Latino foreign born immigrants from Central and South America and the Dominican Republic represent around twenty percent of the Latino population in the United States. This wave of “Other Latinos/as” began to arrive in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This thesis explores the spiritual practices of three Latino Protestant congregations comprised mainly by first generation immigrants in the area of New England. Drawing from literature in spirituality studies, theology, and Latino/a studies, this thesis brings a religious and cultural analysis of Latino immigration through the lens of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s spiritual theorizing of Borderlands as a Nepantla experience. The thesis, moreover, proposes pastoral practices of spiritual, ethnic identity, and community formation that are biblically and theologically informed, contextual, and transformative in response to the needs and particularities of these congregations. In analyzing data from the “Other Latinos/as” this study thus provides a needed corrective and supplement to the widespread notion of a monolithic Latino theology of spirituality based on the Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban immigrant experiences. The thesis also aims to move the conversation about Latino Protestant spirituality beyond the common stereotypes which describe it as festive, family oriented, and emotive towards a more nuanced understanding of the religious practices of these communities.

This dissertation reassesses the impact of U.S. annexation of Arizona and New Mexico in 1848 by recovering the imposition of and resistance to the new national border and identities among Spanish-Mexican, mestiza, and Euro-American women from 1846 to 1941. I analyze the impact of U.S. annexation of Arizona and New Mexico on gender roles, ethnic identity, and cultural practices by focusing on the roles of the domestic space, food culture, and material culture in dividing and bringing together women across these ethnocultural groups. By exploring the political intent and consequences of quotidian choices, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of women in the daily and domestic negotiations over national and cultural borders during the territorial period (1850-1912) and the era of early statehood (1912-1941). Using English and Spanish-language sources, this dissertation argues that Euro-American and Spanish-Mexican women continuously used their homes, housekeeping, cultural customs, and foodways to define their new statuses in the region and negotiate the new cultural, physical, and national boundaries. Euro-Americans used their own and others’ cultural practices to maintain their whiteness and to construct Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indians as non-white and to define gender and class in the region. Simultaneously, Spanish-Mexican women negotiated the new physical, social, and cultural boundaries by asserting their cultural citizenship even though they were denied full citizenship. In the first three chapters, I study the U.S.-Mexico War and the territorial period (1846-1912) by analyzing the roles of material and food culture and the homespace in shaping each group’s constructions of whiteness, nationalism, and ethnic identity and in shaping the processes of cultural assimilation and resistance. I highlight how Euro-Americans used the newly established U.S.-Mexico border to “other” the people and practices they associated with Mexico or “savagery.” Additionally, I argue that Spanish-Mexican and Mexican American worked around gender and legal borders by engaging in trade, traveling across the international border, and inserting themselves in the political and legal activities of Euro-Americans to maintain their homespaces. In Chapters 4 and 5, I address how women across ethnocultural groups used cookbooks and historical memory to create their place in community, state, and national identities after Arizona and New Mexico were incorporated in 1912. Using literary and cultural studies approaches, I address the narrative spaces, such as cookbooks and pioneer histories, in which women across ethnocultural groups claimed a stake in the public memory and community identities. I argue that Euro-American women appropriated some Spanish cultural practices and celebrated the pioneer past while denying full citizenship to people of color. Simultaneously, I argue, Spanish-Mexican and American Indian women used cookbooks and/or oral histories to challenge narratives of their inferiority and to claim their cultural citizenship. This dissertation brings light to the persistent and continuous roles of women, the body, and the home in shaping daily politics in the region. By pushing at the edges of U.S.-Mexico borderlands history methodology to include gender studies methodology, this dissertation introduces the homespace and motherhood as gendered and raced contact zones that were sometimes used to enforce and at other times challenge U.S. territoriality. I argue that the domestic activities of women offer significant, new insight to the political narratives of settler-colonialism, gender roles, nationality, and race in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This dissertation moves away from overtly political acts to the seemingly “mundane” activities of cooking, dressing, and housekeeping to broaden our understanding of the connections between political behavior and cultural practices. These gendered negotiations provide a critical history of the intimate ways U.S. colonial efforts in the American Southwest played out and shaped the current dynamics of borderlands communities.

This dissertation argues that Texas, a border region influenced by the disparate cultures of Mexico and the southern and western United States, developed a tri-racial society, economy, and polity in which individuals were designated "Anglo," "Mexican," or "Negro." When the Irish, Germans, and Czechs immigrated to the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they did not fit comfortably into these categories. They were always viewed as white, but certain traits kept them from being considered Anglo. Language, religion, the use of alcohol, and a real and reputed willingness to ally themselves with their black and brown neighbors set them apart. The Know-Nothing movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction and an 1887 prohibition referendum brought them significant hostility, even occasional violence. Their experiences in 1887 sparked efforts to "become Anglo," shedding or downplaying their prior identities. Even in the early twentieth century, the idea of Irish, German, and Czech "races" remained current; such thinking contributed to harsh federal immigration restrictions in the 1920s. But in Texas, the extension of Jim Crow-style segregation to Mexican-Americans during that period also extended the Anglo designation to all those who were not black or brown. The two world wars furthered Anglicization, making it undesirable to be identified as German-American and giving all Texans a taste of the wider world. Between the wars, the discovery of oil on land owned by some Irish helped make them Anglo. In the post-World War II era, education reform and other developments sounded the death knell for crucial Czech and German language use, while Mexican-Americans began to seek the privileges of Anglo-ness as a reward for service to their country, without having to become Anglo. Revelations of Nazi atrocities helped change understandings of race and the concept of ethnicity gained in popularity. By about 1960, most Texans considered the Irish, Germans,and Czechs Anglo. During the next decade, as legal restrictions based on race were repealed and black and brown Texans embraced their racial identities, the Irish, Germans, and Czechs not only embraced their Anglo-ness but once again began to celebrate their ethnic attributes as well. / text

This study explores borderlands as a function of the imposition of the post-colonial state upon primary structures of identity, polity and social organisation which may be sub-state, national or trans-state in nature. This imposition, particularly in the postcolonial experience of Asia, manifests itself in incongruence between identities of nation and state, between authority and legitimacy, and between beliefs and systems, each of which is most acutely demonstrated in the dynamic borderlands where the competition for influence between non-state and state centres of political gravity is played out. The instability in borderlands is a product of the re-territorialisation of pre-state primary structures, and the state's efforts in accommodating, assimilating or suppressing these structures through a combination of militarisation, providing opportunities for greater political enfranchisement, and the structure of trans-borderland economic flows. The Pashtun tribes of the Afghan borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan are exhibiting a resurgence of autonomy from the state, as part of the re-territorialisation of the primary substructure of Pakhtunkhwa that underlies southern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. This phenomenon is localised, tribally driven, and replicated across the entirety of Pakhtunkhwa. It is a product of the pashtunwali mandated autonomy of zai from which every kor, killi and khel derives its security, and through the protection of which each is able to raise its nang, and is able to realise its position within the larger clan or tribe. Other examples of competition between postcolonial states and primary structures are the Kurdish experience in south-eastern Turkey and the experience of the Arab state. While manifesting significant peculiarities, all three cases - the Kurds, the Arabs and the Pashtuns - demonstrate that the current configuration of the postcolonial state system in Asia is a fragile construction, imposed upon enduring, pre-state primary structures which are resurgent through competition with the state.

The US-Mexico border divides the communities of Palomas, Chihuahua and Columbus, New Mexico, but they remain intimately linked. Both communities suffer from inadequate social services, poor public infrastructure, high unemployment and high poverty rates. To confront these challenges, Palomas and Columbus work together, sharing resources like hospitals, firefighters, and even schools. Palomas and Columbus also share another vital resource—groundwater. In the parched Chihuahuan desert, the communities depend on this groundwater as their sole water supply source, yet their aquifer is contaminated with arsenic and fluoride. Local governments acknowledged this contamination as early as the 1970s, but it was not until the 2000s that they received the needed reverse osmosis technology and water/wastewater infrastructure to ameliorate household exposure to water contamination. This thesis compares how Columbus and Palomas have addressed water insecurity over a twenty-year period from 1996-2016, using a 1996 study as the baseline (Tanski et al. 1998). New data include a household survey of 152 households, 60 semi-structured interviews, and participant observations of water practices collected during two months of fieldwork in the summer of 2016. The central research questions of this thesis are Q1) What causes household water insecurity on the US-Mexico border? and Q2) How can water policymakers and providers more equitably provide users with access to clean, reliable, and affordable drinking water? From a human development perspective, water security is defined as having an adequate supply of reliable and affordable water for a healthy life. This thesis uses a political ecological lens to more critically examine how water security connects to socio-political processes of water governance and power imbalances. Following Jepson (2014), this thesis argues that water (in)security is produced by problems in water access, water quality, and water affect (or water distress) and unfolds within a complex, hydrosocial landscape. Applying Jepson’s (2014) water security typology to Columbus and Palomas revealed that each local water utility adopted a distinct approach to addressing groundwater contamination, predicated on their financial and social resources, and structured by national and bi-national water policies as well as their institutional parameters. The survey found household water security has improved in terms of water access and reliability. But, centralized water filtration technology increased costs and reduced affordability in Columbus, while decentralized water filtration technology inadequately resolved household water supply contamination in Palomas. Thus, despite the technological improvements, households remain unevenly exposed to water contamination and costs. This raises concern about approaches to water security, which should be more finely attuned to water equity. Water equity means the rights to access clean water are more equitably distributed within the communities, and there is greater recognition/participation of community members in decision making on water management.

Human social interactions imbue the world with meaning, transforming abstract spaces into lived places. Given the digital conduits of much modern social interaction, online narratives increasingly affect material places. Yet the emerging glut of online information demands new methods of investigating place narratives at multiple scales. Drawing on novel geographic visualizations of the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of photographs of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands posted on the website Flickr, this study shows that online portrayals are 1) highly uneven in terms of distribution, visibility, and content, 2) fundamentally influenced by "real-world" geographies, 3) often culturally reductive, and 4) made to appear unduly exhaustive by the naturalizing visual slant of the internet as a medium of communication. These processes stand to influence how places are constructed in the information age, especially given the presence of "digital divides" that work against internet access for much of the world's population.

The present project explores the narrative construction of masculinities, violence, and nationalism in three U.S.-Mexico borderland novels written by U.S., Mexican, and Mexican-American writers: Caballero (1930s-40s, pub.1996) by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh; Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy; and Texas: La gran ladronería en el lejano norte (2012) by Carmen Boullosa. Through the scope of masculinity, gender, and (post)colonial studies, this project examines how these authors incorporate hegemonic masculine archetypes and their attendant forms of violence (physical, economic, and epistemic) so as to interrogate claims to identity and national belonging along the Texas-Mexico border, against the backdrop of war and U.S. imperialism. In their roles as builders and/or defenders of an expanding nation-state, the male characters studied here enact distinct forms of violence in order to normalize their positions of power and further encode their claims to political and cultural hegemony. Considered together, the texts studied here demonstrate how the intersection of nationalism, masculinity construction, and particular forms of violence converge within an Anglo hegemonic masculinity to the detriment of Mexicans, non-white borderland individuals, and women--all of whom stand at the periphery of this imagined national (male) community.

This thesis examines the interplay between regional, national and transnational dimensions of identity and language in the Danish and, to a lesser extent, the German minority communities of Sleswig. It also investigates the relationship between subjective and objective interpretations of minority membership. Obtaining data from a survey study carried out on 208 individuals from the Sleswigian minorities, this thesis maps out the composition of minority identity in the 21st century, whilst also using historical evidence as an explanation for the findings. The study shows that the minorities function as two closely-linked and supplementary groups to the national majorities. German language dominates most spheres in both minorities, yet bilingualism and code-switching are essential to minority life and defining group identity. Furthermore, whilst national identities are of a lesser importance to the minorities today than regional or transnational identities, minority identity is still nonetheless hybridised from its roots in the national cultures and languages of Denmark and Germany. The minorities are thus able to "cherry-pick" social, economic, political and linguistic capital from both nations. I argue that although minority identity and language are constantly under negotiation, legitimising a claim to minority identity by way of subjective will is nevertheless juxtaposed with meeting certain objective criteria expected by members of the communities, such as bilingualism, ancestral and geographical links to the region, an understanding of regional history and shared political beliefs. The study seeks originality by mapping the interaction between the regional, national and transnational dimensions of identity in the Danish and German minorities and by examining the influence of social media on identity expression in Sleswig. It also provides a fresh critical understanding of the impact of language on minority identity formation across recent generations in Sleswig. Finally, the thesis proposes a theoretical framework for the study of hybrid and dual minority identities, rooted in theories from nationalism studies, sociology, anthropology and sociolinguistics.

This project studies the paradoxical juxtaposition of the modern nation-state's guarantee of life and security to its citizenry, along with the spectacular (encounter killings, torture chambers and cells) and banal (border control practices, population policies) forms through which it exercises the power over life and death in the sphere of everyday life in particular borderland areas. I argue that a study of exceptional locales like India's eastern borderlands elaborates the paradox of state sovereignty in two ways: first, it illustrates that so-called "margins," like colonies and borderlands, are necessary for the institution of modern state sovereignty, and second, it enables a critical scrutiny of the function of forms of violence as essential tools of modern governmentality. India's eastern borderlands are a crucial locale for such an inquiry because they lie at the crossroads of the three area-studies formations of South, Southeast and East Asia. The institutionalization of the official borders of the nation-states that rim this region--India, China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Bhutan--are comparatively recent historical developments. Specters of pre-nation-statist spatial connections still survive in the region, and often come into conflict with modern state technologies such as citizenship laws and statutes regulating cross-border socioeconomic contacts among people. The central focus of my project is on post-1980 Anglophone and local language literary fictions by Amitav Ghosh, Siddhartha Deb, Parag Das and Raktim Xarma. These fictions demonstrate how the eastern borderlands are figured in popular Indian discourse as a "state of nature" that occupy a position of being both inside the rationalized territorial body of the nation-state and outside the regime of normalized law and order. Focusing on figures as diverse as bureaucrats, army officials, journalists, guerrillas and refugees (among others), they show how socio-historical changes over a longue durée, and the practices and policies employed by the state apparatus, coalesce to produce new modalities of subjectivity and politics in these zones of exception in the Indian nation-state.

Examining an Atlanta area Tibetan Buddhist center as a symbolic and imagined borderland space, I investigate the ways that meaning is created through competing narratives of spirituality and “culture.” Drawing from theories of borderlands, cross-cultural interaction, narratives, authenticity and material culture, I analyze the ways that non-Tibetan community members of the Drepung Loseling center navigate through the interplay of culture and spirituality and how this interaction plays into larger discussions of cultural adaptation, appropriation and representation. Although this particular Tibetan Buddhist center is only a small part of Buddhism’s existence in the United States today, discourses on authenticity, representation and mediated understanding at the Drepung Loseling center provide an example of how ethnic, social, and national boundaries may be negotiated through competing – and overlapping – narratives of culture.