This thesis explores Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness and its relation to Mexican American performance and poster art. It examines how the traditional conceptions of mestizo identity were redefined by Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera in an attempt to eradicate oppression through a change of consciousness. Anzaldua’s conceptions are then applied to Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s performance art discussing the intricacies and complexities of his performances as examples of mestiza consciousness. This thesis finally analyzes various Mexican American posters in relation to both Anzaldúa and Gomez-Peña’s art works. It demonstrates that the similarities in the artist’s treatment of hybridity illustrate a progressive change in worldview, thus exhibit mestiza consciousness.

Working at the nexus of environmental, cultural, and Borderlands history, my research, "Smoke and Mirrors: Smelter Pollution and the Cultural Construction of Environmental Narratives in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," follows the evolving late 20th-century debates over transnational smelter pollution in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. The region has pivoted around copper mining since the late 19th century and by the mid-1900s, the transnational copper industry, concentrated in Douglas, Arizona, and Cananea and Nacozari, Sonora, coupled with the prevalence of maquiladoras in Agua Prieta, produced a severe air pollution problem. In reaction to environmental damage and public health problems, concerned citizens on both sides of the border organized to legally enforce existing environmental regulations and improve local conditions. The ensuing struggle over local air quality in the small towns of Douglas, Cananea, and Nacozari--coined the "Gray Triangle"--quickly escalated to national environmental and economic conversations, and resulted in international cooperation and legislation.

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.

This study examines the manifold ways in which fifteen women of Mexican heritage actively participated in the secular, spiritual, and social spheres to improve conditions for themselves and their community in Douglas, Arizona during the first half of the twentieth century. Using interviews, newspapers, US census reports, ephemera, and secondary sources, it highlights the women's agency and the various ways they employed critical and innovative approaches to break through the economic, personal, and structural borders imposed by a corporate and industrial smelter town created by Phelps-Dodge and Company and the Calumet and Arizona Company. In this dissertation I ask, and seek to answer questions such as: why did these women of Mexican heritage choose to settle in Douglas; why did those who were born there remain; and what did this newly established town offer the women in this study that perhaps more established cities in the southwestern United States did not? Because Mexicanas are invisible in the archives and in the historical chronicles of Douglas Arizona, this dissertation employs an interdisciplinary methodology designed to highlight their actions and their contributions to their communities, city, and nation. Influenced by Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldua, I seek to recover history, and what she refers to as la facultad, by relying on the words of the women and their families to offer answers and insight. Despite the challenges of living in the borderlands in a time of limited access to economic and social resources, these women's contributions to history confirm that Mexicanas were not passive subalterns.

"The Mestizo Consciousness" is a research based on the work of the Mexican-American researcher Glória Anzaldúa and her definition of people who live between the borders of the dualism of society, whether they are borders of race, physical borders between countries, moral borders or political, linguistic or sexual borders. By first analysing the place of the mestizo, we will follow the development of this "non-place" from Alzaldúa onwards and the way in which it affects the individual and society. To do this, we will draw on the thought and experience of the authors we have called upon, such as Alzandúa herself, Derrida in "The Monolingualism of the Other" and the life and philosophy of the indigenous Yanomami people, starting with Davi Kopenawa's "The Fall of Heaven". We will show that dualism has been and continues to be present in our society, how it directly affects the life and philosophy of each individual and we will think about the empowerment of those who are outside this model, which passes less through the recognition of this dualism, than through the affirmation, acceptance and admiration of each characteristic that defines the individual in his or her difference. KEY WORDS: ANZALDÚA, DERRIDA, KOPENAWA, METIZA, CONSCIOUSNESS, DECOLONISATION, BORDERLANDS

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Thesis advisor: Devin O. Pendas / This dissertation studies the cooperation and competition amongst various right-wing paramilitaries in the southeastern portions of German-speaking Europe. My work overturns stereotypical, teleological narratives that presume any far-fight German extremism inherently meant “the rise of Nazism.” Instead, I reveal a complex mosaic of far-right paramilitary men, whose allegiances to and rivalries with each other oscillated with shifting situational contexts across one of the most contested and chaotic borders in interwar Europe. Consequently, my research results open new possibilities for conceptualizing volatile twentieth-century borderlands as stemming not just from international conflicts but also from intra-national infighting. Paramilitary men on both sides of the Austro-Bavarian border considered themselves German, but they conceived of their “Germanness” in very specific terms: southeastern, Catholic, and Alpine in contrast to the northern, Protestant, and Prussian variant of Germandom. How did right-wing groups blend greater German nationalism with their southeastern German regionalism? The hybridization of these two loyalties created an intoxicating affective brew that brought together right-wing agents on both sides of this border in fraternal solidarity but also instigated fratricidal violence, all as these German groups sought to settle the question of what it meant to be German. National identities founded on southeastern regional impulses thus formed a constitutive contradiction of greater German nationalism. The intersectionality of regionalism and nationalism generated internecine right-wing violence, as these groups disagreed over how to implement disparate versions of unification. The result was twenty years of street brawls, assassinations, terror, Putsch attempts, mobilizations, and transborder smuggling of munitions, troops, and funds. This region was thus a paragon of borderlands conflict. The crux was that it was an intra-national borderland: to these activists, national union should have been so simple, making it all the more frustrating when it eluded them. The assumed common nationality meant any perceived dissident was not simply a political opponent but something far worse: a traitor. Paradoxically, the supposedly “agreed-upon” national identity exacerbated borderland chaos and violence. Historians of Eastern and Central Europe have falsely conflated borderlands with spaces between nations in which multi-national populations struggle among each other for hegemony. My work overturns such assumptions by offering the first analysis of European borderlands violence stemming from a perceived communal nationality. This project thus serves as a needed corrective to the scholarship, offering a richly informed regional analysis with significant interventions in the broader fields of borderlands and right-wing extremism. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

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