Browsing by Department "Mexican American Studies"

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The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the U.S. Mexico Border: Text and Map Analysis Assignment
(2019-08-21) Perez Allison, Alexandrea Noel; Palacios, Albert A.
This assignment helps students think critically about the geographical and political definition of the U.S.-Mexico boundary and its effect on people living in the borderlands through the analysis of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo text and contemporary historical maps.
Agüite y lucha : socio-emotional implications of U.S. immigration policy for undocumented Latinx/as in graduate school
(2018-05-04) Madrigal Lara, Griselda; Chávez, Karma R.
This study focuses on the stressors and coping mechanisms that undocumented Latinx/as adopt in their graduate studies. Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with Latinx/as in graduate programs in the West Coast, Midwest, and East Coast. The semi-structured interviews were conducted recently after the rescindment of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) on September 5, 2017. Latinx/as expressed their stressors which mainly pertained to immigration news, including the rescindment of DACA. Coping mechanisms and ways in which participants are resisting are also examined in this study. This study ends with a section on the support systems and relationships that allow for coping and resistance.
Anti-Mexican Violence, Race, and the Myth of Color-Blindness
(2021) Blas, Jacob D.; Vásquez, Antonio
Race and color-blindness have been examined in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies scholarship to explain the United States’ use of power through white supremacy to enact anti-Mexican violence. Anglo Americans have utilized laws, rhetorical strategies, and the manipulation of whiteness to yield fear and xenophobia, exacerbating negative stereotypes of Mexicans and Mexican Americans (e.g., “illegal,” gang members, drug dealers, rapists, criminals, dirty, diseased, mongrel). These attitudes continue to intensify under neoliberal, center, and right-wing U.S. politics and policing to characterize communities of color and immigrants as the “problem.” Neoliberal and liberal politics that use the concept of “color-blindness” do equal harm by erasing histories and ongoing experiences of white supremacy and colonial domination. The purpose of this study is to highlight how the formation of race, which is intrinsically tied to class and gender, is utilized as a mechanism for anti-Mexican violence in historical and contemporary contexts. I also intend to draw connections between this historical legacy and the contemporary period through a discussion about color-blindness and the dangers of white individualism. An examination of white supremacy, and its manifestation throughout U.S. institutions, is critical to understanding these issues because it allows us to critique the systems of power that continue to dominate the bodies of people of color. Racial hierarchies will continue to be reinforced if whiteness dominates U.S. society, academia, and the political apparatus. If we continue to ignore this history and the ongoing subjection, anti-Mexican violence – a critical facet of nation building – will continue unchallenged.
Are American communities becoming more secure? : evaluating the secure communities program
(2012-08) Villagrán, José Guadalupe; Menchaca, Martha; Rodriguez, Nestor P.
This thesis examines the federal government’s progression in implementing the Secure Communities program. The Secure Communities program was initiated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2008 as a pilot program in only fourteen jurisdictions nation-wide. As of the writing of this thesis, four years following the initiation of the program, S-Comm. has been implemented in over 1700 jurisdictions nation-wide and it is set to be implemented in all local jurisdictions nationally by the end of 2013 (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2012). Although local law enforcement agencies had long shared the fingerprints of those they arrested with the FBI, the FBI now forwards this information to the DHS through S-Comm. who then checks the fingerprints against the Automated Biometric Identification System known as IDENT—a fingerprint database containing information on over 91 million individuals, including travelers, applicants for immigration benefits, and immigrants who have previously violated immigration laws. ICE then supposedly reviews their records to see if the person arrested is deportable. If they believe they are, or want to further interrogate them, ICE will issue a detainer. The detainer is a request to the local police to inform federal immigration authorities when the arrestee will be released from custody and to hold the individual for up to two days for transfer to ICE (The Chief Justice, 2011). This process is considered to be the most advanced form of file sharing between local authorities and federal immigration authorities yet. The focus of this endeavor is to evaluate whether this program has been effective in doing as its title maintains. If this program is one that the American people, documented or not, have to endure then it is important that we ask: has Secure Communities made American communities safer? Recent data collected on the program, reports of mass opposition to the initiative by local law enforcement officials throughout the country, and numerous personal accounts of discriminatory harassment of mostly Spanish-speaking Americans by federal immigration agents and state and local law enforcement officials participating in Secure Communities collectively demonstrate that this program has failed in making American communities more secure.
Are there any machos in the house? : contemporary manifestations of machismo
(2017-05) Aragón García, Seiri Janett; Gonzalez, Rachel Valentina; Lopez, Belem G
This research explores the transnational existence of machismo and its continuous presence among Mexican and Mexican American men as transnational ideologies and attitudes from Mexico into the United States. This mixed methods approach, comprised of in-depth interviews, virtual ethnographic analysis, and textual analysis. These approaches to machismo is dedicated to better understand the social performances of Mexican origin, cis-gendered men living in the United States and Mexico, who find their masculinities bridged through social media, as nationalistic pride, taking pride in their Mexican origin/ heritage risen out of narco culture specifically. These three different interviews are presented in holistic sections titled, Señoras de Las Lomas and Machismo, Traditional ideologies of Mexican undocumented millennial, and The Complexity of Social Media and the Narco Lifestyle. The compilation of these case studies presented, aims to demonstrate how machista ideologies and attitudes continue to persist in contemporary U.S. and Mexican society. This research aims to provide insight on how traits are learned and adopted, (public and private) and how they become manifested in online spaces (not exclusively). Readers will be able to reflect about the oversaturation of machista ideologies, and gendered perspectives on machista ideologies and how these “traditions” have been embedded in Mexican culture, become transnational, circulated, re-circulated, inculcated, and how they persist, even subtly in quotidian life in the 21st century.
Complicating the Narrative of Hispanic Migration Through a Healthcare Lens
(2023-05) Sanchez-Garcia, Ezequiel
Hispanic migration and the southern border that concerns it pervade the political sphere as a point of controversy. Spurred on by recent presidential races, the narrative of Hispanic migrants and their role in the country has increased border tensions and attitudes. This honors thesis attempts to shift the standard view of migration, beginning with the 2016 election and continuing through to the present. Instead of just focusing on migration to the United States, the movement and narratives of individuals to Mexico are analyzed for access to alternative healthcare. In addition to personal experience, photojournalism pieces from a recent trip to Nuevo Progreso, secondary and archival data analysis from both countries contribute to understanding medical tourism along the southern U.S. border. Migration across the U.S.-Mexico border is not as simple as saying that movement is a one-way street ending in the theft of American jobs. It is a more complex dynamic that flows in both directions and encompasses an ethnically and geographically unique community.
Counterhegemonic aesthetic practices beyond speculation: art and activism toward the imagined real
(2023-08) Flores, Andie; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-
Guided by counterhegemonic aesthetic strategies like prefiguration and stereoscopic aesthetics as revolutionary tools, this report critically examines and identifies opportunities within speculative art and activism, specifically comparing the art of Iván Argote with different artistic interventions.
Developing a hauntology of Latinidad
(2018-05) Albarrán, Lario José; Gonzalez, Rachel Valentina
In this thesis I utilize theories of phenomenology and performance to develop a hauntology of Latinidad. By following the specter of Latinidad, I interrogate imaginative sites constructed through the historical, social, and performative facets of colonialism’s impact in the United States. I do this to theorize notions of Latinidad in order to argue that the multi-faceted relationship between Latinidad and colonialism has summoned a specter that manifest historically, performatively, visually, and phenomenally as Latinidad. As a result, the specter of Latinidad positions marginalized individuals that identify with Latinidad in the United States as bodies “haunted” by their own biological and phenotypical disposition to Latinidad. Placing the theory of Jacques Derrida and Kashif Powell in conversation with scholars such as Avery Gordon, Judith Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Juana Rodriguez, and others, I evoke the language and metaphor of haunting to consider the profound effect the relationship between marginalized bodies and the lingering specter of Latinidad.
The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism by Frederick C. Turner
(The Journal of Politics, 1969) Ross, Stanley
Education y Justicia: A Living History of the Latinx Experience in U.T Austin
(2018) Hernandez, Luke
El monstruo en “Monstro”: Una perspectiva neobarroca
(Label Me Latina/o, 2017-09-23) Arbino, Daniel; Sabate, Nuria
Fictionalizing Juárez : feminicide, violence, and myth-making in the borderlands
(2014-05) Castro Villarreal, Mario Nicolas; Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole Marie
In 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.
Guatemalan unaccompanied children migration : a case study of unaccompanied children in guatemala
(2016-05) Gonzalez, Luis Raul; Rodriguez, Néstor; Menchaca, Martha
This thesis examines the motives and conditions of migration of Guatemalan unaccompanied children through a case study. Unaccompanied children have been arriving in large numbers than in the past. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in fiscal year 2014, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol apprehended more than 68,000 unaccompanied children (DHS Statistical Yearbook 2014), and approximately 69,000 migrants traveling together as families. Based on ethnographic, semi-structure interviews with families, NGOs, lawyers, and community members I argue that new migration communities are emerging as a result of systemic legal violence. There is little consensus among analysts regarding why the number of Central American minors abandoning their homes in hope of entering the United States has increased so significantly. Nevertheless, structural conditions of high levels of poverty, unemployment, violence, and instability in the region has contributed to the influx of child migration.
Indigeneity and mestizaje in Luis Alberto Urrea's The Hummingbird's Daughter and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead
(2014-05) Hernandez, Zachary Robert; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-
In an attempt to narrow a perceived gap between two literary fields, this thesis provides a comparative analysis of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Humminbird’s Daughter, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. I explore and critique the ways in which Luis Alberto Urrea mobilizes mestizaje and Chicana/o nationalist rhetoric. I argue that mestizaje stems from colonial representations that inscribe indigenous people into a narrative of erasure. Furthermore, I address Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of mestizaje within Almanac of the Dead.
Juárez-Lincoln University : alternative higher education in the Chicana/o Movement, 1969-1983
(2013-12) Puente, Jaime Rafael; Zamora, Emilio
This thesis project centers on the use of pedagogy and education as forms of social protest during the Chicana/o Movement. Following Chicana/o Movement historiography, this project seeks to explore and explain the events behind the establishment and demise of Juárez-Lincoln University in Austin, Texas. Using this institution as the primary focus, the history of the Chicana/o Movement will be examined using the lens of liberation pedagogy to explore how and why an institution such as Juárez-Lincoln University is missing from the larger historical narrative. Placing Juárez- Lincoln University into the context of the Chicana/o Movement will then provide a space for examining the use of education and radical pedagogies as a form of social protest equal to the more visible and studied La Raza Unida Party. This study will serve an introduction to the complex history of education as activism during the Chicana/o Movement.
The K-12 educational experiences and identity formation of Na’ Ñuu Davi in Washington State
(2015-05) Guevara-Cruz, Griselda; Rodríguez, Néstor; Urrieta, Jr. , Luis
In this project, I look at how individuals of Ñuu Davi background came to an understanding of their social position while in the United States' K-12 educational pipeline and how it contributed to their life goals (academically and personally). Some questions addressed are: How does resilience work for students who face multi-layered barriers in education? How do they negotiate their identity? How do acquired skills in school become useful beyond academic settings? Does their acquired knowledge and path of resistance allow for civic/social engagement? Although the focus of this project is very specific, children of individuals of La Mixteca Baja region of Oaxaca residing in Washington State, the findings of this research are relevant in other places where Ñuu Davi (Mixteco) students are present and are being served in the educational pipeline. I see the importance of looking into this community's children's experiences, struggles, and needs in school in order to best equip them to navigate unfamiliar spaces. This exploratory research project stems from my personal experience as a Ña'a Davi (Mixteca) growing up in the Pacific Northwest--juggling three cultures and languages--and the curiosity of learning about the experiences of others from the same background, particularly in education.
King Kong in the Bronx
(2011) Paredez, Deborah; Paredez, Deborah
Latina/o representation on teen-oriented television : marketing to a new kind of family
(2013-12) Hochhalter, Johannah Maria; Beltrán, Mary C.
The ABC Family cable network has become a leader in television for the millennial audience through a strategy of increased diversity on screen and an emphasis on complexity in family life. These goals have both been aided by representing Latina/o characters in the network’s flagship series: The Secret Life of the American Teenager, Pretty Little Liars, Switched at Birth, and The Fosters. In this thesis I engage in industrial, textual, and discourse analysis of these series, finding that Latina/o representation is increasing in both quantity and quality as network executives and producers attempt to appeal to the ethnically diverse millennial generation. These attempts, however, are not perfect. This project pinpoints a span of time in which ABC Family shifts towards more Latina/o inclusion both on-screen and behind the camera. At the same time, ABC Family programming dominates ratings in its key millennial demographic, indicating a correlation (of undetermined causation) between increased Latina/o representation and ratings.
Latinx political empowerment in Chicago during the Trump era : an analysis of interviews from Latinx elected officials
(2020-05-05) Cuevas, Ismael; Rodriguez, Néstor; Gutierrez, Laura G., 1968-
As the Latinx population grows and Latinxs are gaining political representation at every level of government in Chicago and throughout the state of Illinois there must be an analysis to assess if representation is translating into empowerment. The purpose of the study is to understand Latinx political empowerment during the President Trump era in urban neighborhoods from the perspective of Latinx elected officials from city, county, and state levels in the Chicago metropolitan region. This study focuses on the perspectives of ten elected officials — five women and five men — who belong to the Baby Boomer, Generation X, and Millennial generations and are of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Guatemalan descent. Major themes include political representation, Census 2020, immigration rhetoric and policy, and accessibility to local government
Let’s talk about el lenguaje : an examination of code-switching in Latino films, YouTube, and radio
(2019-05-08) Leal Cavazos, Rubinia Macarena; Lopez, Belem G.
The goal of this thesis is to examine and compare the code-switching (CS) used in three Pantelion films set in Los Angeles (LA) to CS used in an LA YouTube video blogger and LA Radio. CS has been identified as a prominent characteristic of films that portray the Latino population (Berg, 2002; Helland, 2015); however little research has examined the types of CS used and how representative they are of Latino speech. This paper finds that films do not accurately represent the language (specifically the CS) of LA Latinos. Additionally, the language choices in Latino films reinforce prescriptivist and language purism ideologies of the acceptable use of code-switching. Most of the code-switching in the films was intersentential and tag switching, whereas the YouTube videos and radio recordings displayed a preference for intrasentential switching. The use of intersentential switching in films can be attributed to it being easier to subtitle, and by including it, the films serve a prescriptivist medium that reinforces language purism and pejorative ideologies of code-switching, which could lead to an increase in language insecurity and a decrease in bilingualism in the Latino community. This paper utilizes Torres (2007) Strategies for the Inclusion of Spanish as a theoretical framework, and expands their definitions to encompass films, YouTube, and radio. Furthermore, based on Torres’ (2007) work, this paper finds that the Latino films accommodate for monolingual speakers using several strategies, while the YouTube videos and the radio station are aimed towards bilingual Latinos who, as an audience, receive bilingual gratification. While the representations of Latinos in the films were mostly positive, there was still a lack of diversity in the cast of the films, especially an absence of U.S. Latino actors. The films display a dichotomy between Mexican and American actors, conflating the diverse nationalities that compose Latinidad into one: Mexican. This work expand the current literature on how CS is incorporated in media, and opens the door to new avenues of investigation on the examination of how representative CS is in different mediums.