The Chicano movements of the 1960s transformed protest and unrest into significant gains in the status of young Mexican Americans. Deriving strength from the political climate of their times, the movements were driven largely by youth organized around the common identity paradigm of Chicanismo and agitating for fundamental change in socio-political discourses and hierarchies within the United States. Since the 1960s, however, collective youth action has rarely been evident in the historical record of Chicanismo, and globalization and transnationalism have influenced the terms of Mexican American experience, identification, and social action themselves. Tucson, Arizona, somewhat in the periphery of the original Chicano movements, finds itself at the epicenter of today's ideological and practical contests over the legacies of the movimiento. This city, located just sixty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, until 2012 hosted one of the country's only public school departments of Mexican American Studies, which itself was home to one of the country's first formalized social-justice education curricula. In the first decade of the 21st century, precipitous increases in the number of graduates of these curricula converged with the collapse of world financial markets and resulting local crises in socio-political economy, which had intersecting, rippled effects on both side of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the ensuing climate of financial constriction and ideological transformation, subterranean questions about national belonging and legitimacy surfaced in local and national political challenges to Mexican immigration and "appropriate" schooling curriculum. Local Chicana/o youth responded to these local and larger contestations to their legitimacy as citizens and students by mobilizing some of the most significant public actions since the 1960s.This dissertation investigates the awakening into critical consciousness and pursuant social action of Mexican American high school students, youth "activists" and "organizers" in Tucson, Arizona. Building from ethnography conducted across nine years within youth actors' sites of activism and social justice engagement, this research reveals new complexities in our understanding of "activist" identity and enactments, and contends that understandings of both "activism" and "Chicanismo" must be revisited in the scholarship of youth movements, generally, and Chicana/o social action, specifically.

Thesis advisor: Owen Stanwood / Making Nations: The Northeastern Borderlands in an Age of Revolution, 1760-1820 examines migration within northeastern North America, and the gradual formation of a meaningful border between the District of Maine and the Province of New Brunswick. The American Revolution, though it divided the northeast between New England and British North America, did not fundamentally change attitudes toward the borderland. For decades, the region had been a special sort of frontier – a more connected frontier, offering migrants from southern New England better access to Atlantic trade. The post-revolutionary era rapidly reverted to pre-war patterns, as settlers crossed a largely meaningless border looking for fertile land and economic connectivity. These settlers, I argue, were not late loyalists, choosing British territory, or early republicans, choosing the U.S. This was one migration, to the borderland and the similar opportunities on both sides. So how did migration within a shared borderland become immigration across a meaningful border? Post-revolution, both Congregationalists and Catholics began to build networks in Maine that stopped at the border. A Congregational missionary society, the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, realized it could secure state funding from Massachusetts by advertising itself as a tool for managing the growing settlements in Maine. State money helped the society grow rapidly, and as similar groups formed they chose to join the pioneer society as partners rather than compete with it. Meanwhile, Congregational women created institutions called “ladies cent societies,” which provided a massive infusion of funding into the system. The resulting Congregational network grew to encompass almost the entire American half of the borderland. At the same time, a Catholic network also grew in Maine, connecting the Catholic Passamaquoddy and Penobscot people to Boston, as well as to Irish Catholics along Maine’s coast. As these networks grew they changed eastern Maine from a place that was attractive because of its connections with British North America, to a place that was attractive because of its connections with New England. These networks made the border meaningful – and immovable. Though politicians on both sides persisted for years in believing they could still adjust the border, they were wrong. It had already taken root. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

As the twentieth century unfolded, American writers, critics, and boosters presented a narrative of the arid Southwest as an exotic place blessed with a romantic history that could inspire, captivate and renew the many new white citizens flocking to rapidly growing cities. The history of Spanish colonialism in the area became a precious and exclusive cultural and economic resource. This dissertation tells the story of the commemoration of the Spanish past from 1848 to 1940 in three Spanish towns that grew into prominent American cities: Tucson, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and San Antonio, Texas. In chapters centered on space, historic preservation, Mexican folk ritual, and pageants, this work examines the stories told about the Spanish past in these cities and reveals how people of differing classes and ethnicities gave meaning to the places they lived and to the process of American annexation of the region. That meaning shaped individual and social identities as well as the flow of power between them.

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

“Ambassadors of Pleasure” examines the social and cultural history of ‘sin’ in the Detroit-Windsor border region during the post-World War II period. It employs the interrelated frameworks of “borderlands” and “vice” in order to identify the complex ways in which illicit economies shaped—and were shaped by—these border cities. It argues that illicit economies served multiple purposes for members of local borderlands communities. For many downtown residents, vice industries provided important forms of leisure, labor, and diversion in cities undergoing rapid changes. Deeply rooted in local working-class communities, prostitution and heroin economies became intimately intertwined in the daily lives of many local residents who relied on them for both entertainment and income. For others, though, anti-vice activities offered a concrete way to engage in what they perceived as community betterment. Fighting the immoral influences of prostitution and drug use was one way some residents, particularly those of the middle class, worked to improve their local communities in seemingly tangible ways. These struggles for control over vice economies highlight the ways in which shifting meanings of race, class, and gender, growing divisions between urban centers and suburban regions, and debates over the meaning of citizenship evolved in the urban borderland. This dissertation subsequently traces the competing interests brought together through illicit vice activities, arguing that they provide unique insight into the fracturing social lines developing in the postwar North American cities.

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of the lives of six student-parents (four young women and two young men) from Barlow High School in northwest Austin, Texas. The lived experiences of student-parents from a predominately Latina/o high school and my interactions with Barlow High School's student body, staff, educators, administrators, and social workers from an on-campus organization called A-Space illustrate how the discursive construction of teenage pregnancy as a social problem intersects with the schooling process to (re)produce gendered, classed, and racialized notions of belonging in the American body politic. My analysis considers the development of an American cultural concern with teenage pregnancy through a history of reproductive and racial politics, and it examines the work of The National Campaign to Prevent Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy, which, I argue, is a racializing campaign. An American cultural concern with teenage pregnancy has yielded a discourse of teenage pregnancy prevention that constructs the solution to teenage pregnancy around responsibility rather than access to contraception and information. The lives of Barlow High students and student-parents highlight the complexity of deterritorialized lived experiences, which sometimes include early family formation. While Barlow High School's student body of color learned about belonging in the first decade of the new millennium, educators vacillated between understanding the intersecting hierarchies of power impeding socioeconomic mobility and academic achievement in the community and believing that they did the best they could in the given situation. Educators and social workers, as agents of the state, failed to recognize their role in creating community. In sum, this dissertation documents a borderlanding or the creation of a borderlands in the new millennium. / text

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“Ambassadors of Pleasure” examines the social and cultural history of ‘sin’ in the Detroit-Windsor border region during the post-World War II period. It employs the interrelated frameworks of “borderlands” and “vice” in order to identify the complex ways in which illicit economies shaped—and were shaped by—these border cities. It argues that illicit economies served multiple purposes for members of local borderlands communities. For many downtown residents, vice industries provided important forms of leisure, labor, and diversion in cities undergoing rapid changes. Deeply rooted in local working-class communities, prostitution and heroin economies became intimately intertwined in the daily lives of many local residents who relied on them for both entertainment and income. For others, though, anti-vice activities offered a concrete way to engage in what they perceived as community betterment. Fighting the immoral influences of prostitution and drug use was one way some residents, particularly those of the middle class, worked to improve their local communities in seemingly tangible ways. These struggles for control over vice economies highlight the ways in which shifting meanings of race, class, and gender, growing divisions between urban centers and suburban regions, and debates over the meaning of citizenship evolved in the urban borderland. This dissertation subsequently traces the competing interests brought together through illicit vice activities, arguing that they provide unique insight into the fracturing social lines developing in the postwar North American cities.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Allyn MacLean Stearman. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-103).