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Parentification, or parent-child role reversal, occurs when children and adolescents take on parental responsibilities within the family (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Spark,1973). This can include caring for younger siblings, attending to their parents' emotional needs, and assisting with tasks such as translation. Parentification disrupts family dynamics as parents transfer significant responsibilities to the child (Martino & Coburn, 2022). Extensive research consistently demonstrates the negative impact of parentification on children, leading to depression, suicidal feelings, shame, guilt, worry, and social isolation (Jurkovic, 1997). It can also contribute to the development of conduct disorders. Unfortunately, these difficulties often go unnoticed. However, when it comes to language brokering, which can be viewed as a similar experience to parentification as indicated by research, it can yield some positive results, such as developing new skills, improving self-esteem, and contributing to family survival (Kam et al., 2017; Martino & Coburn, 2022). Limited research exists on factors that alleviate the impact of parentification in Latine and Hispanic households, and despite its potential harm, parentification is often rationalized by families for various reasons. Familismo, a cultural value emphasizing loyalty and community within the family (Ayon et al., 2010) may play a significant role in the experiences of Latine parentified individuals. Familismo promotes unity, support, and loyalty within the family, resulting in enhanced self-esteem, a strong sense of belonging, and deep respect for the cultural community and family members (Fuligni et al., 1999; Ayon et al., 2010, Montero & Ceballo, 2021; Walker et al., 2022). This quantitative study demonstrates that familismo acts as a moderator in the relationship between parentification and depression. Specifically, this study reveals that higher levels of familismo weaken the link between parentification and anxiety/depression. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

This dissertation connects the recent DEIB movement within organizations to larger social justice movements, specifically those that impact workers and the workplace. Critical human resource development (CHRD) professionals, who serve as “insider activists”, are highlighted due to their work to continue movement objectives within organizations. Through testimonios and critical platicas, this study explores how Black and Latino/x LGBTQ+ CHRD professionals, in particular, are experiencing the workplace, especially as it relates to their engagement with how DEIB is practiced within organizations. Through this study, these professionals provide insights into the ways that workplaces can be redesigned and reimagined to be more critically conscious and equitable spaces, especially for those from marginalized backgrounds. Their reflections can work to enhance the ways that DEIB is practiced within organizations. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

This dissertation traces a genealogy of brown performance and aesthetics from the 1980s to the present. As the title suggests, contestation is a central part of the framework I use to think through the ways that contemporary artists of color negotiate the racial scripts and legacies of white supremacy that structure their lives and professional opportunities. I am interested in brownness as a disidentification with identity politics and their commodification in the contemporary United States. Focusing on brown(ed) bodies as sites of contestation—textual imaginaries of bodies, bodies of scholarship, bodies on stage, on screen, and online— I ultimately theorize brownness as a queer ecology: as a set of unruly connections, perpetuating slippages between racialized identities that at once offer the potential for antiracist and anti-imperial solidarities and also the opportunity for neoliberal cooptation through multicultural discourse and the commodification of brown aesthetics through popular media and celebrity cultures. Chapter 1, which centers on Gloria Anzaldúa and Richard Rodriguez, considers contentious critical histories of Chicano literary studies, leading me to a theorization of queer brown ecologies as the nourishment, attunement to, and production of texts committed to thinking in community. Chapter 2 continues this theorization through the works of friends and artists Gil Cuadros and Laura Aguilar, and their queer worldbuilding: I argue that attuning to the queer and brown media ecologies created and made possible by these artists and their friends highlights the affecting/affective power of friendship as a mode of queer life. Chapter 3 focuses on the career of poet and novelist Melissa Lozada-Oliva to consider the brown commons made manifest in the queer media ecologies—digital and physical—by which we encounter contemporary poetry. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on the contestation and protest, complicity and corporatization that crystallize in the celebrity discourse of actor and influencer Vanessa Hudgens. I suggest that affective, unruly brown texts create possibilities for anticolonial, anticapitalist solidarities based in the brown convergences US imperialism and racism has produced.

Social Mediated Latinas: Creating and Contouring Digital Latina Looks in the Twenty-First Century documents how new forms of Latina celebrity, media viewership, and cultural critique emerged in the twenty-first century with the onset of entertainment streaming platforms, online subcultures, and the social media influencer industry on the internet. Latinas with internet access used their social media presence to create original content and to participate in conversations related to media representation’s impacts on Latina identity in the United States. They utilize the participatory affordances of various digital platforms—such as hashtags, direct messaging, and video editor studios—to post to their personal social media accounts and interact with other users’ content online. In doing so, Latinas act as cultural producers whose online activity builds on existing mass media depictions of Latinas while simultaneously interrogating the star marketing strategies, beauty standards, and stereotyped narratives that U.S. legacy media industries have projected onto them.This project uses a combined approach of content, reception, production, and star persona analysis to examine the social media posts related to Latina representation that are produced, viewed, and responded to by U.S.-based Latina cultural producers on the internet. I recognize the 2010s to be the decade when many Latinas utilized the media production and social networking capabilities of sites like YouTube and TikTok to transform themselves into what I define as Social Mediated Latinas: creators of digital content who, in their self-reflexive posts and public discourse, emphasize their ethnoracial identity as an integral part of how they make, view, and critique Latina representation. I survey how three types of Social Mediated Latinas—Internet celebrities, traditional celebrities, and comics creators—foreground their ethnoracial identity on the internet in ways that complicate the legacies of Latina stardom that originated in the Hollywood-industrial complex in the twentieth century. I contend that these content creators develop self-representational narratives and engage in identity-related discourse that ultimately shift public perceptions of Latinas’ racialized and gendered aesthetics, public personas, and on-screen depictions in and beyond Hollywood.

The following autoethnographic dissertation examines my personal experiences of trauma,abuse, and violence. Drawing on journals, memories, and artifacts from my life, I useself-reflection to illustrate the impacts of trauma on my childhood and adulthood. My traumaticexperiences of sexual abuse, childhood violence, and emotional abuse are situated within broadersociocultural contexts of masculinity, Hispanic culture, and social norms. This study illuminatespossibilities for healing and transformation for myself and others with shared traumaticbackgrounds. It calls for trauma-informed education, masculinity, and resiliency. Evocativelysharing my traumatic life events provides an accessible window into often silenced experiences,bearing witness to injustice while offering empathy, connection, and hope. This dissertation isavailable in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu/) and OhioLINK ETD Center(https://etd.ohiolink.edu/).

Historically and in the present, immigration looms large in the American consciousness. Today, we find ourselves in a challenging moment, struggling with political polarization alongside key questions about the causes and consequences of immigration. In this contemporary context, I explore the views that Americans hold about immigration, which may in turn impact immigrant integration. I then explore how first, second, and third-generation immigrants experience national and transnational social ties with attention to their health impacts. Broadly speaking, my dissertation seeks to understand how proximity to the immigrant experience is an important marker of group change. Since a large number of Americans are immigrants or have parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents who are or were immigrants, understanding variability in the ideas or stereotypes that Americans hold with respect to contemporary immigration is crucial to understanding how today’s immigrants will be incorporated into the fabric of American life. To that end, I collect and analyze original survey data through the American Population Panel (APP) to first examine variability by generation in how Americans view immigrants in today’s climate (Chapter Two). I find that generation is an important predictor of views towards immigration, but generation matters less for how individuals perceive diversity. Next, I use the commentary associated with my original APP survey to understand the thought processes and ideas that respondents invoke when presenting their views of immigration (Chapter Three). I find that oftentimes respondents cannot separate immigration from illegality, with politics, nationalism, and mistrust combining to create archetypes that respondents superimpose on immigrants broadly. Last, I conduct interviews with first, second, and third-generation immigrants in order to characterize the social ties that immigrants hold, how these ties inform their experiences in both the U.S. and in their countries of origin, and how these experiences inform their narratives of their health, particularly their mental health (Chapter Four). I find that immigrants and their descendants hold complex social ties, with generational differences in the meaning of ties and in their experiences with language and loneliness. I also discuss the implications of these findings for the mental health of immigrants and their descendants. Taken together, I find that distance from the immigrant experience is an important factor in both predicting views towards immigration and in understanding the structure and consequences of U.S.-based and transnational social ties.

This qualitative study aims to explore the unique experiences and challenges faced by Latino Caribbean cisgender gay men within their cultural and social contexts. Using focus group and thematic analysis, the researcher examines the narratives and perspectives of a diverse sample of Latino Caribbean cisgender gay men (n = 6) to gain insights into their sexual identity process, cultural influences, family dynamics, and support systems utilizing Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as the methodological framework. The researcher’s findings highlight the themes of Awareness of Sexual Identity, Visibility Management, Spanish Caribbean Families' Influences, Being True to Oneself, and Positive Experiences & Role Models as key factors influencing the participants' experiences. These findings underscore the importance of understanding the intersections between sexual and cultural identities for Latino Caribbean cisgender gay men. The participants navigate the complex process of self-acceptance and disclosure while balancing cultural expectations and societal norms. The role of family and community support emerges as both a source of strength and potential challenge in their journeys of self-exploration and acceptance. The findings shed light on the need to research the sexual identity process for Caribbean LGBTQ+ individuals, couples, and families within a social justice framework. These findings highlight the importance of creating inclusive spaces, promoting visibility, and providing culturally sensitive support services to address the unique needs of this population. And contribute to the existing literature on sexual identity development, cultural diversity, and family dynamics, and provide insights that can inform interventions, policies, and practices aimed at promoting the well-being and empowerment of Latino Caribbean LGBTQ+ individuals.

This dissertation investigates how older Puerto Rican adults in Cleveland, Ohio conceptualize subjective good old ages and how they respond when their ability to achieve good old ages is constrained by inequitable political, economic, and socio-cultural forces. Of particular interest is the role of migration in this process. The older Puerto Rican adults in this study were born in Puerto Rico during the “Great Migration” period (1946-1964), during which one in five Puerto Ricans left the island to find jobs in the United States. They grew up and grew older in Puerto Rico during a time of economic restructuring and high outmigration, and subsequently came to Cleveland through a range of pathways. Now in old age, their life histories contain valuable insights regarding how repeated migration throughout the life course relates to aging, and how aging influences migration decisions. Drawing on remote ethnographic research with older Puerto Rican adults, their families, and service providers in the Greater Cleveland area, this dissertation challenges approaches that equate aging with stasis and rootedness, showing instead how quests for good old ages unfold across space and time. First, I describe how older Puerto Rican adults envision good old ages characterized by feeling tranquilo, what the I call a “tranquil old age.” Second, I analyze older adults’ quests to feel tranquilo, from youth into old age, to show how nation-state policies beyond US immigration law condition migration as a strategy for the pursuit of a tranquil old age and contribute to the inequitable circumstances that make a tranquil old age hard to find. Third, I examine the role of temporality in older migrant experiences of social inclusion and exclusion. This dissertation advances understanding of how older people forge good lives, despite difficult circumstances. Moreover, this dissertation serves as a corrective to aging theories that have privileged stability and individual-level adaptations, while obscuring the broader power dynamics that organize who lives a good old age, as they define it, and who does not.

"Planned Obsolescence" is a novel about a Midwestern Xicana artist that explores themes of visual art, chronic illness, addiction, grief, mental illness, colonialism, violence, and intergenerational trauma. This novel, which takes place over a year, focuses on the cycle of seasons. This timeline, and the fragmented, hybrid nature of the novel, are inspired by forms like the koan, zuihitsu, and prose poem. The manuscript title, "Planned Obsolescence," is derived from the idea that under capitalism, goods are purposefully built to fall apart fast, creating an accelerated cycle of creation and destruction. The concept of “planned obsolescence” is then extrapolated and applied to colonialism, white supremacy, mental illness, the apocalypse, and capitalism itself as it relates to the destruction of the environment and society.

For captive Indigenous peoples enslaved in northern New Mexico in the latter part of the 1800s, all settler power structures were united in perpetuating captivity and colonizing enslaved Indigenous bodies: the state, the Catholic Church, and individual households. Using Catholic Church records and censuses, this study recovers twenty-three captives from three households whose true names and identities were subsumed by the dominant colonizing forces of Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Despite the lack of bodily autonomy, captives found opportunities to create society and connections of their own within their households, their neighborhoods, and with other Indigenous peoples, amplifying their own Indigenous identities. The use of record sources and genealogical research techniques in this study provides one way forward of decolonizing genealogy and family history. This research requires acknowledgement that ultimately the stories of the enslaved are untellable, as these sources are not of the captives’ society, culture, or making. However, my ancestors’ participation in the slave economy demands I make the attempt to tell this story.

Urban ethnic churches across the nation continue to be beacons of light in communities throughout the United States. The people within have endured the same centralized struggles found in every impoverished urban neighborhood, be it crime or gentrification. Many, like the millions of Latinos across America, find respite in belonging to ethnic spaces where they can preserve parts of their cultural identities as they navigate the duality of their culture, what it means to be Latino, while navigating acculturation, what it means to be American. Whether they are immigrants, English Language Learners, or second-and-third-generation Latinos, the meaning-making found in faith-based affinity groups, like ethnic churches, where faith and ethnicity intersect, can serve as a source for understanding leadership and social mobility among minority groups. The leaders of these communities, or pastors, have a unique ability to function as transformational leaders, gatekeepers of social capital, and agents of social and economic advancement in addition to their role as spiritual leaders. This hermeneutic phenomenological study conducted in the Midwest region of the United State States, questions whether urban pastors perceive themselves as social and economic transformational agents, and how keen they are on discovering the meaning-making that happens within the walls of their often small but mighty congregations. When urban Latina/o pastors and their churches discover the intersection of their ethnic and religious identity and their ability to use their social capitalthrough trust (Coleman, 1988), networks (Bourdieu, 1986), and resources (Putman, 2000), they may not only empower their congregations spiritually but also socially and economically.

In the dissertation, "Epistemic Hauntings: Queer Latinx Ghosts in Academia," I contend that queer Latinx, specifically Chicanx and U.S. Central American, academics' legacies haunt the fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies. I argue that it is a haunting that is knowledge-based with deadly consequences. I expand on studies in Chicana feminist epistemologies and hauntology (a framework to analyze the returning ghost or a repressed past), particularly building on sociologist Avery Gordon's (1997) interpretation of haunting as "unresolved social violence." These consequences include a phenomenon, I term epistemic haunting. Chicanx/Latinx Studies has had numerous scholars whose tragic premature deaths have haunted academia for the past three decades. English professor Lora Romero's suicide, Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzald�a's diabetic complications, and U.S. Central American historian Horacio Roque Ramirez's overdose are among these deaths. In examining their literature and archives in various R1 universities, I posit that their legacies serve as contemporary folk tales within the academy. Their legacies reveal queer Latinx resistance against heteropatriarchy's fatal effects.This study theorizes repression that creates and perpetuates knowledge exclusion and dehumanization. I conduct archival investigations, oral histories, and content analysis of these scholars' literature through epistemic haunting and epistemic dehumanization as theoretical lenses. Epistemic haunting is a theoretical framework for understanding knowledge and ontology (human existence). I coin epistemic haunting as a framework that unveils marginalized living and deceased individuals' repressed histories and delegitimized knowledge to expose an ongoing injustice. I demonstrate that epistemic haunting is a collective construction that impacts these Chicanx/Latinx academics' lives, deaths, and legacies. Negating queer Latinx knowledge leads to gendered, sexed, and racialized violence in higher education. Romero, Anzald�a, and Roque Ramirez will continue to haunt given the deadly consequences of their untimely deaths.

“Dissident Vibrations” builds on existing literature within the Black Radical Tradition, Chicana feminisms, and Sound Studies to propose that Chicanas have developed methods of musical political dissidence that, while varied in their style, delivery, and scale of impact, are woven together through a shared radical political imaginary. This imaginary resists containment by national borders, racial divides, or gendered conscriptions, and advances visions of transformative, intersectional liberation. This work expands upon Deborah Vargas's concept of dissonance—an aberration from hegemonic gendered norms, regardless of the political commitments of the performer in question—by centering a commitment to radical political world-making through music.

In this dissertation I study the fractality of the Spanish Empire in the Amazon, in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and its effect on the creation of letters, petitions and chronicles written by Spanish evangelizers, civil agents, and travelers during this period of conquest and colonization. In chapter one, I rethink the concept of Ciudad Letrada with the notion of geontology (coined by Elizabeth Povinelli), which is a social contract whereby the members of a specific community-following their traditions, expectations, and symbolic structures-agree about what and who is a living being, and what and who manifests as an inert object in their community. In the case of the ciudades letradas, this geontological pact established the collective signs of the imperial power (words, maps, plans, emblems, and images produced by the letrados) as the most alive creature of the colonial city. With this assumption, Spanish colonial power was founded on the autonomy of signs as an animate organism; autonomy as the expression of a living and vital being through which the colonial order imposed its rule. In chapter two, I use the concept of fractality developed by Benoit Mandelbrot to propose that life in this period of the Spanish Empire circulated through networks and communication "trees" whose main characteristic was their irregularity and discontinuity. I followed the works of Sandra Negro and Pilar García Jordán to explain that the colonization of the Amazon, through the foundation of missions, reductions, and small towns, used intricate rivers routes as access to the Amazon. Spaniards built their missions and small towns on riverbanks to facilitate communication and connection. Consequently, the network of Franciscan and Jesuit missions had the same shape as the network of Amazonian rivers, which means that communication between missions followed irregular water routes. Unlike the literate circuits proposed by Ángel Rama (who explains that alphabetic colonial documents moved in Euclidean communication networks: square or rectangular circuits similar to the checkerboard structure of colonial cities), I propose that written communication in the Spanish Empire in the Amazon moved in fractal circuits characterized by intermittence. For example, a document written by Hernando Benavente in the 16th century had a path of communication intervened by the forces of insects, animals, excessive rain, and threats of war by the Xíbaro community. His document, like the ones written by Samuel Fritz and Gaspar de Carvajal, among others, communicates multiple interferences and an irregular colonial communication circuit. These circuits are alternative historical models to the colonial/literate/orderly cities, and elucidate the modernity/coloniality of America from prototypes and communication models where the constant interference of things and bodies is recognized. These prototypes function like literate cities, but in the opposite direction, revealing a model of irregularity in colonial/modern power in the Amazon. In chapter three I propose a new way of studying colonial documents that contests the generally accepted idea that historical texts represent, invent, or conceal colonial reality. The primary sources suggest that four basic agents participated in the production of colonial texts: Spanish authors/writers; Amazonian Indigenous communities (and their social and historical backgrounds); documents (understood as the materiality of writing: paper, ink, grammatical structures, syntax, etc.); and bodies of animals, plants, fungi, larvae, and viruses. I argued that these basic agents have a frictional relationship to the point that the production of the text is the result of their interaction and mutual influence. The kinesic structure and the metaplasm of the Amazonian colonial document captured the intersection of multiple forces and perspectives, human and non-human, and the influence of agents such as humidity, rain, and the resistance of the Andaquí community, suggesting that these forces were neither exogenous nor external to the document. As a result, I conclude that the Amazonian colonial document not only contains the perspective of the colonizing author, but also the perspective and pressure of these agents. The legibility of the historical image produced by these documents implies a different perception of the past: an image of the decline of tobacco revenue in the 18th century in the Amazon, for example, is built on the intervention, action, and participation of the tobacco plants themselves. Amazonian colonial documents emerged from the mediation of what I call “relational archive,” which is a system of friction between ecological, social, and material forces that occurs during the process of creating a written document. Examination of the corpus of these texts will show that colonial documents in the Amazonian space emerged, in part, from a non-binary archive in situations where the borders between subject/object, sign/reality, and culture/nature were fluid and not in opposition, revealing a model of irregularity that questions the Euclidean communication network as the norm for the Americas.

Feeling Close investigates how contemporary cultural productions by queer and trans of color subjects reveal the reparative potentials of ordinary forms of closeness (physical proximity and/or emotional intimacy) with others. I show how acts of closeness that fill the daily lives of gender- and sexual-variant subjects of color open up experiences of spacetime that exceed colonial logics and illuminate reparative and life-sustaining modes of togetherness. I offer a method of close reading and intersectional comparatist cultural critique that shows how attention to the minutiae of lived, embodied experience brings into relief the strategies queer and trans of color subjects use to challenge hegemonic knowledge systems. My comparatist approach centers the solidarities between U.S.-based gender- and sexual-variant Filipinx and Chicanx artists and writers to demonstrate how queer and trans of color subjects’ routine contestations of colonial meaning-making and power structures illuminate otherwise unintelligible possibilities for cross-ethnic coalition. Centering literature, performance, and visual culture from the 1990s to the present, I study how sensations of physical and/or emotional closeness located within queer and trans of color everyday life disrupt dominant orderings of the world to reimagine spacetime and relationality. Each chapter pairs works by Filipinx and Chicanx cultural producers and focuses on a distinct artistic medium. Chapter 1 argues that Aurora Guerrero’s and Isabel Sandoval’s respective independent narrative films, Mosquita y Mari and Lingua Franca, depict quotidian practices through which undocumented queer and trans femme characters feel the bodies of those out of reach. It rethinks the ordinary sexual act, edging, proposing it as an analytic and strategy rooted in erotics that reveals other ways of feeling close to others across spatiotemporal locations. Chapter 2 reads R. Zamora Linmark’s novel, Rolling the R’s, alongside Rigoberto González’s memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa. It demonstrates how sensations of stickiness illuminate minoritarian configurations of geography, memory, history, and development. Chapter 3 analyzes Xandra Ibarra’s and Kiam Marcelo Junio’s respective artworks, Nude Laughing and American Karaoke. It proposes that these pieces employ corniness to critique western aesthetics and reconfigure relationalities between the viewing subject and the subject on view.

Advancements have been made in identity politics research, yet identity in times of disruption and crisis is understudied. Focusing on the 2008 economic recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, I analyze nationally representative survey data to explore various aspects related to linked fate, perceptions of the pandemic, and vaccine hesitancy.First, using data from the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), I find that Black linked fate was lower in 2012, challenging the assumption that economic concerns weaken Black unity. Financial hardship did not impact levels of linked fate for Blacks, and there are no systematic racial/ethnic differences in levels linked fate among those experiencing financial struggles. These findings suggest that Black linked fate and economic concerns may be reinforcing in this context. Using the 2020 View of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, I examine the relationship between several identity factors and perceptions of the disproportionate health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. I explore whether perceptions juxtapose with data. I find ethic differences among partisans, except for Democrats. The effect of gender is conditional on Hispanic ethnicity, suggesting that these factors play a significant role in shaping perceptions of the pandemic. Lastly, using 2020 CMPS data, I demonstrate that the more conservative and younger a respondent is, the more likely they are to be vaccine hesitant. In contrast, older adults are unresponsive to ideology, possibly due to differences in risk perception, social media exposure, and interactions with trusted healthcare providers. Overall, my findings suggest the importance of investigating the mechanisms behind these relationships using experimental designs. These findings also highlight the importance of refined linked fate survey measures, since linked fate appears to be an important factor behind perceptions in the contemporary climate.

This dissertation looks at nostalgic songs written in Mexico during the first half of the 20th century, with the purpose of reflecting on the origin of these nostalgic expressions, describing the characteristics and transformations that the nostalgic repertoire undergoes over time, as well as understanding the role that nostalgia had in the generation of the sense of belonging to different communities, including the imagined community. Through an interdisciplinary analysis, I observe and describe the poetic, musical and nostalgic characteristics of the corpus, in relation to the development of the migratory, cultural, and socio-political context of Mexico during the first half of the 20th century. I argue that it is possible to observe three major phases of the nostalgic musical repertoire written during the first half of the 20th century, which I have named: modern nostalgia, nostalgia ranchera, and national nostalgia. The repertoire of modern nostalgia is testimony and memory of internal migration and the emotions caused by this migratory displacement. The songs of this phase were characterized by their musical and literary heterogeneity and by expressing longing for abandoned lands due to rural-urban migration caused by the project of national modernization. The repertoire of nostalgic songs was used in comedia ranchera films, for which it was closely linked to the nationalist ideology of mestizaje and is usually considered as canciones rancheras. I argue that in the adaptation of nostalgic songs to the comedia ranchera, the longing, previously felt for the yearned-native lands, was transferred to the cinematographic locus of Mexicanness "el rancho". In addition, these songs were characterized by the tendency to homogenize their musical elements. The nostalgic expression took a turn in the 1940s when new cinematographic and ideological influences compelled composers to create nostalgic songs, whose object of emotion was the nation. In my dissertation I demonstrate that the nostalgic musical compositions made possible the generation of different communities during the first half of the 20th century: the modern nostalgia songs, through the sharing of emotions caused by the rural-urban migratory experience; the nostalgia ranchera songs, by enabling individuals to imagine themselves as a result of the idealized national past; and the national nostalgia songs, by allowing listeners to define themselves as part of the imagined national community.

Por una Vida Mejor, a sentiment that is shared amongst the Latino community. How this sentiment fares in the pursuit of higher education has been largely understudied. I analyze how Latino college students navigate the sociopolitical environment in Arkansas in their pursuit of middle-class certification to help their family and fulfill the American dream. In this thesis I offer an analysis to understand Latinos in the Nuevo South. I use data from the 2021 Latino College Students Navigating the Sociopolitical Environment in Arkansas survey through the lens of Funds of Knowledge (Velez-Ibanez and Greenberg 1992). I conduct a quantitative analysis of the different factors that influence the pursuit of higher education for Latinos in the new destination, Nuevo South. I find that linguistic assimilation plays a significant role in Latinos pursuit of higher education to help the family. I also find that experiences with discrimination among Latino students in the Nuevo South influence their assessments of their educational and political leaders.

In my dissertation, I analyze some problems raised by contemporary Latin-American (Mock-)epic narratives, both from Jorge Luis Borges’ (theoretical) perspective and through the reading of Macuna�ma (1928), from M�rio de Andrade. This dissertation is divided in two parts. In the first part, I elaborate a theory of the (Mock-)Epic through a review of several Jorge Luis Borges’s essays. In view of this context, I thus outline the main aims of my research, namely: a) to analyze the critical role of the epic narratives in the contemporary world; b) to analyze the Poetics of the contemporary epic narrative, that is, to question the form and the literary devices which make an epic narrative somehow effective. In the second part, I carry out a double-sided analysis of Macuna�ma. Firstly, as a reflection around two axes and respective articulation (the collective psychological Brazilian reality and the language used to express it), in order to understand what is specifically at stake in what concerns a possible epic feature found in Macuna�ma marked by protest and non-conformity. As follows, Macuna�ma is envisaged as: a) a dialogue with (medieval) literary traditions where the (mock-)epic discourse repeats its “original” forms and simultaneously, strays away from them; b) a literary work which satirically criticized the cultural and economical (neo)colonialism to which Brazil was (yet) subjugated in the early twentieth century, while destabilizing the rational, realistic and logical-positivist categories of colonial thought. In a second moment, in confrontation with a critical tradition which defends that Macuna�ma searches for and attempts to reach a homogeneity of a Brazilian identity, in service of M�rio de Andrade’s supposed nationalist program, the hypothesis for a different reading shall be considered. More specifically, the possibility that Macuna�ma opens up a vision of the Brazilian reality regarding cosmopolitanism, heterogeneity and the unknown, with the concepts of desire, eroticism, variable rhythm and childishness operating a dynamic articulation which leads to the production of Alterity.

This dissertation analyzes Native fiestas of Southern California. Although Native fiestas appear in various narratives concerning Southern California Native history, there is to date no study solely dedicated to analyzing the significance and impact of these events to Southern California Native and regional history. The dissertation traces Native events of tradition, later deemed fiestas by Spaniards, from their Spanish pre-invasion origin and follows fiesta activity throughout the Mission, Californio, and Euro-American Periods. Significantly, it presents a new analysis of Native fiestas, which have traditionally been understudied by academia, in order to present a new historical lens through which to consider Southern California Native and regional history.

Latinx students and their families represent a large and growing population within the U.S. education system and experience significant opportunity gaps, inequities, and barriers in pursuit of academic achievement. Parent engagement (PE) is an important mechanism to increase academic outcomes and close opportunity gaps. However, efforts to accurately measure and understand Latinx PE are inhibited by existing PE measures that are based upon euro-centric middle-class frameworks of PE that do not consider the culturally situated PE behaviors or barriers to engagement unique to Latinx parents. Deficits in PE measurement also exist for the general white population that include a lack of comprehensive and salient domains of PE that are multidimensional and contain behavioral indicators of PE that are important to PE outcomes. The present study contributes to the PE literature for elementary-aged students by developing and validating a culturally sensitive PE questionnaire (CSPEQ) to improve PE measurement in two ways 1) creating a culturally informed PE measure for Latinx families and 2) creating a comprehensive PE measure that captures multi-dimensional PE domains with salient PE behavioral indicators that could also be potentially used for White families. Factor analyses were conducted to assess whether the CSPEQ’s factor structure is consistent with the theorized PE dimensions for both Latinx and White parent groups. An additional objective included the examination of the instrument’s psychometric properties through invariance testing to discern if the constructs of the CSPEQ are being measured in the same way across Latinx and White parents of elementary-aged children. The separate group CFA results indicated that the theoretical PE models may be different for Latinx and White parents, including differences across Latinx and White parent model fit, areas of localized strain, and parent endorsement of item response categories. Overall, the results of the CFA indicated that the theorized model does not support the Latinx parent data after failed efforts to improve model fit for the Latinx group CFA. Research objectives to further conduct multiple groups invariance testing were abandoned to prioritize the exploration and identification of a theoretically interpretable factor structure for Latinx parents through EFA analyses. The results of the EFA produced a reliable and theoretically supported 4-factor PE measure consisting of 35 items that reflect culturally embedded PE behaviors for Latinx parents across home and school settings. These PE domains include Bien Educado, School Engagement, Academic Supports, and Academic Socialization. Key findings of the EFA demonstrate that PE is a multidimensional construct that can consist of culturally informed Latinx PE behaviors and PE behaviors that are salient indicators of positive student outcomes. The CSPEQ affirmed the culturally centered PE behaviors of Latinx parents supported by the research literature and illuminated how those PE behaviors are related to various dimensions of PE across home and school. Taken together, the development and validation of the CSPEQ provide significant steps to conceptualizing and measuring PE for Latinx families in culturally responsive ways that can more accurately capture Latinx PE.

This dissertation examines the entanglements between the promise of a good American life, the liberal mission of education, and benevolent forms of empire as experienced in a California public high school and its newcomer program (an intervention designed for helping (im)migrant students develop basic English language skills while also providing them with socioemotional support). Specifically Educational (Im)possibilities shows how newcomer programs and the schooling of (im)migrant and refugee students are inextricably entangled within a matrix of benevolent imperialism, liberal education, and the gift of freedom. Set against a professed egalitarian ethos America is upheld—domestically and abroad—as a beacon of freedom and democracy where anyone can achieve the American dream. Furthermore, professing to be a benevolent nation, the United States as an empire of freedom, has militarily intervened in other nations’ domestic affairs under the guise of imparting freedom and democracy (Espiritu, 2006; Nguyen, 2012). Thus, reckoning with the continuity of U.S. empire and its enduring gift of freedom, this ethnographic project asks what are the sources of sustenance for the empire of freedom within the school site? Informed by migration, critical refugee studies, and a critical pedagogical perspective Educational (Im)possibilities features ethnographic data (classroom participant observation and interviews) collected over 12 months at the school site. Findings show that educators’ practices of separation, care, and sanctuary are unwittingly complicit in the sustenance of the empire of freedom. In the case of newcomer students these benevolent inflected practices become entangled in the reproduction of, among others, longstanding processes of racialization and differentiation. In all, this dissertation urges educators and researchers to critically reflect on our own unwitting complicity with benevolent imperialism. To support us in this work it contributes a framework to chart paths of (un)learning required in the deep study and personal reflection on the history of the U.S. in relation to U.S. empire, (im)migration, and liberal education.

This dissertation examines literary representations of Chicanx experiences of higher education in autobiographical writing to excavate new insight into the past, present, and future of education for diverse students. Throughout the US, we continue to struggle to achieve equitable access to education across racial/ethnic, and though many universities and colleges make strides toward inclusivity and diversity, these institutions often fall short of meeting the needs of a diverse student population. As a first-generation Chicano student and teacher, troubled by these concerns in and around the classroom, I recognized similar preoccupations in various forms of self-writing—including autobiography, memoir, essay, poetry, and short narrative—of many Mexican American and/or Chicano/a/x writers. From Richard Rodriguez, Ruben Navarrette, and Sergio Troncoso to Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, to, more recently, Reyna Grande and Rigoberto Gonzalez, education haunts their written lives—sometimes in the subject matter and sometimes in the formal qualities of their work. It is as if they cannot help but simultaneously account for their educational privilege while giving testimony to the racial trauma of education. Studying the self-representational writing of these highly educated authors, I argue that Chicanx self-writing is a particular site for the manifestation of the burden of representation—the pressure to perform as othered racial/ethnic subjects. These works, published from the late 1970s to the late 2010s and giving accounts of experiences as early as the mid-1960s, are indicative of the shifts in education for students from underserved communities in the late 20th century that we continue to see: mainly increased but uneven and precarious inclusion. Self-writing—operating less as a genre and more as a rhetorical mode in its unique constellations between writer, historical context, “truth,” and reader—becomes a critical space that calls for the interrogation of one’s own exceptionality. Each of these authors, to varying degrees, at times embraces and at others resists their exceptional status as all of them, on some level, express an understanding of how the rhetoric of exceptionalism can often function to justify the continuity and continuation of inequity. This project reveals that within these authors’ accounts of and reflections on higher education lie a basis for both a sustained critique of the shortcomings of the university for Latino/a/x people as well as the potential for reimagining what higher education can be and do.

This dissertation questions the analytic categories that have been used to study nineteenth century Mexican and Latin American literatures and culture. My dissertation explores the way aural and sonic culture impacts fiction and non-fiction narratives during a period of high economic liberalization and State consolidation. I draw upon the fields of sound studies and literature, to analyze the Mexican fin-de-siècle marked by the emergence of a sonic excess, which I define as the proliferation of sounds (technological and human) that modified arts and politics during a period of nation dependent integration into a global economy.I work on the concept of aural regimes and performative listening, where I explore the ways in which gender and modernista aesthetics are projected and heard in the noises of modern cities such as Mexico and Paris. I analyze how gender is learned, represented, reinforced, or contested in the aural regime. Here, categories of the feminine (and their intersectionality with race and class) are constituted within spatial sound environments where power, inequality and agency are manifested in the sonic field. Sound becomes a signifier that helps us to understand how power relations, gender, and aesthetics are constructed. I also study a war narrative, Tomochic, an historical novel that gives account of a military campaign to reduce and silence a popular upheaval in northern Mexico as an audionarrative, this is a narrative informed, mainly, through different points of auditions, voices, and war sounds, shifting the naturalist and realist narratological conceptualization of nineteenth century approaches. Additionally, I analyze, for instance, sound representations in a non-fiction travel narrative from the perspective of intellectual Justo Sierra who travels to the United States from Mexico City, noticing that in his geographical displacement there is also an epistemological one that takes him from the lettered city to the audible city, in which the power of writing assimilated by the political order, is affected not only by the hegemonic discourses of elites, but by the noises and sounds of multicultural North American cities.In this sense, war, material and popular culture, and fiction and non-fiction narratives allow me to reinterpret the turn of the 19th century archive in terms of sound ecologies informed by gender, economics, technologies, and nation building and social movement processes.

My research centers on the narratological analysis, market, and sociological connotations of female light literature, also known as “best- seller literature”. Female light literature is the type of literature that by its cover is categorized as best- seller, captivating the popular sector by its wide market availability, and its entertaining plots, that connect and disconnect the reader from its surroundings. Due to the high number of books sold, female light literature is perceived as the type of commercial literature that circulates in the editorial market as a consumption object and not as a literary work, as it’s assumed that it does not implement an intellectual and artistic base in its narrative. The main purpose of this study is to locate the multiple functions of female light literature, how it connects with the global market, and its translatable international image. My research contributes to the Latin American field by going beyond the common connotation about female light literature being treated as second class literature and opening a space in academia that presents and formally analyzes a complete investigation of the impact that it has in the consumption of popular culture.In my dissertation The Other Side of Female Light Literature, I claim that even though it is often argued that female light literature is viewed as simple in content this does not make it “simple” or light. On the contrary, the idea that this type of literature can take on the global market makes it more complex, since within its totality we can find a literary work but also a consumption “object” that is able to create a bridge between the many aspects of entertainment and the artistic and theoretical narratives. For example, in the second chapter of my dissertation, I read the work of Guadalupe Loaeza, a Mexican female writer, often seen as lacking seriousness in her literary work merely for being one of the top best- seller female writers in Mexico. Through a different perspective, in chapter two of my dissertation, “The Capitalist Labyrinth in Compro, luego existo (1992) by Guadalupe Loaeza”, I claim that Loaeza’s work is a labyrinthic capitalist space that has two functions: that of being a representation of speculation and consumption that I understand as “light literature” and that of structuring itself as an accumulative collage. In this chapter, I also make a parallel analogy between the structure of a labyrinth with that of a mall, and I make a comparison by explaining how spaces are created within them. The other chapters of my dissertation analyze the work of Mexican female writers Ángeles Mastretta and Laura Esquivel, which also explore the main functions of female light literature. On the contrary, in chapter one of this study, you will see an analysis from the literary work of two female writers, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814 – 1873) and Sandra Cisneros (1980 – present). Even though they are not view as light literature by the literary cannon; they are a significant key to the introduction of my research of female narrative analysis since they represent and explore different spectrums and centuries of female literature. This then establishes a strong and rich understanding of how female writers are capable to give the reader a unique experience through their creative narrative that needs to be taken seriously by the literary cannon.

Migrant Figures: Visual Embodiments of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in US Central American-Latinx Culture argues that twenty-first-century migrant figures visually embody the ideological complexities undergirding the present-day US immigration crisis. My interdisciplinary and multimedia cultural study sutures together migrant figures depicted in post-1980s literature, film, and visual art emerging across Central American, Mexican, Caribbean, and North American cultural contexts. Through readings of Carlos Guillermo Wilson’s novel Chombo (1981), Edwidge Danticat’s fictional and nonfictional writing, Cary Fukunaga’s film Sin Nombre (2009), Diego Quemada-Díez’s film La Jaula de Oro (2013), Marc Silver’s documentary Who is Dayani Crystal? (2014), and Beatriz Cortez’s performance piece “No Cages No Jaulas” (2020), I demonstrate how migrant figures constellate visual embodiments of meaning entwined with politicized migrant subjectivities. Drawing upon feminist and queer materialist thought, my project’s visual reading practice of “embodied perception” traces a “politics of dis/embodiment” in which migrant figures visually de/materialize through co-constituted racial, gendered, and sexual processes. Grating against Western liberal renderings of a unified human migrant subjectivity, I argue for the need to ground cultural and theoretical investigations of migrant culture in frameworks that emerge from embodied forms of knowledge practices. Understood as a relational ontology, the migrant figure houses alternative affective, material, and social affinities that expand the conceptual perimeters of race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and citizenship and the epistemic parameters of US Central American and Latinx studies. This project makes significant interventions in visual studies, intersectional thought, and cultural politics of migration.

Mirroring the rapid expansion of Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) across the nation, interest in examining student retention at HSIs has grown among researchers, policymakers and practitioners. HSIs are defined as colleges and universities enrolling 25 percent or more Latinx undergraduate students. As such, these institutions play a critical role in advancing student success as HSIs collectively educate over 60 percent of all Latinx undergraduates. Empirical research on Latinx student retention at HSIs has generally focused on individual characteristics, with minimal attention placed on the role of organizational structures in academically supporting students, particularly those who encounter academic challenges such as academic probation, dismissal, and reinstatement on the path to degree completion. Although scholars have recently moved towards organizational level analyses within HSI research, the influence of structures on Latinx students’ experiences with academic probation, dismissal and reinstatement remain unexplored. Knowledge of the organizational structures at HSIs that are intended to support Latinx students who experience academic challenges will provide a better understanding on how to best serve and retain Latinx students through graduation. As such, the questions that guide this dissertation are: 1) What organizational structures and services support Latina/o/x undergraduate students’ retention at HSIs? 2) How do institutional factors influence support structures for Latinx students facing academic challenges at HSIs? Grounded in the Multidimensional Conceptual Framework of Servingness in HSIs, this mixed-methods study design includes the descriptive analyses of a survey distributed to staff and administrators at public, four-year HSIs to understand academic and retention support structures. In addition, a case study employing interviews with administrators and document analysis at a HSIs was conducted. Findings indicate that there are structures within a HSI that fully embody servingness and carry the weight for other units on campus which are not serving. This study broadens the scope of existing literature on Latinx student retention by documenting how the organizational structures and campus-based efforts at HSIs “serve” Latinx students during instances of academic probation, dismissal, and reinstatement through their persistence to graduation.

Research and scholarship in multicultural education has consistently affirmed that as a result of the long standing racial academic achievement gap and the current teaching force not reflecting the changing demographics of students in the United States, students of color continue to be deprived from having teachers who look like them and who may bring similar life, social, and cultural experiences that can increase the value they place on academics. The purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of teachers of color and how they perceive their identity as significant and meaningful to their profession and its influential impact on the academic success of students of color. It is the role-model premise that students can benefit from seeing teachers with similar racial/ethnic background in a position of authority in school. This research was grounded on the depth that qualitative inquiry brings to the field of education and was critical to the ongoing thematic interpretation of teachers of colors’ often preconceived views of identity. Findings were extracted from 14 teachers of color participants who were engaged in a reflective process that revealed emerging themes from their individual and common perceptions and experiences. This study affirms that teachers of color are vital in the education system and as anticipated, their reflective narratives each produced a landscape of stories that brought meaning into their different backgrounds, personal stories, challenges, belief system, and career that surfaced their initial motivation for entering the teaching profession. This study is also embedded within a framework that draws particularly from two theoretical lenses; identity theory and identity construction theory. Employing identity studies to teachers is an extension of ways in which theoretical views intersects with teachers’ lives, experiences and perceptions of their role and educational practices. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu).

Capacity building for globally competent educators is a 21st Century imperative to address contemporary complex and constantly changing challenges. This action research project is grounded in positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship, relational cultural theory, and relational leadership practices. It sought to identify adaptive challenges educators face as they try to integrate globally competent teaching practices into their curricula, demonstrate learning and growth experienced by the educators in this project, and provide guidance and solutions to the challenges globally competent educators face. Six educators participated in this three-phase project, which included focus groups, reflective journal entries, and an exit interview. Data were collected, grouped into emergent themes, and organized into cohesive categories. The data from this project supported the creation of two foundational models for educating for global competence. The first is pedagogical and the other, coaching. Both models are in developing stages and are grounded in key theoretical frameworks and the data shared by the participants. Globally competent and globally responsive pedagogy tasks educators with examining their practice through a global and cultural prism to gain clarity of perspective, build social capital, improve relationships, and meet ever-changing local and global challenges. The approaches honor and respect diversity so as to dismantle systems of oppression and fight policies and social norms rooted in cognitive biases. The model integrates theory and key findings from this study to support educators to integrate and implement global competence. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA, https://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/etd.

This honors thesis examines archival and fictional representations of women in the early modern Spanish empire who engaged in heterodox practices, considering the purposes and efficacy of their work, the material vestiges of the resistance to regulations imposed by Spanish Inquisitorial bodies, and the ways they mobilized traditional knowledge to construct intimate, diverse, and intergenerational communities. Examining questions of representation, resistance, and persecution in both the Iberian peninsula and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, this project considers the alignment of the period of transition––between the Middle Ages and Renaissance––with the escalation of imperial expansion as integral to the understanding of Spanish, Catholic restrictions of heterodox knowledge and practice. Through the analysis of Spanish Golden Age texts and inquisitorial records, this thesis demonstrates the extent to which hechiceras (sorceresses) effectively challenged and expanded orthodox understandings of medical and natural knowledge, in large part due to their ability to construct and maintain intimate and intergenerational communities of women, which materially and demonstrably threatened ecclesiastical authority over free will, sexuality, and healing.

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how AfroPuerto Rican mothers engage in Blackness as a sociocultural-historical practice. An analysis of ethnographic data, including participant-observations and life history interviews with six AfroPuerto Rican women in California, were the means used to describe the teaching and learning (or teaching/learning) practices within AfroPuerto Rican multigenerational communities that focus on Blackness as an ancestral, cooperative, and activist practice. This study documents how the participating AfroPuerto Rican women’s enactments of blackness-as-practice reflected communal, proleptic understandings of blackness within AfroPuerto Rican communities. Through the use of Black and AfroLatinx feminist lenses and sociocultural understandings of human activity, I suggest how researchers andpractitioners can learn from AfroPurto Rican mother-designers to design educational environments for the teaching of blackness-as-practice.

This study investigated the influence of socio-demographics on emerging adults’: (a) conceptions toward transitioning to adulthood; (b) sense of ethnic identity; (c) social emotional competence; and (d) coping strategies. A sample of N = 494 emerging adult college students (ages 18-30) completed a battery of measures to assess their approaches and attitudes toward adulthood and life functioning. This information was used to compare differences in emerging adult experiences across ethnic groups. It was hypothesized that there would be response differences between ethnic minority (African American, Asian American, and Latinx) and White emerging adults due to differences in cultural framework and socio-demographics.Frequencies and analysis of covariance were run to explore differences based on ethnic group, gender, and ethnic group x gender, controlling for socioeconomic status (SES). A bivariate correlational analysis was also conducted to establish a relationship between social emotional competence, coping strategies, and ethnic identity. Results showed that these variables were positively correlated with each other. There were also significant response differences found between ethnic groups regarding their: views on adulthood, ethnic identity, intra- and interpersonal skills, and dispositional coping tendencies when dealing with stress. Specifically, ethnic minorities reported an overall higher sense of ethnic identity and were more social-emotionally competent than Whites. They were also less likely to feel they had reached adulthood and reported higher tendency to engage in problem-focused coping than Whites.This study provides a nuanced approach to understanding how culture impacts emerging adults’ experiences transitioning to adulthood. In turn, it builds a foundation for future research to investigate how social emotional competence and coping approaches may manifest differently for specific subgroups of emerging adults. Such research is especially relevant since these constructs are associated with long-term adult outcomes that include academic and career success.

Latinx youth in the United States report higher levels of internalizing symptoms thantheir White non-Latinx counterparts. Culturally unique factors and values such aslanguage proficiency and use, respeto, familismo, religiosity and spirituality, gender rolebeliefs, and U.S.-centered acculturative gaps have been shown to be associated withinternalizing symptomatology. However, intergenerational discrepancies in theseculturally-based factors require further examination in Latinx adolescents. This studyexplored the relationship between cultural factors and intergenerational culturaldifferences on adolescent internalizing symptoms. An online survey (N = 91) included aracially and ethnically diverse sample of Latinx adolescents between the ages of 11 - 16(mean = 14, SD = 1.27) and one of their parents.. Responses indicated that the associationbetween cultural factors on internalizing symptoms may in part be explained byintergenerational differences in English language use and proficiency, intergenerationalinterpersonal religious struggles, and U.S.-centered acculturative gaps.

Esta tesis examina el papel fundamental que juegan los afectos y las pasiones en los mundos literarios de las novelas pol�ticas de Mario Vargas Llosa y Alonso Cueto, y en particular la ira, la humillaci�n, el deseo de venganza y las luchas de prestigio. Seg�n una tradici�n filos�fica con antecedentes en el pensamiento cl�sico, estas emociones tienen sus ra�ces en lo que Plat�n defini� como el “thym�s,”es decir el deseo de reconocimiento o la necesidad del ser humano de afirmarse frente a los dem�s. En esta tesis me interesa identificar instancias en las novelas pol�ticas de estos dos autores en las que ciertos afectos y pasiones thym�ticas producen cambios estructurales en las circunstancias hist�ricas, econ�micas y pol�ticas de los universos narrados. Esta investigaci�n est� inspirada en una l�nea de pensamiento iniciada por Nietzsche sobre el resentimiento y sus implicaciones en los destinos de individuos y de grupos humanos, con interesantes trasformaciones en la obra de Max Scheler y Peter Sloterdijk porque todos ellos se interesan en un mundo de fuertes emociones que relacionan a determinados contextos sociales con implicaciones pol�ticas. El pensamiento de Sloterdijk es especialmente relevante a mi acercamiento puesto que el fil�sofo alem�n pone en relaci�n el resentimiento y la pol�tica con las din�micas thym�ticas. El enfoque temporal de esta investigaci�n son principalmente las representaciones literarias de dos d�cadas de convulsi�n pol�tica de la historia del Per�: la guerra contra el grupo terrorista Sendero Luminoso entre 1980 y 1992 y el r�gimen dictatorial de Alberto Fujimori entre 1990 y el 2000. Las obras que tratan la guerra contra Sendero Luminoso y que analizo en este estudio son las novelas Historia de Mayta (1984) y Lituma en los Andes (1993) de Vargas Llosa y La hora azul (2005), La pasajera (2015), La viajera del viento (2016) y el relato P�lido cielo de Cueto. Las novelas que comprenden el r�gimen dictatorial de Alberto Fujimori son Grandes miradas (2003) de Cueto y Cinco Esquinas (2016) de Vargas Llosa. Sin embargo, en este �ltimo apartado de an�lisis he incluido tambi�n Conversaci�n en la Catedral (1969) y La Fiesta del Chivo (2000) novelas de Vargas Llosa que rese�an dos etapas hist�ricas diferentes. La primera est� ambientada durante el tiempo de la dictadura peruana de Manuel A. Odr�a entre 1948 y1956 y la he incluido porque las din�micas thym�ticas entre afectos, relaciones de poder y corrupci�n anticipan tipolog�as de la dictadura de Fujimori. La segunda, representa la dictadura de Le�nidas Trujillo en la Rep�blica Dominicana entre 1930 y 1961 y aunque se refiera a la era de Trujillo, hay varios elementos que insin�an que se pens� bajo el influjo de lo que pasaba con Fujimori y su director del Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional, Vladimiro Montesinos en el Per�. En el primer cap�tulo analizo las din�micas entre humillaci�n y deseo de venganza entre personajes subalternos y poderosos en los contextos de gobiernos dictatoriales en Conversaci�n en la Catedral, La Fiesta del Chivo y Grandes Miradas. Luego en P�lido cielo considero el resentimiento de clase para explicar algunas de las motivaciones de los miembros de Sendero Luminoso. En el segundo cap�tulo exploro, a partir de Grandes miradas de Cueto y Cinco Esquinas de Vargas Llosa, la posici�n de aparente debilidad que despliegan personajes subalternos en su intento de subvertir el poder cuando se enfrentan al sistema de corrupci�n de la dictadura de Alberto Fujimori y el director de Inteligencia Nacional Vladimiro Montesinos. Seguidamente indico el procedimiento por el cual una conjugaci�n entre bajas pasiones y altruismo, que afecta a estos personajes, deviene en el catalizador que precipita la ca�da del r�gimen. En el �ltimo cap�tulo analizo la guerra contra Sendero Luminoso a trav�s de Historia de Mayta y Lituma en los Andes de Vargas Llosa y La hora azul, La pasajera y La viajera del viento de Cueto. Ambos autores coinciden en presentar relatos exhaustivos de la violencia pol�tica. Sin embargo, su foco de inter�s es diferente. Vargas Llosa explora el aspecto ideol�gico del revolucionario y Cueto reflexiona sobre el abismo social que separa a los m�s pobres de los m�s ricos del pa�s. En mi l�nea de an�lisis, las din�micas thym�ticas entre afectos que act�an sobre los personajes sufren una modificaci�n para as� poder explicar el fen�meno del terrorismo y el comportamiento violento del fan�tico pol�tico. Finalmente, esta investigaci�n abre un nuevo camino para acercarse a las novelas pol�ticas de Vargas Llosa y Cueto: la consideraci�n de las pasiones como una variable de peso que se mueve agazapada por las diferentes cuestiones pol�ticas que tratan las novelas de este estudio y que al secuestrar el �nimo de los protagonistas propulsa cambios estructurales en el acontecer hist�rico y pol�tico de los mundos narrados por estos dos autores.

This dissertation expands the understanding of migrants’ emotions beyond individual internal processes to argue that affect is political and is shaped by—while simultaneously shaping— structures of power. This project provides an overarching theory of the role that “affects” play within domination, argues that affect can be a route for decolonial transgression and redemption, and asserts that undocumented communities in the United States are mobilizing affects in relation to the Coloniality of Affect—both in compliance and in contestation to it.My dissertation delineates the connection between affect and coloniality through an analysis of cultural productions by undocumented or formerly-undocumented creators, including memoirs, poetry, novels, and media. Specifically, I look at the emotions depicted and produced in these works and understand them as existing on a spectrum between the dominant affects of the anti-immigrant state, what I call colonial affects, and the decolonial affects that present the possibility for making worlds where belonging and dignity are not dependent on citizenship. This project identifies new forms of affect, especially hope and joy, by which undocumented immigrants are performing belonging beyond categories such as “legality” and “citizenship.” I contend that decolonial affects mobilized by undocumented immigrants provide a new understanding of affect as transgressive and as a starting point for social justice work.

This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century American and Latinx Studies have choreographed a geography of Latinx “arrival” and “discovery” following the drawing of the U.S.-Mexican border in 1848. Moving away from national territories that are landlocked by that timeline, my project disrupts Latinx subject formations by dancing to a score of queer performances of latinidad drawn across passages of water. I argue that attuning ourselves to alternative aqueous channels that rift the American landscape can teach us how to radically re-read culturally dominant American literary texts that have informed our limited territorialized understanding of latinidad. Moreover, my turn to various bodies of water rather than land helps us consider multiple strategies for disrupting the territorial boundaries of the nineteenth-century American map and allows us Latinxs to unpin ourselves from spatiotemporal coordinates that are inherently tied to the legacies of colonialism and U.S. nation building. While each of the chapters in the dissertation read queer latinidad in materials that are often canonized and taught in American literary survey courses, the chapters do not attempt to recover or redeem the American canon in any kind of way. Rather, I read the undercurrents that move beneath the territorial geographies constructed by these texts to saturate the nineteenth-century American map with dissonant queer Latinx performances swimming on the margins of the page. This reading practice calls for a deep interrogation of latinidades that cannot be contained, situated, or easily represented within the U.S. and its canonical body of literature. Ultimately, my aim in this writing is a pedagogical and instructive endeavor that invites readers of the margin, whether they identify as Latinx or not, to draw out their corporeal relationship with books and boundaries that intentionally sought to erase us.

Diasporic intimacies between Asian and Latinx communities have converged across the world for centuries; the mixing of these cultures and as a result, mixed individual is the effect of centuries of interactions with each other. In this thesis, I review the literature across Asian diaspora in Latin America, mixed race studies, and interethnic relations to understand how AsianLatinxs have continually been relegated to the subaltern despite their strong presence in the Americas. I argue it is necessitated to center AsianLatinxs experiences to understand the interconnectedness of global Asian and Latinx communities through what I call AsianLatinx Studies. A field such as AsianLatinx Studies disrupts previous monoracial frameworks of diaspora, mixed identity, and interethnic relations to (re)imagine a reality that situates the complexities of mixedness tangential to racialization processes, identity formation, and transnationalism.

This study proposes an analysis of land, as a literary and historical notion, in a selection of mid-twentieth century Mexican novels: Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), El gallo de oro (1980), Agustín Yáñez’s La tierra pródiga (1960), and Juan José Arreola’s La feria (1963). And proposes these novels as representational paradigms of the relationship between land and landownership in Mexico from the Revolution into the 1980’s. In addition to “land narrative” this research offers an array of historical contributions to the analysis of traditional and cultural representation of land in Mexico’s literary history. This investigation also proposes a re-interpretative reading of historical conceptions of land and property in midcentury rural Mexico. Land narrative in this context, offers a new perspective of Mexico’s literary land history after its Revolution. This novel approach to the topic of land narrative proposes both new terms and approaches for understanding the intelligibility of midcentury literature and its conceptualization.

This dissertation illuminates how the experience of growing up during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) affected the individual's sense of self as citizen and the impact on their sense of democratic agency, civic-mindedness, and political engagement in their country's current democracy. To understand that impact, the researcher chose to study her own generation, the “Pinochet-era” generation (Cummings, 2015) and interviewed those who were part of the Chilean middle class, who despite not being explicit victims of perpetrators, were raised in dictatorship and surrounded by abuse of state power including repression, disappearance, and imprisonment. The theoretical frame of the Socio-Political Development Theory (Watt, Williams, & Jagers, 2003) helped to understand the process that participants went through and how they moved from an A-Critical Stage, with a complete absence of awareness and understanding about what was happening in their world at the time of the coup d’Etat, to a stage of critical consciousness surrounded by empathy for those who were suffering human rights violations which were the main drivers to latter participate in a liberation process. This development of a critical consciousness was influenced—among others—by specific family and social context which promoted transgenerational (Uwineza & Brackelaire, 2014) and intergenerational dialogue (Reyes, Cornejo, Cruz, Carrillo, & Caviedes, 2015) processes, where values, heritage, and ways of acting were transmitted. The narrative approach helped to elicit stories about participants’ life events from the coup d’Etat to present. Through the exploration of 15 narrative interviews it was also possible to collect participants’ memories and observe how they currently manifest their civic commitment and social responsibility. Their collective memory, influenced by a collective grief (Metraux, 2005b), still lingers over 40 years later and helps us to understand their life-long commitment and passion to fight for justice. This generation was part of a social movement that managed to set aside its political and economic divides and its personal self-interests with the collective goal of restoring democracy. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and Ohiolink ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/

My research attempts to build an archive of the violence that mothers and daughters faced under the Argentine "Dirty War" dictatorship of 1976-1983 with specific attention to pregnant women who visibly straddle the identity of mother and daughter. By looking to state-sanctioned resources and fictional narratives, including novels and film, I hope to better understand a lived experience of pregnant prisoners that has been historically erased, and understand how this intergenerational trauma instilled a legacy of terror through the exploitation of feminized bodies. My thesis proposes that subversive, pregnant women posed the historically rich threat of being “brujas” (witches) against the masculine military state, and that this subversion appears in popular, fictional narratives (novels and movies) through the character arc of the narrative’s mother and daughter characters. While initially I centered my research only on the pregnant disappeared women, their visible absence from film and fiction challenged me to expand the scope of my study to examine biological, adoptive, clandestine and figurative representations of motherhood in the years following the dictatorship, through the twenty-first century. Thus, fiction plays a key role in building an archive that considers how the enduring, intergenerational terror of the military dictatorship operates through these women.

While Latinx students struggle to endure negative stereotypes, microaggressions and other forms of discrimination, they are still one of the fastest growing populations in US higher education. Several studies conducted on the experiences of Latinx students at predominantly white institutions conclude that poor racial climates deter these students from establishing a sense of belonging. With that said, it is important to understand what support systems are available for Latinx students. This study examines the experiences of Latinx students and their relationship to a campus multicultural center. Furthermore, this study explores how Latinx students might make meaning within the multicultural center. Like their Black counterparts, it is important to acknowledge that Latinx students also face discrimination, racism, alienation, and marginalization on campus (Harper & Hurtado, 2007, p. 9) and thus also need to build community and support through counterspaces (Yosso, Smith, Ceja & Solorzano, 2009). To demonstrate the importance of community and counterspaces, this study drew upon homeplace which hooks (1990) describes as a “site of resistance” engaged in community, healing, and escape from racist domination. To draw on the experiences of Latinx students and understand their relationship to the multicultural center and determine if a sense of homeplace was established, the researcher conducted a miniethnographic case study and employed methods which consisted of participant interviews, observations, and document analysis. This approach provided an intersectional way to explore the relationship between Latinx students and the multicultural through the guise of their experiences on campus and the multicultural center. While studies on multicultural centers have focused on the experiences of Black students within Black Cultural Centers, this study offered a nuanced perspective from the lens of Latinx students at a predominantly white institution.

Intertextuality is a key aspect in the poetry of Blas de Otero (1916-1979), an engagement with other poets as well as with his readers. It is a powerful tool that he uses to create a polyphonic voice that challenges the discourse of power. One of the fundamental figures in this polyphony is the Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), whose poetry deeply affected the work of Blas de Otero. Both Vallejo and Otero shared similar temperaments and ideologies, and believed that intellectuals had a responsibility towards society. By examining the way that Vallejo’s España aparta de mí este cáliz (1938) informs Otero’s Pido la paz y la palabra (1955), this dissertation reopens the question of the social role of art, focusing specifically on the so-called “poesía social” of Spain during the 1950’s. It also explores the role of the reader and the circulation, often clandestine, of Vallejo’s poetry during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Lastly, by focusing on Blas de Otero as a reader of Vallejo’s work, this dissertation shows that the specific characteristics found in Vallejo were fundamental in making him one of the most influential poets in Franco’s Spain. Aware of the uniqueness of Vallejo’s poetry, Otero transformed the Peruvian’s word and made it his own, shaping a compelling language that suggests new realities and defies oppression.

Adolescence is a pivotal time for Latinx individuals with type 1 diabetes, yet this population remains understudied. This paper examined the role that division of responsibility (adolescent, parent, and shared) for diabetes management tasks plays in adolescent health in this population across two studies. Diabetes responsibility was measured using two methods: surveys (Study 1) and a novel coding scheme applied to parent-adolescent interactions (Study 2). Results of study 1 showed that Latinx mothers reported more shared and less adolescent responsibility in surveys than non-Hispanic White mothers. Mother- and adolescent-reported shared responsibility were generally associated with higher levels of diabetes adherence, while reports of individual (parent and adolescent) responsibility were generally associated with lower levels of diabetes adherence. Results of Study 2 showed that descriptions of shared, adolescent, and parent responsibility in conflict discussions were not associated with adolescent health. Cultural values (familism and independence/self-reliance) were not associated with particular patterns of diabetes responsibility, but cultural values were associated with health outcomes. Specifically, independence/self-reliance tended to be associated with poorer adolescent health (lower quality of life and increased anxiety), while adolescent familism was associated with higher levels of adolescent-reported adherence. The importance of multi-method studies and implications for interventions are discussed.

This dissertation aims to actively approach melodramatic Latinx/Mexican productions as cultural manifestations of a political movement that not only pushes the proverbial envelope towards post-queer-identity (that is post the coming out climax of many works) by demanding the recognition of explicit queer sexuality as a powerful tool that can and does invoke change in the cultural and social realm. Sácala (del closet) theorizes what I am calling unapologetic raw queer sexualities, which I see manifested in Latin American and Latinx cultural productions. I pay close attention to the transnational connections and influences not only between the neighboring countries of México and the US but also in global conversations with sexual identities in Latin America. The works I engage in my dissertations include the 1983 novel titled Melodrama by Luis Zapata. I suggest that Melodrama is both an homage and a parody of the melodramatic genre in Mexican Golden Age cinema and how the novel ultimately destabilizes fixed notions of gender and sexuality that impact both straight and queer understandings of body, identity, and desire. In Chapter 2, I work with performances by El Mariachi Arcoris de Los Angeles by analyzing the different ways in which the queer mariachi queers spaces and dares to reimagine what it means to be queer and what it means to unsettle patriarchal, heteronormative frameworks that are historically associated not only with Latinx culture and Chicanx activism but indeed socially pervasive across the different ethnic groups that make up the United States of America. The following chapter analyzes Netflix's La casa de las flores (2018), an original series entangled with Mexican melodrama, particularly stemming from telenovelas, that relate directly to queer world making issues as I pay attention to US notions of sexual identities that are appropriated by non-US subjects as well as the different forms in which these subjectivities exceed theoretical imagining of transnational queer (re)formation with a visibly queer sexuality. Lastly, I analyze Tangerine as an audiovisual project which allows the viewer to experience -with limitations- sexual otherness while questioning notions of Latinx family.

This dissertation explores the concept of the body in fictional representations within the context of repression and forced migration in literature and visual arts. My analysis focuses on the aesthetic proposals of Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941), Daniel Moyano (Argentina, 1930 – Spain, 1992), and José Balmes (Spain, 1927 – Chile, 2016), banned in their home countries and forced into exile by military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s. The study draws from contemporary discussions on nomadism, Borderlands theory, feminist critiques of modern understandings of the body—especially in the context of repression and violence—and Latin American visual arts and literary theory in relation to exile and memory. Drawing from Gloria Anzaldúa’s insightful understanding of the body as a porous borderland that dwells in liminality and intersectionality, I argue that the close interrelation and interdependence between embodiment and space become highly legible in the condition of physical displacement. This is why I examine the somatic and discursive constructions of migrant embodiment—particularly in the situation of forced displacement—in different characters in Peri Rossi’s poetry, Moyano’s fiction and Balmes’s art. Bodies in Transit is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 is titled “The Body in Fluid Stages: Negotiating Exile in Descripción de un Naufragio, by Cristina Peri Rossi” (1975, Description of a Shipwreck). In this poetry collection, the free expression of eroticism and passion constitutes an irreverent and eloquent perspective on banishment (Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994; Sandoval, 2000). The characters relearn their corporeal language as part of both a migratory dynamic of traveling by ship, and a hybrid reality of living in between worlds. In Chapter 2, “Going into Exile: Rethinking the Body in Libro de Navíos y Borrascas by Daniel Moyano” (1983, The Book of Vessels and Tempests), I explore the journey into forced displacement (also sailing across the open ocean), the somatic experiences of the main characters and their exposure to sexual violence, forced disappearance, and prison (Arendt, 1963; Butler, Bodies, 1993; Scarry, 1985; R. Segato, Guerra, 2018). The various literary voices in this novel search for ways of coping with the complex experience of banishment; they find havens in memory (personal and collective), in art, and in the representation of non-official historical episodes. Finally, in the third chapter, “Mapping Memory and Trauma: Exile in José Balmes’s artwork,” I examine bodies that revisit trauma in the artist’s output relating to his recollections of his own journeys as a Spanish refugee in 1939 and as a Chilean exile in 1973 (Johnson, 2007; Lazzara, 2006; McCloskey, 2005; Nochlin, 1996; Richard, 2007; Taylor, 2007). In Balmes’s paintings, the human body performs a testimony and is represented as an important component of an alternative historical discourse. A comparative look at these three experiences of migratory flows is important since the journey into exile has an effect on the literary and visual representations of these authors. Specifically, I analyze how the body is limited and violented by discourses deploying a modern concept of embodiment, and how, at the same time, going into exile presents opportunities for becoming aware of the embodied border-location. I am interested in the analysis of power structures and in their intersection with alternative cultural representations—literary works, visual and plastic artworks—that represent a “material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure” (Lowe 22). I explore a striking reiteration of topics in the outputs of the three creators, specifically related to the terms absence and presence, memory and violence, and body and trauma. These are recurrent concepts that acquire a particular nuance from the creators’ shared experience as exiled subjects.Although much research has already been done into Southern Cone literary and artistic exile, my work looks at significant connections in multiple intersecting fields and responds to the contemporary complexities of migration. My study broadens the discussion about the connections between embodiment and dominant discourses on citizenship and exile in the Americas. It also expands our understanding of how the vibrant and diverse cultural production of Latin American spaces is constantly threatened by repressive discourses that persist, even after the end of dictatorship, naturalizing violence and silencing dissident writers and artists.

When D.W. Griffith began filming The Greaser's Gauntlet in 1908, no one could have predicted that he would create an enduring character. This dissertation explores the history of the greaser character and its influence in American and Chicanx Literature. Beginning with The Greaser's Gauntlet, this study traces the greaser character and illuminates the history of greaser cinema in several films, including: Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914) and Licking the Greaser's (1914/1918). The dissertation then argues that the images produced in these films are essential to establishing racialized representations of Mexican and Latinx characters in the U.S. film industry and in the social sphere. Next, the dissertation investigates artistic responses to the greaser character. In particular, the dissertation examines four novels—Nathanael West's Day of the Locust (1939), José Antonio Villareal's Pocho (1959), Oscar Zeta Acosta's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), and The Revolt of the Cockroach People (1973)—to show how creative writers have reimagined and critiqued the character in their fictions.

For students from working-class backgrounds, a college degree is often viewed as the most reliable way to achieve upward mobility. Although existing studies assessing upward mobility in college tend to focus on the racially exclusionary experiences of Hispanics or the devaluation of working-class culture, this study bridges the gap between race and social class studies. This research adopts a racialized class lens to investigate how the upwardly mobile trajectories of working class, Mexican-origin students differ based on the selectivity of the school they attend as well as the community in which that school is located.Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation, I compare the experiences of 60 working class, Mexican-origin students across two universities. Thirty respondents attended a moderately selective, flagship institution located in an urban, middle-class metropolis and their co-ethnic counterparts attended a regional, Hispanic-serving institution. I conducted a total of 60 student interviews and recorded in-depth observations for a 16-week period.Whereas key institutional processes, such as classroom content, leadership program opportunities and organizational cultural offerings challenged students to alter discourse techniques and lifestyle patterns in the moderately selective, flagship school, students attending the regionally accessible university experienced fewer challenges to do so. The flagship university thus valorized mainstream, middle-class cosmopolitan cultures but provided limited opportunities for student respondents to exercise valuable ethnic cultural skills. Students attending the Hispanic-serving, regional university, on the other hand, experienced their working-class, racial-ethnic culture as dominant cultural capital in the university but had fewer opportunities to develop mainstream, middle-class cultural skills.This research illuminates how a horizontally stratified university system hinders access to valued forms of cultural knowledge. I argue that while a four-year college degree facilitates access to middle-class occupations, contextual characteristics associated with a school’s selectivity shape the extent to which Hispanic students can access skills that enable them to navigate mainstream cultural arenas and remain engaged in non-dominant ones. Thus, inequality in the college-for-all era becomes increasingly characterized not solely based on overt forms of exclusion but by the cultural tradeoffs involved as upwardly-mobile minorities attempt to broaden their opportunity structures.

Since the 1990s, the identifying label of “transfronterizos” has emerged in border scholarship to theorize the experiences of transborder, U.S.-Mexico border resident families and individuals. Transfronterizos have also been characterized as U.S. and Mexico cross-border residents with dual citizenship, who attend school, work, and forge families across nations. They have also been described as bilingual and bicultural people that possess tight affective ties on both sides of the border. While the existing border literature provides appropriately general and schematic understandings to theorize on the lives of cross-border families and individuals living on the Tijuana and San Diego border region, this dissertation centralizes the memories, voices, material realities, and lived experiences of “transborder citizens” themselves. To do so, this dissertation draws from oral history approaches and ethnographic research methodologies to excavate transborder citizens and families’ past experiences and present lived realities in the Tijuana and San Diego border region. Based on my findings, I refer to “transborder citizens” instead as, fronteriza/os. This dissertation does three things. First, it historicizes the rise of transborder family units and transborder citizenship practices on the Tijuana border from 1889 to 1965. In the same vein, I also explore and theoretically advance the post-1965-1989 rise of “transborder parentocracy,” an intentional and aspirational upwardly-mobile practice to give birth north of the borderline so that middle and upper-class border children can benefit from a U.S. birthright citizenship status in the Tijuana and San Diego region. Secondly, I theorize on the present-day and lived transborder family and citizenship experiences of fronteriza/os. I found that transborder family units also include members of mixed-legal status living at the U.S.-Mexico border. Thus, I further advance that fronteriza/os’ articulate and construct a form of “transborder legal consciousness,” shaped by U.S. citizenship and Mexican dual nationality laws. On the one hand, fronteriza/os’ legal consciousness is implicated by a U.S. citizenship status that is shaped in relationship to family members mixed-legal status at the border. On the other hand, fronteriza/os’ transborder legal consciousness is complicated by a limited and differential access to Mexican dual nationality. Third, and lastly, I theoretically encapsulate fronteriza/os’ transborder family and citizenship experiences, including the construction of a transborder legal consciousness, through the border localized and aspirational “Tijuana Dream” narrative. I argue that ultimately, the notion of the “Tijuana Dream” is fueled by narratives of exceptionalism and meritocracy, promoting the idea that the “American Dream” is readily available to U.S. citizens and transborder families living at the Mexican border city of Tijuana. Through the exploration and theorization on the historical genealogies and quotidian social practices shaping transborder citizens’ experiences in the Tijuana and San Diego border region, this dissertation fills a void at the intersection of Border Studies, Law and Society, and Chicana/o and Latina/o citizenship scholarship. This dissertation further expands the theories of transborder citizenship, legal consciousness and mixed-legal status families with the inclusion of “transborder mixed-status family” experiences, the practice of “transborder parentocracy,” and the construction of a “transborder legal consciousness” into academic circles.

This qualitative study described four testimonios from Chicanas who have successfully completed a doctorate in education degree, both Ph.D. and Ed.D. The literature reviewed three important areas of study. The first is a review of the systemic challenges that Chicanas must hurdle; cheap labor, segregation of schools and neighborhoods, being silenced through English-only education, and deficit thinking. The second area of review focused on ways that Chicanas create strategies for success to overcome these challenges. The third was a review of the theoretical literature through a distinctly and relevant Chicana feminist lens. Chicanas’ strategies for success were collected as testimonios. These lived stories are shared using a narrative approach and were analyzed through a Chicana feminist lens, allowing the researcher to connect with indigenous roots. Findings include cultural intuition, reflexión, máscaras, nepantla, and La Virgen de Guadalupe as themes that enable an understanding of the strategies used by these successful women. This study sought to understand how gender and race impact graduate scholarship among a unique population and adds to the body of knowledge on doctoral education and Latina (specifically Chicana) education in particular.

Anchored in Latino Critical Race Theory, this project analyzes undocumented Latinx narratives across theater, comics, memoir, and music as decolonial cultural production and counter-storytelling. It investigates how each form is used to build affective ties with audiences, call on them to reflect on their own positionality, and imagine new social realities. This is accomplished by simulating the violence of deportation and positioning undocumented communities as foundational to building networks of support and resistance. The works examined here rely on surrogates to publicize and justify everyday undocumented disobedience that otherwise would not be shared for fear of deportation. Critically reading these texts in educational settings is urgently needed to decolonize multicultural approaches that include Latinx literature in apolitical and celebratory ways. Moreover, attending to the diverse and, at times, contradictory perspectives and approaches to social transformation found across these works positions undocumented communities as dynamic social agents that draw on a wide variety of ways to forge a politics of possibility.