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Latinx students constitute the fastest and largest growing segment of the population in California community colleges (CCCs), with roughly 45% of students identified as Latinx. Yet Latinx representation among faculty and administrators lags behind, with very modest gains in representation in the faculty and academic administrator ranks (Bates et al., 2018; Contreras, 2017). Utilizing qualitative methods, through elite interviews, this study delves into the perspectives and experiences of Latinx presidents in enhancing diversity in hiring practices at HSCCs. Findings revealed the unique challenges Latinx presidents encounter in advancing equity in hiring initiatives and highlights opportunities for transformative change. By amplifying the voices of Latinx presidents, this research addresses a critical gap in the existing literature, moving beyond mere strategies to operationalizing experiences in navigating institutional politics to promote equity in hiring. The study underscores the importance of Latinx presidents in shaping and implementing diversity initiatives, offering valuable insights into their racialized experiences as candidates and as leaders.Ultimately, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing the representation of Latinx faculty and administrators in CCCs. By centering the perspective of Latinx presidents, this study offers actionable strategies for fostering greater inclusivity and representation within community college settings.

This dissertation examines twenty-first century Central American and U.S. Central American women’s literature that redefines the concepts of voice and silence within the period of armed conflict and beyond, thereby showcasing narrative and poetic alternatives to official historical accounts regarding this tumultuous period from the perspective of women. A recurring motif in this body of literature is the interplay between voice and silence, specifically what is “voiced” and what is kept silent for a myriad of reasons. For the women of Central America, the act of speaking or remaining silent is often loaded with political, social, and personal implications. This dissertation, in effect, seeks to explore voice and silence as they manifest in contemporary women's literature of Central America in order to analyze the particular nuances to these concepts and highlight the often ignored issues that are particular to women during war and postwar. Focusing on literature from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and California, this project highlights the experiences of Central and U.S. Central American women from multiple generations who have dealt with war and continue to grapple with the aftermath of the period of armed conflict in the isthmus. In effect, I argue that these women writers reveal how much is yet to be said regarding the traumatic experiences of war, poverty, migration and violence. Furthermore, I argue that silence appears as a tool of empowerment and protection for Central American women and its diaspora.This project maps the possibilities of meanings of voice and silence across four Central American spaces: El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the U.S. Central American diaspora in California. Chapter One analyzes voice and silence in Roza tumba quema (2017). Hernández articulates the deleterious psychological and material effects of the epoch of armed conflict specifically for women. Through the employment of a third-person narrator, a lack of specific names, and an emphasis on mental dialogue and thinking processes, the Salvadoran writer explores the potential meanings of voice and silence in context of war and postwar El Salvador, opening up the possibilities for how one can narrate and interpret significant and even traumatic life events such as war through the medium of the novel. Specifically, I examine narrative voice as the points of view of women characters and the perspective of the guerrilla. Similarly, silence in the novel exhibits the presence of emotional trauma and stands as a tool for survival. As literary trauma scholar Cathy Caruth states, Roza tumba quema exemplifies a text that points to “a central problem of listening, of knowing, and of representing that emerges from the actual experience of the crisis” (5). Hernández in effect demonstrates the precarious nature of listening, knowing and representing women’s psychological trauma of the Salvadoran armed conflict and its repercussions on them and subsequent generations.Chapter Two centers the poetry of two contemporary poets: Nicaraguan Alejandra Sequeira and Guatemalan Carmen Lucía Alvarado. In this chapter, I analyze the manifestations of voice in silence in Sequeira’s poetic collection Quien me espera no existe (2006) and Alvarado’s Edad geológica del miedo (2018). These two Central American authors speak to the similar yet multifaceted experiences of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan individuals located within the postwar period and beyond, revealing and highlighting an inextricable relationship between silence, fear and death in the region’s contemporary literature. Through its anaphoras, syntactic repetitions, apostrophes, and the content of the poems position silence as the voice of death and fear. Through such nuanced and complex definitions of silence, these Central American poets offer metapoetic ruminations and a reckoning of the psychosomatic repercussions of war, trauma and experiences of post-conflict societies simultaneously. In this way, the kind of silence that is present in the works of Sequeira and Alvarado speaks and communicates messages, and these messages carry out the work of remembering those who perished during the period of armed conflict and afterward in Central America. Through the poetic medium, these writers articulate a nuanced re-definition of silence and exhibit poetry’s potential for accomplishing the work of recuperating individual and cultural memories.Chapter Three takes a dive into a few U.S. Central American/diasporic writers: Salvadoran-American Yesika Salgado, Salvadoran-American Leticia Hernández-Linares and Guatemalan-American Maya Chinchilla. Through an analysis of their poetic collections, selections from Salgado’s trilogy of poetic collections Corazón (2017) Tesoro (2018) and Hermosa (2019), Linares’ mucha muchacha (2015), and Chinchilla’s The Cha Cha Files: A Chapina Poética (2014), I posit that contemporary U.S. Central American poetic writing stands as a mode for speaking about and processing significant events such as the experience of war and migration, communicating affective responses to these experiences by voicing and keeping silent, and engendering new possibilities and imaginaries for Central American immigrants and their descendants’ personal and collective stories and identities beyond the paradigms of violence and poverty. Furthermore, the centering of women’s voices in this specific archive demonstrates the urgency of this sector of the U.S. Central American diaspora to reevaluate and transform gendered, patriarchal norms that have kept women in bondage to silence for decades. It is in this way that U.S. Central American women poets are speaking up about often-silenced issues pertaining to this diasporic community and forging new possibilities of existing for U.S. Central American women.

This study draws on intensive ethnographic engagement with mixed-status families and their wider community circles to explore children’s material and immaterial contributions to family life and how they learn and practice emotional labor through observing and participating in family and community activities alongside their mothers, whose labor for organizations and schools constitutes an unrecognized form of intensive mothering.

This study investigates the role of prosody in narration as a function of Labovian narrative structure and stancetaking in identity performance. This study is both (1) an extension and enhancement of preliminary work that looked at a handful of prosodic features in Mexican Spanish narratives, and (2) a novel investigation into discursive acts expressed through narrative prosody. Previous work has established that speakers use prosody in socially meaningful ways in discourse (House, 2006). At the same time, research in narrative inquiry has provided unique insight about the ways in which speakers systematically construct oral narratives (Labov, 1997, 2013; Labov & Waltetzky). Still, many questions remain open regarding the interface of these realms and the function that prosody plays in narrative construction, especially in language contact settings where bilingualism is the norm for speakers. In addition, while many scholars have touched upon identity as a fluid sociological entity, there is yet to be any insight as to how prosody can reveal the underpinnings of dynamic identity performance in narration. Drawing on and expanding preliminary work, I examine Mexican American bilingual narratives as a means to observe patterns of prosodic content and function to provide answers for both of these theoretical questions. Narratives are analyzed through (1) discourse analysis informed by a Labovian structural framework, and (2) Spanish ToBI analyses to measure pitch accent realization and intonation patterns. Both of these facets are conducted with the goal of outlining the relationship between prosody and (1) narrative structure as well as (2) performativity of Mexican/Hispanic/Latinx identities via style shifting and stance. This study can offer insight in how prosody can be comprehensively incorporated with Labov’s framework of narrative analysis, as well as how speakers in language contact utilize prosody to varying degrees depending on discourse content and positionality. Additionally, this study provides insight into how prosody may vary in its usage in language contact situations.Findings from both studies demonstrate rich use of prosody in a variety of narrative contexts, related to personal experiences, family stories, and identity navigation. Notably, speakers use intonation contours to index narrative structure and different epistemic stances in identity, with observations being noted in the difference between falling and non-falling (e.g., uptalk) contours. Pauses and syllable lengthening also have narrative and discourse-specific purposes, including the enhancement of intonation contours, signaling stances of certainty and uncertainty, and modulating the interaction to index open vs closed dialogic continuation in identity work. The purposes that these prosodic features carry may often overlap or be difficult to interpret based on the context. Nonetheless, the results of this dissertation reveal the importance of prosody in both narrative discourse generally and specifically within bilingual contexts common to the Mexican American community.

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.

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 findthat Black linked fate was lower in 2012, challenging the assumption that economic concernsweaken Black unity. Financial hardship did not impact levels of linked fate for Blacks, and thereare no systematic racial/ethnic differences in levels linked fate among those experiencingfinancial struggles. These findings suggest that Black linked fate and economic concerns may bereinforcing in this context. Using the 2020 View of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, I examine therelationship between several identity factors and perceptions of the disproportionate healthimpact of the COVID-19 pandemic. I explore whether perceptions juxtapose with data. I findethic differences among partisans, except for Democrats. The effect of gender is conditional onHispanic ethnicity, suggesting that these factors play a significant role in shaping perceptions ofthe pandemic. Lastly, using 2020 CMPS data, I demonstrate that the more conservative and younger arespondent is, the more likely they are to be vaccine hesitant. In contrast, older adults areunresponsive 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 behindthese 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 behindperceptions in the contemporary climate.

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.

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.

“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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The following study is an examination of how racialized forms of citizenship were produced and reinforced pedagogically as part of placemaking efforts centered around whiteness in Riverside, California during the period between 1915-1933. Through programs of Americanization and practices of segregation, educational figures, parent groups, churches, and service clubs mobilized to strategically implement a curriculum that reproduced a racial and class hierarchy for Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the city. The study centers on the formation and early functions of an explicitly "Mexican school," known as the Independiente School, for the children of Mexican citrus laborers in the Riverside community of Arlington. This little known school in the history of the city exemplifies how racialization occurred pedagogically through coordinated training, curriculum, segregation, and expulsion to make Riverside a place structured around and identified with white citizenship.

This dissertation examines the Texas Mexican musical genre known as conjunto and its concomitant social world. In this work I situate conjunto within a broader context of Mexican American cultural production, Texas Mexican popular music, and the shared histories of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. As a social history, the dissertation traces the development of the genre and its practitioners across the twentieth century to the present. I examine interactions of power; expressions of identity; and constructions of race, class, and gender through movement (dance), performance (instrumentation and playing), and place (the dancehall or nite club) within and around San Antonio and South Texas. I argue that conjunto is an embodiment of Xicanx thought and knowledge, an everyday act of resistance and reaffirmation.

This Doctoral Dissertation explores the transition that took place in the eighteenth century from the figure of the king as the symbolic representative of the nation to the recently created category of the citizen as the new national metaphor all over the western world. The necessity of creating a positively racialized model of citizen that would serve as a symbolic representative of the nation followed the racial zeitgeist of the time, dictated by imperial expansion together with the creation of new systems of thought such as scientific racism, geographic determinism, or phrenology. Spain, former hegemonic power during Early Modern Europe, was expelled from Modern Europe in the eighteenth century, being displaced for the first time to a racialized southern European periphery at a time when race matched power. Intellectual battles fought through the first stages of the Printed Press and the Encyclopedia, used propaganda to build or destroy national identities. Through an extensive study about foreign views of Spain by France, England, and Latin America, and their reception in Spain, this doctoral dissertation explores Spanish attempts to dislocate Northern European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries epistemologies by creating alternative networks of knowledge and proposing a model of empire where race was not used as a political ideology, with the aim of re-branding itself in the new nation-building landscape of the time.

As an American contemporary modern dance maker, I explore the ways in which my Mexican-American female identity reveals itself in my choreographic work. In this two-fold dance thesis research, I insightfully search for mind and body connectives to help increase awareness centered around various parts of my ethnicity. I inquire about my mixture of histories, lineages, and experiences and share my collaborative choreographic process for the making of Agave Americana, a dance work that premiered on April 25-26th, 2019 at UC Irvine’s Experimental Media Performance Lab. I poetically insert my personal perspective of dance making to engage with a broader discourse in the fields of cultural studies, feminism, and the contemporary dance making body.

In the late 1980s, northern meat packaging plants in the United States shut their doors and moved South in search of a lower paid workforce and deregulated labor laws. Hispanics throughout the United States and abroad migrated to work in these plants, most of which were in predominantly white communities that had not seen immigration in several generations. Until then, through racial cleansing practices and the use of sundown towns, parts of Arkansas and the majority of northwest Arkansas (NWA) remained overwhelmingly white. Considering this context of a predominately white geographic area with a history of racial discrimination against ethnic minorities, I adopt a lens of racialization to examine Hispanics’ sense of belonging in the U.S. South. During May and August of 2018, I interviewed Hispanics in NWA aged 18 to 26 (n=35). Consistent with previous research, my results suggest that some Hispanic youths experience a contradictory sense of belonging as they feel a strong sense of belonging in some spaces, yet simultaneously experience exclusion in other spaces. Negative racialized experiences, racial discrimination, and anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric force Hispanics to constantly renegotiate their sense of belonging in NWA and draw boundaries between where they belong and where they do not belong. Insofar as previous research has focused primarily on newly arrived immigrants, this study is novel since it focuses on the experiences of their children.

This is the first comprehensive study of the mural La Dualidad (The Duality) designed by Chicano artist Guillermo “Yermo” Aranda in collaboration with Los Toltecas en Aztl�n located inside El Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, California. The thesis conducts a visual analysis of La Dualidad (The Duality), and discusses the changes in design from 1970 to the current version finished in 1984. By reading it in dialogue with the Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo’s Dualidad (Duality) mural of 1964, as an example of an earlier mural that visualized the Mesoamerican concept of “duality” through the depiction of the Aztec gods Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl, I propose that the San Diego mural presents the distinct qualities of Chicano muralism. Most notably, La Dualidad (The Duality) re-conceptualizes the concept of “duality” in a future-forward visual interpretation that incorporates what I term a “syncretic-continuum” of ideas, philosophies, and symbolism from Amerindian, Mexican, Mexican American, and Chicano/a cultures. By utilizing a “Xicana futurist lens,” I observe a future-conscious perspective that envisioned the forthcoming generations of Chicanos and Chicanas as active protagonists and creators in a dynamic and technologically advanced American society. This study is the first to theorize futurism and “Chicanafuturism” to conduct a social art historical in-depth reading of Chicano murals.

Across the US, Chicana/o and Latina/o murals have served as artistic landmarks commemorating Chicana/o and Latina/o culture, history and identity. These murals, however, are predominantly heteronormative representations of Chicana/o culture and history. What happens, therefore, when queer Latinx and Chicanx artists use muralism to express their intersectional identities? This project focuses on the digital queer mural, Por Vida, designed by Los Angeles based artist Paul Manuel, installed June 13, 2015 on 24th and Bryant Street in San Francisco’s Mission District in celebration of Pride Month. Just days after its installation, the mural was defaced multiple times, three times spray-painted, the fourth time incinerated. After the defacements, community tensions rose among local and non-local Mission District residents. To this day, the identity of individual(s) behind the violent vandalism are still unknown.In this project, I explore what I identify as the “contested conversations” regarding Por Vida’s defacements between local and non-local residents. From over 230 Instagram comments, I identify five different types of arguments within these online conversations which include, 1) Cultural Gatekeepers of "The Cholo" 2) Spatial Entitlement 3) Gentrification Activism 4) Pro-LGBTQ and 5) Latinx Pro-LGBTQ. Drawing from queer of color critique, spatial theory, whiteness studies, and women of color feminism, I explore these contested debates, along with the Mission District’s cultural and spatial relationship to Por Vida’s installation. Using this analytics lens, I highlight and challenge the pervasive forms of whiteness in mainstream LGBTQ representation that, I argue, ultimately erase queer of color identities or “brown” pride (Mu�oz). Rainbow capitalism is a racial social project that informs spatial imaginations, producing territorial boundaries (cultural and spatial) that intentionally exclude queer of color bodies. I argue that the censorship of the Por Vida mural reinforces rainbow capitalism’s project of erasure–a project reaffirming queerness as a social identity belonging only to that of white, wealthier queer subjects. Indeed, I aim to question the “gentrification argument,” pointing to instead the white gay subject’s universal or dominant socio-spatial relationship to queer of color bodies and claims to safe spaces such as “gayborhoods.” Through a queer of color spatial critique, I discovered that the anti-gentrification sentiments from local Mission District residents, while they openly resist against the displacement of low-income families of color, also simultaneously observe Por Vida’s representation of queer of color intimacy as a symptom of gentrification. Interviews revealed that these sentiments are rooted in homophobic and transphobic attitudes but also territorial entitlements that continuously marginalize queer and trans bodies of color. I argue that Por Vida’s representation of queer Latinx intimacy is an active disruption to public space’s heteronormative social values of respectability and domesticity, that also render visible the pervasive homophobic and transphobic attitudes still informing Latina/o communities even as they support anti-racist, anti-displacement activism.

Studies of rapto in scholarship on Chile are extremely scarce. Research done in social history and history of mentalities have looked into cases of rapto among others in order to determine the “judicial-legal culture” of legal actors in colonial and nineteenth-century Chile. However, scholars have not paid attention to the specific rhetorical and judicial strategies deployed by individual legal actors in cases of rapto with a microhistory approach and a focus on women’s agency. In this thesis, I examine the judicial and rhetorical strategies used by legal actors in a case of rapto through the lens of gender, honor, and its relation to class. I look into a case of rapto by seduction that takes place during the years 1823-1824 in Santiago. I argue that actors at the trial turn to several judicial and rhetorical strategies to bolster their cases but also to argue about larger social issues and ideas particular to the early nineteenth century.

Surrealism is central to understanding twentieth century Peruvian cultural production, yet some of its complexities remain under-studied, including the impact of the political demands that both inspired and inhibited its proponents, or how they championed surrealism as a fundamental tool for modernizing not only Peruvian literature, but also visual art and even society. Based on new interpretations and fresh archival work, this dissertation explores the specific ways in which José Carlos Mariátegui, Xavier Abril, and César Moro engaged with the surrealist spirit, as André Breton articulated it: “‘Transform the world,’ said Marx; ‘change life,’ said Rimbaud: for us these two slogans are one and the same.”Chapter 1 focuses on Mariátegui, Peru’s most important Marxist thinker, by exploring the unresolved tension between his two distinct approaches to surrealism. In the context of the communist demand for a socialist realist literature, at times Mariátegui perceived surrealist endeavors as evidence of the cultural confusion that announced a revolutionary period. Yet Mariátegui concurrently backed surrealism from another perspective that configured his aesthetic heterodoxy: in his essays and his only novel, La novela y la vida. Siegfried y el profesor Canella (which has received scant critical attention), he viewed surrealism as a form of liberation via fantasy, the unconscious, and love, all valid means for renovating literature and connecting it with real life. Chapter 2 explores how Abril initially used surrealism as an eclectic label that appropriated the repertoire of earlier vanguard movements to position himself and other young Peruvian poets as legitimate, up-to-date voices in both local and transatlantic settings. I also explain how Abril’s initial attempt to renew Peruvian literature was realized and expanded to the social realm in his short novel El autómata, where he finally achieved a mature surrealist imagery. In this text, from which I present two unpublished fragments, Abril employs surrealism to convince the reader that madness is the path to overcoming the castrating demands of bourgeois society, and subsequently create what he calls a “surrealist class” and a “surrealist culture.” Chapter 3 is devoted to Moro, one of the most representative surrealist poets in Latin America, and the most important in Peru. Focusing on his collages and paintings, this chapter shows the centrality of Moro’s work as a visual artist to his brand of surrealism. I demonstrate that one of the most powerful surrealist statements in Peru is Moro’s attempt to contentiously persuade his spectators through visual means that poetry and dream are the ways to overcome antiquated artistic expectations and obtain “clairvoyance”—the capacity to appreciate and engage with the new expressive language of contemporary times: surrealism.

In his political comedias, seventeenth-century Novohispanic playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón shows as much interest in criticizing the ethical behavior of male characters as he does in representing violence against the female ones. This intersection of gender and political power is analyzed in the texts from a gender-perspective and supported by recent historiography on the political agency of royal women during the Spanish Golden Age. Despite the aggressions against them, Alarcón’s female characters consistently act according to reason, morality, and law. Furthermore, the decisions that restore the order lost to the intricate movements of the plots are not exclusively proposed or executed by the male characters, but usually foreseen or directly suggested by the female ones. In appropriating the functions reserved for a few privileged men, these women propose an alternative mode of government that challenges the traditional relationships between gender roles and political participation as understood in imperial Spain.

This dissertation focuses on the portrayal of human attitudes and actions and their impact on the environment in the works of Mexican authors, Agustín Yáñez and Homero Aridjis, and Colombian writers, Tomás Carrasquilla and Pablo Montoya. Although, these writers did not identify themselves as environmentalists, (with exception of Homero Aridjis), I observe that overall, their works implicitly denounce human actions on the environment. In my chapter “Return to Nature in Frutos de mi tierra (1896),” by Tomás Carrasquilla, I analyze how Medellín’s Nineteenth-Century capitalist society promotes a life-style that desensitizes human identification and coexistence with the natural world. In “Domination or Coexistence in Nature in Las tierras flacas (1962),” by Agustín Yáñez, I observe how the use of sustainable technology is implemented in a rural town to improve agriculture, as well as the different positions of domination, stewardship, and coexistence between humans and nature, arguing that Yáñez’ portrayal suggests that both stewardship and dominion, like patriarchy, assume human superiority over all non-human beings. In “Cultural Attitudes Towards the Environment in El hombre que amaba el sol (2005),” by Homero Aridjis, I reflect on the representation of environmental injustice of the State failing to educate society in environmental awareness so that it might more harmoniously coexist and protect nature, and particularly the Monarch butterfly. In “The Colonization of Nature in Tríptico de la Infamia (2014),” by Pablo Montoya, I explore how human actions impact the environment. I also study the imperial gaze brought by French colonizers during Sixteen-Century to the “New World” and contrast it the Timucuas’ interdependence with the nonhuman world.

This dissertation deploys an interdisciplinary framework that draws from literary studies, history, and critical human geography to critically examine counter-mapping acts in L.A. from 1965 to 2015, specifically those that shed light on the social and material conditions of Latinas/os. “Another Los Angeles” traces the counter-mapping practices of Chicana/o Latina/o communities as seen in fiction, visual art, and film. Counter-mapping as an oppositional practice reflects a non-dominant view of space and asserts subaltern histories and memories, challenging dominant discourses that render them invisible. In the first chapter, I analyze historical detective fiction by black and brown authors and argue that their novelistic return to the 1965-71 period remembers the long-standing issue of policing in the segregated ghetto and barrio and the flourishing of social justice movements of that era that were responding to inequitable policing and other injustices. In chapter two, I examine Hector Tobar’s 1998 novel, The Tattooed Soldier and its interwoven narrative structure to highlight the co-constitutive relationship between Central American spaces and the making of Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s as produced by neoliberal policies in the hemispheric Americas. In the last two chapters I shift focus to the visual and sonic to explore the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of the raced, classed, and gendered Latina/o body in urban space. In chapter 3, I trace the tradition of Chicana/o public art from the 1960s to the 21st century as a conceptually and politically useful medium for L.A. Chicana/o artists to reflect an ethos of urban vulnerability and enact critical spatializing practices. In the last chapter, I examine the Hollywood film, A Better Life, as a bricolage of visual and sound parts of L.A. communities of color that portray a “third space” reflective of and created by immigrants’ cultural, sonic, and spatial practices. Ultimately, “Another Los Angeles” privileges the counter-mapping practices of Los Angeles’ brown, black, and immigrant populations as they ascertain their vantage points in a city that while vastly present in the national imaginary, often forgets or flattens the spaces of communities of color.

Divided into three episodes between the 1830s and 1970s, the dissertation explores the U.S. imagination of Maya ruins vis-à-vis the works of three salient figures in American cultural history. The first point of interest is the nineteenth-century expeditionary tradition and the politics of ruin gazing in southeastern Mexico, concentrating on the illustrated texts of the citizen-diplomat and travel writer, John Lloyd Stephens, and his counterpart, the English architect and draftsman, Frederick Catherwood. Stephens and Catherwood were the first to thoroughly document Maya ruins for a U.S. audience with the two-volume Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841), Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), and Catherwood’s self-published folio of lithographs, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1844). Mayan Revival (also known as “Neo-Mayan”) architecture is the second subject, focusing on Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of ancient American aesthetics in the 1910s and 1920s to create an “indigenous” modern American architecture in examples like the Ennis House (1923-1924). The third and final subject centers on the long sixties and the configurations of ruination (and ruin gazing), landscape, and the indigene in selected projects and writings of the celebrity of American land art, Robert Smithson. I address examples like “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” a 1969 photographic travel essay, and Smithson’s comedic slide lecture, Hotel Palenque (1969-1972). The recuperations of Maya architecture in U.S. contexts provide insight into the ways the imperial behaviors of the nineteenth-century United States can be traced through the aesthetics of modernity that emerged in the early to mid-twentieth century. The import of indigenous aesthetics and subject matter on Anglo-American aesthetic traditions—whether in Catherwood’s illustrations of the continent’s ruins, Wright’s Mesoamerican revival architecture, or the putatively radical de-sublimation at work amongst the American neo-avant-gardists like Smithson—sheds light on the unusual and occasionally overlooked relationship between ruination, U.S. art and architectural modernism, and the hierarchies that in many ways define the American landscape.