Browsing by Subject "Chicano"
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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 Examining Working Class Chicano Identities in San Antonio and Chicago as Portrayed in The Banner Project by Juan Miguel Ramos, David Botello’s Arte por Vida/Art for Life and The Children of Quetzalcoatl by Ricardo Santos Hernandez(2011-08) Polendo, Arthur J.; Check, Ed; Chua, Kevin; Erler, Carolyn; Wasserman, Jason; Jaddo, LahibThis dissertation examines how contemporary Chicano working class identities are imagined and portrayed within three public art examples in Chicago, Illinois and San Antonio, Texas: The Banner Project, completed in 2002, by San Antonio Artist Juan Miguel Ramos, contemporary tattoo art of San Antonio artist David Botello, owner and proprietor of Arte Por Vida/Art for Life tattoo studio, and The Children of Quetzalcoatl mural by Chicago artist Ricardo Hernandez. Using the artists? lives and environs as grounded theories, I fully document their images and analyze how these artists and their artworks relate to and interact with the particular surrounding space and location as well as my personal and professional relationships to the original art sites. I examine the multiple ways ethnicity plays a role in each artist?s life and art and discover that ethnicity is but one meaningful factor defining their art. Formal education, lived experiences within familial locations and working class values and ethics also contribute in shaping the course of these artists? identities and artwork over time. Ethnicity and social class are factors that these artists negotiate daily. These formally educated artists with working class roots have helped change communities and the visual arts and are but a glimpse of the complex lives and locations of what it means to be Chicano in a rapidly changing American cultural landscape.Item My Chicano education : the importance of edgewalkers to the field of art education.(2013-08) Smith, Cassie Lynn; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-This thesis uses autoethnographic research of the Mexican American art community in Austin, Texas to demonstrate how edgewalkers, people to move between multiple cultural worlds yet retain their own identity, become informal art educators through the process of transculturation. The work describes this cyclical and on-going process that includes curiosity, knowledge gathering, and awareness of self and others and the summation of these elements, which leads to transculturation. For this research, four informal art educators practicing in Austin were interviewed. Each of the collaborators practices art in different media including visual art, curating of exhibitions, performance, and graphic design. The descriptions and analysis of the researcher’s experiences along with those of the informal art educators reveal a third landscape, or an alternative space and identity, where multiple cultural worlds overlap into bicultural, bilingual and/or biconceptual environments. This thesis demonstrates how informal art education, made possible through transcultural experiences, is an effective tool in art education and culturally responsive instruction.Item ¡Sí se come! : creating a unique Mexican American food identity(2012-08) Juárez, Marisa Celia; Stross, Brian; Moran Gonzalez, JohnYou are what you eat. The essence of being is our identity, so what we choose to eat has a large impact on who we are. By defining identity and applying these definitions in relation to food we can discover how we identify through the foods we eat, creating a food identity. For Mexican Americans, it is la comida que sí se come! I have classified the following as our most basic forms of identity: mental versus the physical or biological, and individual versus group. Within the group identity stem the facets of race, ethnicity, nationality, language and culture that all make up a Mexican American identity. By thoroughly exploring the four basic classifications of identity we are able to apply the methods of identity creation towards our interactions with food, from our first learned experiences as children, to later cooking for our own children, which all lead to the creation of our food identities. Once food identity is understood it can be applied specifically to the Mexican American experience, therefore exploring how the food choices that Mexican Americans make contribute towards a unique food identity. Just like the Mexican American self identity, Mexican American food identity is neither “Mexican” nor “American,” and yet it can be both. Like self identity, this food identity consists of a long historical background, embracing dual nationalities and combining life experiences with culture. It is also heavily influenced by family- familia- more so than a generic food identity.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.Item The start of a new era? : examining the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition (AIRC) and experiences of Latinas(2011-08) Jiménez, Hortencia; Young, Michael P.; Browne, Simone; Charrad, Maya; Martinez, Lisa; Gonzalez-Lopez, Gloria; Rodriguez, NestorThrough fifty-three in-depth interviews with activists, community members, immigrants, students, and allies, this dissertation research explores the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition (AIRC), a nonprofit immigrant rights organization in Austin, Texas that formed as a response to the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (H.R. 4437) in the spring of 2006. Three layers of questions guide this research: (1) How did AIRC emerge from the established organizations and activist networks in Austin, Texas? (2) What did AIRC do after the 2006 marches and what is its relationship with organizations in Austin? (3) What are the different ways AIRC has attempted to mobilize Latino(a) and pro-immigrant activism? My dissertation demonstrates that the 2006 mobilizations in Austin, Texas were part of a concerted effort by non-profit organizations, grassroots groups, activists, allies, and college and high school students. Amongst these many active participants, Latinas took a lead. The prominence of the work of similar coalitions throughout the U.S. during La Primavera Latina of 2006 and the lack of prominent male leadership suggests that across the nation, as in Austin, a new type of organizational lead is emerging in the Immigrant Rights Movement (Ramírez Perales-Ramos, Arellano 2010). The 2006 mobilizations reveal a different type of leadership, not an absence of one. In Austin, Latinas took on various leadership roles to move the AIRC forward during and beyond the 2006 marches. This dissertation explores the significance of new leadership, a process approach to leadership which I term “doing leadership.” The four processes of doing leadership embody shared leadership, leadership that serves the community, leadership that leads by obeying, and leadership unfolds behind the scenes.Item The Chicano Gunfighter and the Mestiza Goddess: contemporary Chicana/o identity in Américo Paredes's(Texas Tech University, 2006-08) Benavidez, Fernando; Aycock, Wendell M.; Miner, MadonneThe notion of a complex process of identity construction due to the unique political and cultural Chicana/o situation at the U.S.-Mexico border is the focus of this thesis. What matters, that is, is how the Chicana/o "thinks" about his/her existence in such an historically conflicted space like the border after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and how the Chicanas/os define themselves there through literature. For decades, Mexican American artists, authors, musicians, philosophers, and scholars have attempted to express the Chicana/o consciousness on the border. As part of the cultural group that lost this historical battle between the U.S. and Mexico, the contemporary Mexican American border intellectual has been challenged by his/her unique existence in this “in-between” border space. In With His Pistol In His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero and in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Américo Paredes and Gloria Anzaldúa attempt to reflect different processes of identity construction, respectively. Then, the question is: How do these authors interpret this unique existence "in between both possibilities" within their works differently? In order to examine these works, I will explore the border region as a unique space from which these authors explore identity construction, implying that the U.S.-Mexico border is a cultural, social, and political space which becomes a relevant force in this process. I will also explore how each author influences the way Chicanos/as think about themselves and their socially subaltern status on the border. I will also consider how each author affects Chicana/o identity construction as well as the affect each author has on the predicament into which the Chicana/o intellectual's process of identity construction falls when facing a postmodernist world.