Browsing by Subject "Chicana"
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Item Becoming an activist Chicana teacher: a story of identity making of a Mexican American bilingual educator in Texas(2009-08) Jackson, Linda Dolores Guardia; Urrieta, Luis; Valenzuela, AngelaThis person-centered ethnography focused on the ways one exemplary veteran Mexican American bilingual educator’s (MABE’s) cultural resources and professional experiences influenced her teaching practices. The study examined her life history and classroom practices to explore the trajectory of her identity making. The framework utilized in this research included a sociohistorical/sociocultural lens and Chicana/Latina feminist theories. Specifically, my research investigated the multiple spaces where a MABE navigated between an additive bilingual education model and a subtractive one. The study relied primarily on data collected from oral life history interviews augmented by participant observations at a school in a large, central Texas district. The participant, a first grade teacher with 28 years of classroom experience in the same district, was interviewed over a four-year span. Further, classroom observations occurred during a full school year. Additional interviews with educators who worked with the participant at critical moments in her professional life provided not only triangulation of information, but also a multiplicity of perspectives and foci on the educational landscapes wherein she operated. Narrative analysis of the data involved the decoding and deconstruction of a MABE’s active participation in the processes of performing and (re)presenting her identity production including being silenced and speaking up. The findings revealed a dialectic and dialogic process between personal experiences, early schooling, impositions of policies, and daily-lived classroom experience while constantly navigating and negotiating the challenges of educating culturally and linguistically diverse students. A primary finding revealed the construct of autobiographical consciousness as a MABE’s critical awareness of the historical legacy, lived experiences, and the contexts in which she teaches. The study documented silencing through marginalization, as well as establishing voice through agency to understand construction and reconstruction of identities.Item Chicana political visionaries : a review of political art, cultural resistance and Chicana aesthetics(2011-05) Marterre, Elizabeth Nicole; Menchaca, Martha; Campbell, CraigThis paper presents a literature review on Chicana artists throughout history. It is an effort to situate Chicana artists as political visionaries, capable of conveying new visions for the future in their strategic disruption of the distribution of the sensible. Chicana art has been widely studied in the past two decades as a body of work that is both based in cultural formation, spirituality and a feminist critique of the Chicano Movement from 1968-1975. In this review of the literature, I will explore Chicana art in its role as political inspiration and a mapping of resistance to white elite power structures. Therefore, my focus in this work will be to analyze resistance and visual art, as well as the relationship between Chicanas and visual art. In this sample, I will canvas some of the work written on the historical processes that shaped Chicana/o identity, the Chicano/a movement and the early Chicana critique of that movement. This will simultaneously incorporate references to the artistic expression of the movement that has continued to shape cultural and political production in the Mexican American and affiliated academic communities for the last forty years.Item Crystal City women's reflections and stories of the Chicano movement in Crystal City, Texas(2014-05) Zavala, Corina Raquel; Urrieta, LuisCrystal City, Texas has been a part of the Chicano Movement narrative since the beginning. Crystal City High School like others across the United States held walkouts to protest the lack of respect for the Mexican American culture and for civil rights for Mexican Americans in schools. Crystal City is also the home to one of the original Raza Unida Parties. This rich history has placed Crystal City in a unique position in Chicano history. This study draws from Chicana Feminist epistemology, methodology, and scholarship to disrupt the meta-narrative that is and has been told of the Chicano Movement, and more specifically about Crystal City and its part in the Movement. By creating a counter narrative that is woman centered, this dissertation seeks to disrupt the binary of good/bad views of the Chicano Movement. This is done through the use of oral histories and testimonios of four women who were not directly in the spotlight of the Chicano Movement. This dissertation then briefly examines what stories our four women shared with their youngest child. This was done to investigate what the author has experienced with younger generations of Cristaleños. The experiences can best be described as disillusionment of the Chicano Movement. The major components of this dissertation are the stories the four participants share about the Chicano Movement in Crystal City, Texas. These stories are personal and touching in a way that showcases the use of Chicana Feminist methodology and disrupts the meta-narrative of the Chicano Movement and the binary of the views of the Movement.Item Cultivating community : socially responsible pedagogy in the devising process(2015-05) Thomas, Emily Aguilar; Schroeder-Arce, Roxanne; Dawson, Kathryn; González-López, GloriaAccording to the U.S. Department of Justice, statistics show that young people are experiencing sexual violence at the hands of adults and often do not tell anyone about their experiences ("Reporting of Sexual Violence Incidents"). Weaving research and practice in sexual violence and Applied Theatre, this case study explores the process of building community among participants while learning through and about these key content areas. Through a devising process that worked toward creating an original Applied Theatre program for young audiences, the researcher interrogates how enacting socially responsible pedagogy informed the process and nurtured a learning community. Enacting a critically-engaged pedagogy, this document invites artists, practitioners and pedagogues to consider how a feminist pedagogy might shape a socially-engaged art-making process and incite participants to take constructive action in their communities.Item Embodied Storying, A Methodology for Chican@ Rhetorics: (Re)making Stories, (Un)mapping the Lines, And Re-membering Bodies(2012-10-19) Cobos, CasieThis dissertation privileges Chican@ rhetorics in order to challenge a single History of Rhetoric, as well as to challenge Chican@s to formulate our rhetorical practices through our own epistemologies. Chapter One works in three ways: (1) it points to how a single History of Rhetoric is implemented, (2) it begins to answer Victor Villanueva's call to "Break precedent!" from a singly History, and (3) it lays groundwork for the three-prong heuristic of "embodied storying," which acts as a lens for Chican@ rhetorics. Chapter Two uses embodied storying to look at how Chican@s are produced through History and how Chican@s produce histories. By analyzing how Spanish colonizers, contemporary scholars/publishers, and Chican@s often disembody indigenous codices, this chapter calls for rethinking how we practice codices. In order to do so, this chapter retells various stories about Malinche to show how Chican@s already privilege bodies in Chican@ stories in and beyond codices. Chapter Three looks at cartographic practices in the construction, un-construction, and deconstruction of bodies, places, and spaces in the Americas. Because indigenous peoples practice mapping by privileging bodies who inhabit/practice spaces, this chapter shows how colonial maps rely on place-based conceptions of land in order to create imperial borders and rely on space-based conceptions in order to ignore and remove indigenous peoples from their lands. Chapter Four looks at foodways as a practice of rhetoric, identity, community, and space. Using personal, familial, and community knowledge to discuss Mexican American food practices, this chapter argues that foodways are rhetorical in that they affect and are affected by Chican@ identities. In this way, food practices can challenge the conception of rhetoric as being solely attached to text and privilege the body. Finally, Chapter Five looks at how Chican@ rhetorics and embodied storying can affect the field(s) of rhetoric and writing. I ask three specific questions: (1) How can we use embodied storying in histories of rhetoric? (2) How can we use embodied storying in Chican@ rhetorics? (3) How can we use embodied storying in our pedagogy?Item "The face of god has changed" : Tejana cultural production and the politics of spirituality in the borderlands(2010-08) Sendejo, Brenda Lee; Flores, Richard R.; Menchaca, Martha; Strong, Pauline; Martinez, Anne M.; Zamora, EmilioThis ethnography of spirituality explores the production of cultural practices and beliefs among a group of Texas Mexican women (Tejanas) of the post-World War II generation. These women have been involved with various social justice initiatives since the 1960s and 1970s in Texas, such as the Chicana feminist and Chicano civil rights movements. This study explains how race, ethnicity, and gender intersect and interact in these women’s geographic and spiritual borderlands to produce a pattern of change in the ways they choose to engage with religion, particularly Catholicism. While the Tejana spiritual productions examined here are in many ways distinct from the religious practices of these women’s Catholic upbringings, they also recall religious rituals and traditions from their imagined, constructed, and engaged pasts. Some women have left Catholicism for other forms of spiritual fulfillment, including earth-based, indigenous, and/or Eastern religious practices, while others have remained Catholic-identified, yet altered how they practice Catholicism. A common theme in the narratives is that of spiritual agency – the conscious decision women make to reconfigure their spiritual practices and beliefs. I explore the meaning of such acts and what they indicate about the construction of spiritual and religious identities in the borderlands. I argue that because gender structures Tejana religious experiences to such a wide extent, a critical gender analysis of religious and spiritual practices will provide deeper insight into the making of Texas Mexican culture and social relations. I examine the women’s life experiences through a methodological framework I call mujerista ethnography, which draws on oral history and research methods employed by feminist, indigenous, and Chicana/o Studies scholars. In order to further illustrate how the women’s material and spiritual needs have changed so as to require new forms of spiritual engagement, I engage in a critical self-reflection of my own spiritual journey as a Tejana raised in the Catholic faith through the use of autoethnographic research methods and testimonio. I argue that these Tejanas have extended the political, feminist, and historical consciousnesses that they cultivated in Mexican American social causes into the religious and spiritual realms. For instance, these women transferred their critique of gender politics and hierarchies of power into the social setting of organized Catholicism with new spiritual practices and understandings, effectively remaking religion and subsequently engaging in processes of self-making by changing the ways they interact with Catholicism and are affected by it. Religion, as a site of social struggle for women, is political, that is, these Tejanas transformed the spiritual into a site of resistance, resolution, and reconciliation where they disrupt and challenge hierarchies of power and create strategies for healing themselves, their communities, and the earth.Item Schooling in times of dystopia : empowering education for Juárez women(2011-05) Cervantes Soon, Claudia Garbiela; Foley, Douglas E.; Valenzuela, Angela; Brown, Keffrelyn; Balli, Cecilia; Luykx, AurolynYoung women in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico are coming of age in an era of feminicides, drug wars, impunity, and fear. This ethnographic study examines the ways in which Preparatoria Altavista, a public high school, in one of the most marginalized areas of Juárez, attempts to empower subaltern young women through its critical and social justice philosophy of education. The study draws from critical pedagogy, socio-cultural theory, and feminist scholarship to offer a unique analysis of how hegemonic ideas are resisted and/or inscribed pedagogically, politically, and institutionally at Altavista. Secondly, the study examines how the school’s constructions of democratic and social justice education interact with the current dystopic context of Juárez and discourses about Juárez women to provide a framework with which a group of young women author their identities and practice forms of resistance. The ethnographic fieldwork took place in the 2009-2010 academic year. The methods included unstructured ethnographic interviews with teachers, administrators, and numerous students, as well as semi-structured interviews and an auto-photography technique with nine girls. The study identifies three interrelated aspects that characterize the transformative pedagogy of Preparatoria Altavista: freedom and autonomy, authentic caring relationships, and the cultivation of critical discourse and activism. Together, these core values promote the school’s ultimate goal for its students – autogestión, or the ability to self-author empowered identities; read their world; and initiate and develop socially transformative projects. Considering the school’s context, as well as the many challenges inherent in the dystopic Juárez of today, the study also identifies a typology of four different paths to the girls’ identity and agency development: the Redirectors, the Reinventors, the Redefiners, and the Refugees. This typology is based on various ways and degrees to which the young women in this study authored the self as they negotiated the messages from the multiple figured worlds that they inhabit. The study seeks to counter sensationalist, criminalizing, and dooming narratives about Juárez youth, as well as stereotypical and objectifying depictions of Juárez women by offering a nuanced analysis of their experiences, perspectives, identities, and forms of agency. The study also seeks to offer a language of possibility and hope for urban schools and contexts of civil unrest through critical pedagogy.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.