Browsing by Subject "Mexican Americans--Texas--San Antonio--Ethnic identity"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Carpa y teatro, sol y sombra: show business and public culture in San Antonio's Mexican colony, 1900-1940(2004) Haney, Peter Clair; Flores, Richard R.This project describes and analyzes the theatrical life of the ethnic Mexican colony in San Antonio, Texas, during the first half of the twentieth century, both as a historical phenomenon and as the object of public historical discourse. The study focuses the commercial musical comedy, vaudeville, and circus-like entertainments that are usually referred to as popular theater and the non-profit politically-oriented performance of Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s that claimed the earlier theater as a precursor. Key sources include fifty oral interviews with twenty former participants in that theatrical life, sound recordings of comic dialogues and sketches made by performers during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, newspaper sources, the business records of a tent show called the Carpa Cubana, a set of manuscripts used by another tent show, the Carpa Monsiváis, and photographic records of several interviewees. The project argues that theatrical entertainment was a key part of a set of interlocking public discursive institutions through which ethnic Mexicans formed themselves into a community in San Antonio and southern Texas. In particular, the theater offered a space in which ethnic Mexicans symbolically reflected on the contradictions involved in their processes of community formation, resisted their socially subordinate position in a modernizing Texas, and created an image of themselves directed at the encompassing Anglo-dominated social order. This study surveys the typology of theatrical space in San Antonio’s Mexican colony, showing how the distinction between carpa (“tent show”) and teatro (“theater”) symbolized class divisions in the colony and led to status distinctions among performers. It also examines thematic material from various theatrical entertainments, examining the ways in which a gendered sense of Mexican identity was articulated in the theater through stock character types, the mixing of English and Spanish, and the ironic juxtaposition of incongruous generic frameworks. Finally, the study details the politics of history in which the earlier popular theater is embedded today, examining the heritage discourse of the Chicano Movement and the autobiographical discourse of a comedian who was active with his family’s tent show in San Antonio.Item Language choice, language attitudes and ethnic identity in bilingual speakers: a case study comparing Québécois in Montréal and Texas Spanish in San Antonio(2003) Cody, Karen; Blyth, Carl S. (Carl Stewart), 1958-; Walters, Keith, 1952-In this dissertation, I describe the ethnic identities reported by three generations of two families, one a Mexican American family in San Antonio, Texas, the other a Québécois family in Montréal. Analysis of ethnographic interview data focusing on Spanish or French was conducted using Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) Grounded Theory with respect to Keefe and Padilla’s (1987) model of ethnic identity, Woolard’s (1989) axes of solidarity versus status, and Heller’s (1992) notion of language choice as political act. For this Mexican American family, their identity is based on origin and physical markers of ‘race’, accompanying strong familism, detaching to varying degrees the component of language. The identification of the Texas variety of Spanish with a historically less powerful socio-economic group outweighed its covert prestige as a marker of solidarity within the group, primarily for the younger generations. All subjects of the Québécois family identify ethnic language fluency as a key component of their identity; none has detached the language. Though the language variety was also historically identified with a less powerful socio-economic group, its covert prestige as a marker of solidarity against the majority prevailed to the point that the group has valorized their identity by choosing their variety of French in all interactions. The qualitative data of this contrastive case study show that current models, based on primarily quantitative data gathered from discrete-response questionnaires, are too brittle to account for these very different constructions of identity. Identity is fluid, constructed in different ways for different ends, and a bicultural/bilingual identity is not merely a midpoint on an inevitable march to complete assimilation to the majority culture, but instead is often additive. This study also contributes to our understanding of the specific relationship between ethnic identity and language. Moreover, it contributes to a growing body of qualitative methodology, as well as research on the sociology of the language varieties of two large and increasingly powerful groups, Mexican Americans and Québécois.