; Flores, Richard R.Since 1994, Chicana/o artists, musicians, and activists have been in dialogue with the Zapatista indigenous movement of Chiapas, Mexico. Such a transnational bridge has resonated in a new and unique form of Chicana/o cultural politics centered on the Zapatista concept of “autonomy” and “autonomous organizing.” In Los Angeles, California, this brand of “Chicana/o urban Zapatismo,” as I refer to it in the dissertation, is symbolic of recent political and cultural organizing efforts by Chicanos to combat housing gentrification, economic restructuring, racial and ethnic cleansing, environmental pollution in low-income areas, and mass anti-immigrant hysteria. This dissertation contends that Chicana/o urban Zapatismo is a result of various local, statewide, national, and international social justice movements that embrace the global trend in urban and rural areas towards constructing locally rooted participatory and democratic methods of organizing that are “horizontal” and that mobilize against such far-reaching social forces as racism and global capitalism. Using ethnographic data and interviews collected between 2005 to 2007, this dissertation maps the emergence of Chicana/o urban Zapatismo by tracing its historical origins to the changing social, political, and economic conditions of ethnic Mexican communities in Los Angeles, California; capturing the everyday internal and external tensions between one primarily working class Chicano autonomous collective, the Eastside Café ECHOSPACE in El Sereno, California; offering the case study of the South Central Farm, a 14-acre Mexican and Latino immigrant community garden; and charting the trans-border organizing of Chicana/o urban Zapatistas surrounding the most recent Zapatista-initiated project, “the Mexican Other Campaign”. These four distinct case studies converge in Los Angeles in the creation of a unique political process referred to as “urban Zapatismo”. This ethnographic study suggests that by uncovering the everyday relationships and tensions between Chicana/o urban Zapatistas in Los Angeles and the communities they live in, researchers looking at the production of different forms of racisms and structural inequalities in urban areas may derive a greater understanding of social (re)organization and mobilization by a growing, diverse, and historically marginalized group like Chicanos in the United States.Item Borderlands without borders : migrants in transit in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico(2015-05) Morante Aguirre, Mariana; Leu, Lorraine; Rodriguez, Victoria E.Each year, thousands of undocumented migrants in transit travelling on "La Bestia" through the Western route cross the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico- the second largest metropolitan area in the country. This thesis focuses on how the intersection between the "illegality" of Central American migrants and Mexican "nationals" creates a contested space of undefined border(s) through State's processes, everyday practices, political discourses, and landscapes. The research provides a spatial analysis of migrants in transit's trajectories, as well as of their experiences and relations with both the built environment and with the "locals" in a specific urban context. The analysis sheds light into the distinct ways through which migrants' trajectories are qualified by legal status, and by specific political, social and cultural imaginations and discourses of space. Furthermore, in an effort to "bring the humans back" to migratory narratives, this thesis brings to the fore the multiplicity and diversity of migrants' stories and trajectories while uncovering how the mobilization of the State and civil society creates racial and class borders that further marginalizes migrants in transit through the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.Item Colonial border control : reconsidering migrants and the making of New Spain's northern borderlands, 1714-1820(2015-05) Villarreal, Christina Marie; Twinam, Ann, 1946-; Deans-Smith, SussanThis report explores how residents of the Louisiana-Texas borderland defined and maintained the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the long eighteenth century. Utilizing colonial correspondence, royal decrees, and petitions, this study considers how subaltern historical actors--runaways, deserters, and foreigners--affected the geographic reality of Spanish sovereignty in the American Gulf Coast. Their movements across imperial borders illuminate the elusiveness of those borderlines and suggest alternate boundaries separating Spain's American territory from that of her rivals. In their responses to royal questionnaires, soldiers garrisoned at the easternmost presidios of Los Adaes and Nacogdoches based their perceptions of New Spain's geopolitical limits on the actions of border crossers. The actions of religious and political leaders, as well as the official protocol regarding runaway slaves and deserting soldiers, served as the evidence frontiersmen used to identify the location of the northern borderland. The tenuous status of the periphery led to flexibility in imperial control. Rather than enforce Spanish laws from the top-down, Texas officials relied on the knowledge and understanding of local dwellers to protect an ill-defined boundary in ways that both challenged royal law while maintaining distinct elements of colonial border control.Item Entangled knowledge, expanding nation : science and the United States empire in the southeast borderlands, 1783-1842(2013-08) Strang, Cameron Blair; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Sidbury, James; Hunt, Bruce; Olwell, Robert; Morris, ChristopherThis dissertation is about knowledge, power, and identities in North America. It practices and develops borderlands history of science as a method for exploring the interplay between these factors during the earliest period of the United States' territorial expansion, the 1780s to the early 1840s. Approaching science in the early United States from a borderlands perspective and decentering the thirteen original states on the nation's eastern periphery reveals a new picture of the knowledge, practices, individuals, and networks that comprised American culture on the whole during its formative years. Multinational individuals within borderland regions, entanglements with neighboring empires, and the imperial dimensions of the early republic were all constitutive of national science and culture. The southeast borderlands—the Gulf South territories that would become the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—is an ideal region for decentering the history of the United States: it was as much a part of the Caribbean, Spanish, and French worlds as it was of Anglo-North America and it was central to the worlds of Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and other Native groups. Scientific practitioners, ideas, and techniques in the southeast borderlands were integral to the development of both national identity and imperialism in the early United States. U.S. officials and men of science did not simply create the scientific perspectives and practices used to dominate the former Spanish, French, and British colonies of the Gulf South. Instead, they incorporated the region's multinational scientific experts, drew on the examples of other empires, and used the Gulf South as an experimental space in which they could perfect more advanced methods of exploiting the land and its peoples. Science and culture in the United States were multinational, multiethnic, and inextricable from the imperial context in which they developed.Item Fictionalizing Juárez : feminicide, violence, and myth-making in the borderlands(2014-05) Castro Villarreal, Mario Nicolas; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole MarieIn the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio.Item How the Irish, Germans, and Czechs became Anglo: race and identity in the Texas-Mexico borderlands(2010-05) Barber, Marian Jean, 1956-; Oshinsky, David M., 1944-; Miller, Guy H.; Stoff, Michael B.; Garza, Thomas J.; McKiernan-Gonzalez, JohnThis dissertation argues that Texas, a border region influenced by the disparate cultures of Mexico and the southern and western United States, developed a tri-racial society, economy, and polity in which individuals were designated "Anglo," "Mexican," or "Negro." When the Irish, Germans, and Czechs immigrated to the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they did not fit comfortably into these categories. They were always viewed as white, but certain traits kept them from being considered Anglo. Language, religion, the use of alcohol, and a real and reputed willingness to ally themselves with their black and brown neighbors set them apart. The Know-Nothing movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction and an 1887 prohibition referendum brought them significant hostility, even occasional violence. Their experiences in 1887 sparked efforts to "become Anglo," shedding or downplaying their prior identities. Even in the early twentieth century, the idea of Irish, German, and Czech "races" remained current; such thinking contributed to harsh federal immigration restrictions in the 1920s. But in Texas, the extension of Jim Crow-style segregation to Mexican-Americans during that period also extended the Anglo designation to all those who were not black or brown. The two world wars furthered Anglicization, making it undesirable to be identified as German-American and giving all Texans a taste of the wider world. Between the wars, the discovery of oil on land owned by some Irish helped make them Anglo. In the post-World War II era, education reform and other developments sounded the death knell for crucial Czech and German language use, while Mexican-Americans began to seek the privileges of Anglo-ness as a reward for service to their country, without having to become Anglo. Revelations of Nazi atrocities helped change understandings of race and the concept of ethnicity gained in popularity. By about 1960, most Texans considered the Irish, Germans,and Czechs Anglo. During the next decade, as legal restrictions based on race were repealed and black and brown Texans embraced their racial identities, the Irish, Germans, and Czechs not only embraced their Anglo-ness but once again began to celebrate their ethnic attributes as well.Item Latinos and the Natural Environment Along the United States-Mexico Border(2012-02-14) Lopez, AngelicaThe vitality of international transborder natural resources is important for the preservation of wildlife corridors, clean water, clean air, and working lands. In particular, not only does the Texas Rio Grande Valley Region in the United States (U.S.), on the U.S.-Mexico border, offer critical habitat important to North American migratory species, the area also provides substantial agricultural goods (i.e., sugarcane, sorghum, melons, onions, citrus, carrots, cabbage, and cattle). Hence, the dilemma between consumptive and non-consumptive uses of natural resources along a large geographic expanse separated by sociopolitical and sociocultural differences, is further complicated. Latinos of Mexican descent along the southwestern U.S. are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the U.S., yet their influence on U.S. natural resource allocation and management has been largely ignored. For this reason, the purpose of my study was threefold: (1) to determine public perceptions toward natural resources, the environment, and conservation; (2) to assess general environmental behaviors; and (3) to determine general recreational behaviors among three student population groups along the U.S.Mexico border region. The student groups were comprised of Texas students (Texas Latino and Texas non-Latino white), and Mexican students from three northern Mexico states, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas. A survey was derived from three of the most frequently used environmental concern, behavior, and recreation indices used for research in the discipline. Predictors of environmental concern, behavior, and outdoor recreation participation for my sample varied across sociodemographic and sociopolitical variables for each student group. A review of environmental attitudes found Mexican students were more environmentally friendly (~ 2.35 odds; P < 0.05) than their U.S. counterparts. Among the three student groups, basic environmental behaviors (environmental conservation contribution; avoiding environmentally harmful products; changing car oil; and lawn responsibility) were influenced (P < 0.05) by environmental orientation, political candidate's environmental position, father and mother's educational attainment, place of origin, sex, and combined parent income. Outdoor recreation participation and constraints to outdoor recreation participation among the student groups were influenced (P < 0.05) by parent income, age, place of origin, and environmental orientation. Examples of constraints were: not enough money, personal health reasons, inadequate transportation, and personal safety reasons. Findings from my study benefit natural resource and environmental organizations pursuing collaborative program development and implementation along the U.S.-Mexico border and other transborder regions.Item Sexuality and schooling in the borderlands : the deconstruction of Latina/o teenage pregnancy as a social problem(2013-08) Ríos, Nancy, active 2005; Menchaca, MarthaThis dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of the lives of six student-parents (four young women and two young men) from Barlow High School in northwest Austin, Texas. The lived experiences of student-parents from a predominately Latina/o high school and my interactions with Barlow High School's student body, staff, educators, administrators, and social workers from an on-campus organization called A-Space illustrate how the discursive construction of teenage pregnancy as a social problem intersects with the schooling process to (re)produce gendered, classed, and racialized notions of belonging in the American body politic. My analysis considers the development of an American cultural concern with teenage pregnancy through a history of reproductive and racial politics, and it examines the work of The National Campaign to Prevent Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy, which, I argue, is a racializing campaign. An American cultural concern with teenage pregnancy has yielded a discourse of teenage pregnancy prevention that constructs the solution to teenage pregnancy around responsibility rather than access to contraception and information. The lives of Barlow High students and student-parents highlight the complexity of deterritorialized lived experiences, which sometimes include early family formation. While Barlow High School's student body of color learned about belonging in the first decade of the new millennium, educators vacillated between understanding the intersecting hierarchies of power impeding socioeconomic mobility and academic achievement in the community and believing that they did the best they could in the given situation. Educators and social workers, as agents of the state, failed to recognize their role in creating community. In sum, this dissertation documents a borderlanding or the creation of a borderlands in the new millennium.Item The materiality of Tejano identity(2016-12) Hanson, Casey; Wade, Maria Fátima, 1948-; Creel, Darrell; Franklin, Maria; Doolittle, William; Menchaca, MarthaScholars have examined Tejano identity through various theoretical and methodological lenses, but in general, all are interested in highlighting Tejano agency in the development of Texas. As diachronic examinations of identity, these investigations are often situated in terms of shifting ethnic identities, where a broad range of backgrounds came to share common concepts of Tejano identity through shared experiences and the dynamic context of the frontier. This dissertation builds upon this research and comprehensively evaluates Tejano identity through an examination of the archaeological record from a perspective based in theories of materiality. Like previous investigations, my dissertation is a diachronic study that conceptualizes Tejano identity as a changing ethnic identity, but as an examination rooted in material culture studies, my dissertation provides a new perspective into the role of Tejano agency in the development of region. My dissertation asks what objects and what material practices were integral to the formation of Tejano identity and how did those practices change over time? To answer these questions, I compared the material worlds of various Tejano families and individuals from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and explored how objects were enmeshed in the work of subject formation over time. In my dissertation, I present the archaeological and archival data from three case study sites, the eighteenth century deposits at Spanish Governor’s Palace (41BX179), the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century deposits at and the Delgado Cistern (41BX1753) and the Mexican Period Padrón-Cháves Midden and Siege of Béxar entrenchment (41BX1752) as well as a number of other related sites. The comparative analyses reveal that local traditions, technologies, and practices contributed to the establishment of a distinct regional identity in the early eighteenth century. Many aspects of this identity endured into the nineteenth century, although other aspects of identification began to shift due to the introduction of new material practices through an illicit trade network that helped to forge a unified Tejano identity across frontier communities. Finally, the unprecedented amount of goods introduced to the frontier along with Anglo-American colonists during the Mexican Period exposed Tejanos to an array of new practices that fractured Tejano identity and reshaped the frontier.