Browsing by Subject "Transnationalism"
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Item Debating legality in Fremont, Nebraska : migrant political participation and the growing trend of local immigration enforcement(2012-05) Martinez, Vanessa Hope; Rodriguez, Nestor; Sletto, BjørnThis research uses Fremont, Nebraska, and City Ordinance 5165, passed in June of 2010, as a case study to explore the effects on migrant political activity of local legislation that prevents undocumented migrants from renting homes and acquiring jobs, and also investigates the nature of migrant participation in opposing such measures. Fremont is one of many U.S. cities that have passed ordinances targeting undocumented migrants, and while continuous legal battles have delayed these laws from going into effect, they reflect a growing attempt to undertake immigration enforcement at a local level. Interviews with Fremont community members suggest the effects of the passage of Ordinance 5165 and surrounding debate are primarily negative, including community division, increased racism, and a challenged sense of safety and belonging for many residents. However, the legislation has also had some positive influence, such as motivating higher levels of civic engagement among migrants and Latinos, and spurring mobilization efforts that have served as points of solidarity and empowerment for these same groups. Furthermore, because places are formed by way of their relations to other places, fieldwork was also conducted in Chichihualco, Guerrero, Mexico one of the largest sending communities to Fremont. These complementary findings exposed how global realities, such as economic need and transnational social ties, shaped happenings in Fremont; and interviews with return migrants and migrants' family members in Chichihualco suggest that it is unlikely the law will deter migration to the city nor persuade migrants to relocate or return to their countries of origin. The Fremont case study provides insight concerning the nationwide trend of local immigration enforcement, highlighting the need for continued investigation of the ways in which community members are organizing against such policy measures, and the observed and potential effects for various actors at different scales. This sort of legislation is being passed with greater frequency in the U.S., and this research argues that its effects have been overwhelmingly negative, and that such laws represent a missed opportunity to instead integrate growing migrant populations into city planning and development processes that could be beneficial for entire communities.Item Digital geographies of transnational spaces: a mixed-method study of Mexico-US migration(2014-08) Clary, John Vincent; Adams, Paul C.The central objective of this thesis is to explore how sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) impact Mexico-US migration. In particular, it attends to those ICTs that enable Mexican immigrants in the United States to stay “in touch” with their loved ones in Mexico. Rather than pursue the impacts of these technologies through a singular methodology or theoretical framework, this study employs an array of approaches in order to examine the geography transnational communication across multiple scales. At the level of the individual, I examine how Mexican immigrants living in Austin, TX, incorporate communication technologies into their daily lives. Informed by a series of semi-structured and in-depth interviews, I argue that cellular phone calls, text messaging, and social media platforms enable a passive, routinized transnationalism that allows migrants to maintain a degree of presence both “here” and “there.” I subsequently scale up my analysis in order to trace the emergence of digital social media—Facebook, in particular—as a communication tool for dispersed Mexican immigrant communities, and I interrogate the ways in which digital social media engender transnational social networks. Using place as a guiding conceptual theme, I demonstrate how senses of and attachments to place form the basis of communal social interactions online, and I identify the many different places, both in the US and Mexico, that are involved in particular transnational social networks and migration flows. This study concludes by drawing on recent critical GIS scholarship and volunteered geographic information (VGI) in order to visualize the digital, place-to-place connections between Mexican migrants living in United States and their friends and family members living in Mexico and elsewhere.Item I'm bien pocha: transnational teachers of English in Mexico(2003) Petron, Mary A.; Schwarzer, DavidMexican officials of the Secretaría de Educación Pública of Nuevo León assert that approximately 95 percent of English teachers working in public schools outside of the Monterrey metropolitan area learned their English as children of Mexican immigrants to the U.S. While much has been written on the effects of Mexican immigration in the U.S., little exists regarding the ways in which transnationals, who have returned to Mexico, have adapted to and/or transformed Mexican society and the education system. The purpose of this dissertation is to describe the phenomenon of transnationalism as it presented itself and continues to unfold in the lives of five transnational individuals currently employed as English teachers in rural Nuevo Leon. This dissertation is a qualitative, descriptive, multiple case study that utilizes ethnographic methods. The primary data consists of in-depth interviews, participant observations in homes and classrooms, and analysis of written artifacts such as school records of the five transnational participants. Although the focus is on these five participants, the voices of their parents, siblings, and Mexican education officials are interwoven. Analysis indicates that these individuals have painful memories of their transitions between U.S. and Mexican schooling contexts due to acculturation/assimilation processes. They provide insight into issues of race as they manifest themselves in the U.S. educational system, and issues of class as they play out in the educational system of Mexico. As adults, these transnational teachers have been extremely successful at trading the cultural capital they acquired in the U.S. for their own gain in Mexico. At the same time, they maintain the values of their immigrant parents nurtured by the transnational experience which have also served them well. As a whole, these transnational individuals have developed a borderlands consciousness which they seek to pass on to their own students and children. This study fills a gap in the research literature on transnationalism by exploring the phenomenon from the Mexican side of the border. This study highlights the shifting multiple frames of reference of transnationals and thus includes implications for theory and research as well as for educators working with Mexican origin youth in the U.S.Item Local believers, foreign missionaries, and the creation of Guatemalan Protestantism, 1882-1944(2012-05) Dove, Stephen Carter; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-; Kamil, Neil; Butler, Matthew; Tweed, Thomas; Sullivan-González, DouglassThis dissertation examines how Guatemalan converts transformed missionary Protestantism into a locally contextualized religion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Using archival materials from local religious groups and public archives in Guatemala alongside missionary documents from the United States, this research identifies how converts adopted certain missionary teachings but reinterpreted or rejected others. This selective application not only altered the definition of Protestantism in Guatemala but also affected the early growth of the movement by creating contextualized forms of Protestantism that attracted more interest than foreign versions. The first section of the dissertation analyzes the theologies and goals that early missionaries brought to Guatemala and explains the intramural conflicts that created the first Protestant communities in the country. Between 1882 and 1921, five North American Protestant denominations and several independent missionaries entered Guatemala, each with particular ideas about how to improve the country both spiritually and materially. This internal diversity provided new converts with the ability to choose between multiple versions of Protestantism, but more importantly it also taught them how to carve out their own space between imported religious ideologies. The second section of the dissertation analyzes how local believers reinterpreted Protestantism within those spaces by pursuing four important areas of innovation: theological primitivism, Pentecostalism, political involvement, and nationalism. Despite protests from many foreign missionaries, between 1920 and 1944 numerous Guatemalan Protestants adopted variations of these four themes in attempts to create a culturally and socially relevant religious product. As new converts opted for these new local communities over missionary-led options, these four themes became defining hallmarks of Guatemalan Protestantism, which by the twenty-first century was practiced by one-third of the country’s population. This dissertation argues that these contextualized challenges to missionary ideas in the early twentieth-century made Protestantism an attractive local product in Guatemala and sparked the movement’s growth. It also demonstrates how poor and working class Guatemalans in the early twentieth century used Protestantism as a tool to participate in national conversations about race, gender, and class.Item Re-reading the American renaissance in New England and in Mexico City(2010-05) Anderson, Jill, 1979-; Barrish, Phillip; Carton, Evan; Dominguéz-Ruvalcaba, Héctor; Joysmith, Claire; Murphy, GretchenRe-Reading the American Renaissance in New England and in Mexico City is a bi-national literary history of the confluence of concerns unevenly shared by new world liberal intellectuals in New England and in Mexico City. This dissertation seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of the complex history that informs the multi-faceted public and private spheres of the United States and Mexico in the twenty-first century. I introduce translations of nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals from the interior of Mexico who were preoccupied with many of the same ideas and problems characteristic of US American literary nationalism: the nation in moral crisis, the post-/neo-colonial onus of originality in the new world, the hypocrisies of race-based romantic nationalism, and the inherent contradictions of economic and political liberalisms. These inter-textual juxtapositions shift the analysis of US American liberal nationalism from a nation-based narrative of success or failure to the study of the complex, unequally distributed failures of liberalism across the region. Each chapter offers a new contextualization of the US American renaissance that demonstrates the period to be a complex palimpsest of provincial prejudices, liberal nationalisms, and cosmopolitan strategies. In Chapter Two I read the trans-american jeremiads of Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and Henry David Thoreau and Carlos María de Bustamante, Mariano Otero, and Luís de la Rosa in the aftermath of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Chapter Three focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Ignacio Ramírez's incommensurate preoccupations with the origins of language and their inter-related post/neo-colonial bids for national recognition on a Eurocentric geopolitical stage. The travel accounts of William Cullen Bryant’s trip to Mexico City in 1872 and Guillermo Prieto’s overnight stay in Bryant’s Long Island home in 1877 set the scene in Chapter Four to explore the bi-national tensions inherent in their oddly inter-related romantic nationalisms. Furthermore, the insights of this bi-national literary history invite us to recognize the contours of our own geopolitical positions, and in recognizing them, to re-orient nationalist epistemologies and literary histories as deeply conversant with contemporaneous traditions otherwise considered peripheral and/or foreign.Item Searching for the spirit(s) of diasporic Viet Nam : appeasing the ancestors and articulating cultural belonging(2013-05) Peché, Linda Ho; Strong, Pauline Turner, 1953-This dissertation contributes an interpretation of the ancestral altar tradition among Vietnamese American first and second generation practitioners. It traces the contours of the shifting transformations in domestic religious practice, specifically the transnational and diasporic dimensions in people's lives. I address how and toward what ends the "spiritual" is accessed, experienced and/or transformed in the materiality of everyday life, in the context of a complex relationship to a diasporic homeland and an emerging second generation. The research was conducted in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio (Texas), Carthage (Missouri), Sài Gòn (Viet Nam) and Pulau Galang (Indonesia). I make two main assertions. The first is that domestic religious practices matter in exploring issues of cultural citizenship and belonging. As a collection of things, I explain how altar assemblages are constituted through the purposeful and chance encounters of the practitioner(s), which is a way to talk about the global (such as transnational mobilities or the discourses about diasporic citizenship) through the intimately local. My second claim is that ideas of cultural citizenship can intersect with religious motivations and practices, and that they happen (are performed, imagined and circulated) transnationally, or more precisely, translocatively. I document how practitioners' and groups of practitioners' struggle to combat the (current Vietnamese) state's interventions in re-narrating the circumstances of their exile and also the relative invisibility they face as historical subjects in the United States. By carefully examining ancestral altars as a constitution of "things" and as situated "spaces," I address various facets of what they are and how they work -- as ways to express a familial or diasporic imaginary; or as assemblages of things that are both intimately meaningful and private, yet situated at the intersections of geopolitical engagements and cultural politics.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 Transnational Mexican-origin families : ways of knowing and implications for schooling(2012-05) Kasun, Gail Sue; Urrieta, Luis; De Lissovoy, Noah; Foley, Douglas E.; Sánchez, Patricia; Valenzuela, AngelaTransnational Mexican-origin Families is a qualitative study of four working class, Mexican-origin families who resided in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. region and who also made return visits to Mexico at least every two years. Through critical ethnographic case studies, the researcher worked with the families for over two years in multi-sited ethnography, with locations in the U.S. and Mexico. The dissertation examines the following question: What are the ways of knowing of Mexican-origin transnational students and their families in the Washington, D.C. area, and how do these transnational families experience their ways of knowing regarding education in formal schooling contexts? Using transnational theory and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento, or knowing, this study shows how transnational families’ ways of knowing are situated in three mutually-constituted domains. They are: 1) chained knowing, including the ways participants are chained to the Mexican-U.S. border and to their communities in Mexico and the U.S., 2) sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing, in terms of how the families both survive and thrive, highlighting what I call their “underdog mentality” as well as the matters of life and death on both sides of the border, and 3) Nepantlera knowing, or an in-between knowing, which allows for attempts at bridge buildings and creation of Third Spaces. In regards to schooling, the transnational aspects of these families’ lives remained hidden, despite the students’ eagerness to share about their transnationalism. Schools tended to respond to their transnational families along the “continuum of the comfortable,” or a line where schools increased their outreach to these families only moderately and only along their terms. The intention of this research is to disrupt assimilationist discourses about immigrants, particularly in light of the need to be able to navigate an increasingly globalized world. Preliminary findings suggest the need to begin to reframe immigrants as transnational, value their language heritages, disrupt the comfort of educators in their outreach to transnational families, and for educators, in particular, to learn to do the work of border crossing in their outreach to transnational families.Item Transnational social fields and the experience of transit migrants in Istanbul, Turkey(Texas Tech University, 2006-05) Shepherd, Jordan DavidThroughout history, Turkey has been a stop on numerous migration routes. The political implications of the current state of transit migration through Turkey have been analyzed, but little work has focused on the migrants themselves. My project focuses on a diverse group of transit migrants based at an Anglican parish in Istanbul. They interact within multiple transnational social fields to cope with the challenges of migration. These migrants must struggle with separation from family and friends, earning an income, finding ways out of Turkey, and other issues. To face these challenges, they rely on the resources of three transnational social fields: family and friends outside Turkey, their national community within Turkey, and the international community of governmental and non-governmental aid organizations. My analysis of the migrants' experience in Istanbul will highlight the human side of transit migration and the agency of a group of people often considered passive or dependent. Hopefully, my research can provide a useful perspective for aid organizations and others who confront issues of forced migration.