No description available.

abstract: La frontera entre México y Estados Unidos es un territorio que se ha conceptualizado y construido por el centralismo mexicano y por el discurso chicano dominante: el de Borderlands. Estos dos focos equidistantes establecen sus perspectivas a partir del contacto que la región fronteriza tiene con los Estados Unidos en términos de intercambios económicos y culturales. La tradición de definir la zona fronteriza se inicia a partir de 1848 con el Tratado de Guadalupe Hidalgo. Más tarde, dicha región estaría en indiferencia por su distancia geográfica con el centro mexicano, excepto durante la Revolución mexicana. Sin embargo, la región fronteriza empieza a recibir gran atención hacia finales del Siglo XX, cuando nuevas formas de intercambio económico entre México y Estados Unidos se empiezan a desarrollar. La frontera, entonces experimenta un crecimiento económico que se refleja, a su vez, en el resurgimiento y crecimiento de la cultura fronteriza. El antropólogo cultural, Nestor García Canclini intentó definir la cultura fronteriza al analizar el uso del idioma inglés en Tijuana. En sus estudios, tanto Tijuana: la casa de toda la gente (1989) como Culturas híbridas: Cómo entrar y salir de la modernidad (1992), García Canclini sostiene que la frontera es un espacio de hibridación cultural. Por otro lado, las teorías dominantes dentro del campo chicano definen la frontera en términos metafísicos. Para Gloria Anzaldúa, el espacio fronterizo es el Borderlands: un área geográfica en donde los paradigmas de la psicología del individuo están en constante conflicto. Considerando estos antecedentes como punto de partida, esta investigación se enfoca en el estudio de la cultura fronteriza como múltiples universos de signos que entran en contacto unos con otros. Tal como lo establece Iury Lotman en su estudio teórico La semiosfera (1996), una semiosfera es un espacio delimitado por una frontera que, a su vez, tiene la función de traducir información de otras semiosferas. De manera que dicho concepto se muestra adecuado para analizar El gran preténder (1992) de Luis Humberto Crosthwaite y Berlín 77 (y otros relatos) (2003) de Carlos Adolfo Gutiérrez Vidal. En última instancia, al establecer los espacios fronterizos como universos culturales (semiosferas) se devela el nivel de contacto entre éstas, especialmente entre las semiosferas mexicana/americana y la fronteriza. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2011

abstract: This dissertation examines pro-immigrants' rights activism and advocacy among middle-class White women in and around Phoenix, Arizona, in order to analyze these activists' understandings and enactments of their racialized and gendered citizenship. This project contributes a wealth of qualitative data regarding the operation of race, gender, class, (dis)ability, sexuality, and community in the daily lives and activism of White women pro-immigrants' rights advocates, collected largely through formal and informal interviewing in conjunction with in-depth participant observation. Using a feminist, intersectional analytical lens, and drawing upon critical race studies, Whiteness studies, and citizenship theory, this dissertation ultimately finds that White women face thornily difficult ethical questions about how to wield the rights entailed in their citizenship and their White privilege on behalf of marginalized Latinx non-citizens. This project ultimately argues that the material realities and racial consequences of being a White woman participating in (im)migrants’ rights work in the borderlands means living with the contradiction that one’s specific and intersectionally mediated status as a White woman citizen contributes to and further reifies the gendered system of White supremacy that functions to the direct detriment of the (im)migrants one seeks to assist, while simultaneously endowing one with the advantages and privileges of Whiteness, which together furnish the social capital necessary to challenge that same system of their behalf. The dissertation contends that White women committed to pro-(im)migrants’ rights advocacy and antiracism writ large must reckon with the source of their gendered and racialized citizenship and interrogate to what complicated and unforeseen ends they wield the Master’s tools against the Master’s house. In doing so, the project makes the case that White women's lives, as well as their experiences of citizenship and activism, are inherently and fundamentally intersectional and should be analyzed as such by scholars in Women's and Gender Studies. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Women and Gender Studies 2020

This dissertation seeks to answer two primary questions stemming from the war between the United States and Mexico: 1) What methods did the United States Army Quartermaster Department employ during the war to achieve their goals of supporting armies in the field? 2) In executing these methods, what lasting impact did the presence of the Quartermaster Department leave on the Lower Río Grande borderland, specifically South Texas during the interwar period from 1848-1860? In order to obtain a complete understanding of what the Department did during the war, a discussion of the creation, evolution, and methodology of the Quartermaster Department lays the foundation for effective analysis of the department's wartime methods and post-war influence. It is equally essential to understand the history of South Texas prior to the Mexican War under the successive control of Spain, Mexico and the United States and how that shaped the wartime situation. The wartime discussion of Department operations is divided into three chapters, reflecting each of the main theaters and illustrating the respective methods and influence within each area. The final two chapters address the impact of the war on South Texas and how the presence of the Quartermaster Department on the Río Grande served as a catalyst for economic, social, and political changes in this borderland region. Combining primary source analysis of wartime logistics with a synthesis of divergent military and social histories of the Lower Río Grande borderland demonstrates the influence of the Department on South Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. The presence of the Quartermaster Department created an economic environment that favored Anglo-American entrepreneurs, allowing them to grow in wealth and begin to supplant the traditional Tejano/Mexican-American power structure in South Texas. Despite remaining an ethnic minority, Anglos used this situational advantage to dominate the region politically. This outcome shaped South Texas for decades to follow.

San Luis Obispo, California was a violent place in the 1850s with numerous murders and lynchings in staggering proportions. This thesis studies the rise of violence in SLO, its causation, and effects. The vigilance committee of 1858 represents the culmination of the violence that came from sweeping changes in the region, stemming from its earliest conquest by the Spanish. The mounting violence built upon itself as extensive changes took place. These changes include the conquest of California, from the Spanish mission period, Mexican and Alvarado revolutions, Mexican-American War, and the Gold Rush. The history of the county is explored until 1863 to garner an understanding of the borderlands violence therein.

<p>We all embody various intersecting visible and non-visible social identities. Those intersecting identities can place some individuals at the margins or borderlands of their other identities, causing dissonance and perhaps threatening their sense of belonging to a community. Compounding potential identity dissonances, a learner finding their fit in engineering will likely face engineering attributes such as meritocracy, heteronormativity, and a climate that prioritizes technical feats and dismisses social phenomena as outside the scope of engineering. These interactions can negatively impact their belonging, persistence, and degree</p> <p>completion.</p> <p><br></p> <p>However, completing an arduous engineering degree at the intersection of multiple minoritized identities is feasible. In my dissertation, I use three studies to investigate how gay Latinx engineers navigate the borderlands of their intersecting identities. Along the way, I explore how they bridge the borderlands between those and their engineering identities as I examine how they manifest and leverage their assets at this identity intersection. Initial findings suggest that learners at the borderlands of multiple minoritized identities are keenly aware of social identities and cope by leveraging some of their powerful identities (i.e., masculinity, math, and science identities) to increase their sense of belongingness, proving they are successful and valuable members of humankind.</p>

Since the end of the Second World War, scholars have attempted to understand why Fascist Italy chose to adopt the racial laws in 1938. For sixteen years, Benito Mussolini rejected the existence of antisemitism in Italy, leading many to assert that the antisemitic program was a foreign import. The rise of Nazi Germany, expansion of Fascist Italy's colonial empire, and the desire to create the new fascist man are generally believed to be the main factors that pushed Italian fascism towards a racial program. Yet these factors do not fully explain the radical shift in Fascist Italy's approach to its Jewish minority. This dissertation argues that the turn towards official racism should also take into consideration the development of fascism's other long-standing minority program. Beginning in 1923, the Fascist government instituted policies to "Italianize" the Germanic and Slavic ethno-linguistic minority communities of South Tyrol (Venezia Tridentina) and the Adriatic (Venezia Giulia), known as the allogeni. To "make Italians" of the allogeni the Fascist government stripped them of their linguistic, cultural and political rights, and attempted to absorb them into the national community. However, by the end of the 1920s, Fascist officials began to question whether the assimilation of these ethno-linguistic Others was sufficient or even desirable. I argue that the failures of Italianization led to the delegitimization of assimilation - the foundation upon which Jewish inclusion had been built. The decline of assimilation was an important precursor to the rise of fascism's racial program. This dissertation posits that the borderland Italianization program and racial laws were different phases of the Fascist "redemptive struggle," aimed at redeeming the Italian people and nation through their unification in both being and spirit. The borderland Italianization programs also established some of the methods and procedures that would be adopted for the implementation of the racial laws.

This thesis utilises district court records from the three judicial districts of Hammerdal, Offerdal, and Undersåker to shed light on Saamis’ presence in north-western Jämtland during the seventeenth century. The research question posed is how encounters with the local communities shaped the Saamis’ situation during a period of emerging colonial mores and contributes to the discussion on how encounters with others impacted the situation for the Saami in early modern Sweden. The theoretical framework adopts the concepts of borderlands, concurrences, and settler colonialism to understand the manifold of encounters that shaped the situation for the Saami, acknowledging the possibility that the encounters could be contradictory while also understanding them as shaped within a context of power asymmetries. Contrary to the northern lappmarks, this thesis shows that the Saamis in north-western Jämtland were deprived of representation at the local courts, affecting their influence in local self-governance and administration of justice. Moreover, by not only focusing on Saamis’ encounters with the representatives of the Crown and the Church but also with the non-Saamis who resided in the local communities, this thesis concludes that the Saamis’ situation was shaped by concurring and conflicting encounters, encompassing not only coercion and confrontation but also cooperation and coexistence.

No description available.

The current study was conducted with the purpose of investigating what influence a pandemic may have on the everyday lives and border perceptions of people living on a border, and also how such a change might influence the social construction of that border. To fulfill this purpose, focus was set on the border between northern Sweden and Finland during the border-defining Covid-19 pandemic. Six border landers and cross-border commuters from both sides of the Sweden-Finland border were therefore interviewed during the tail-end of the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden. This collected material was subject to thematic analysis and organized temporally to depict how behavior and border perceptions changed depending on what stage of the pandemic was active: pre-covid, mid-covid, or post-covid. While the pre-covid border was discussed positively, characterized as imperceivable, and as enabling of cross-border practices, things changed when the border manifested, and mid-covid times started. During this time, the border instead became a source for distinction, resulting in prejudices, and behavior became more restricted. During post-covid, the informants reacted positively to the disappearance of the border, and the return to the normal, although it was not quite the same normal as before. The main finding of the study was that the impercievability and manifestation of the border were two counteracting states which influenced its assigned meaning. The importance of this study for the field of sociology comes from having investigated how pandemics and shutting down a border can disrupt regular social life and cross-border practices, thereby influencing the socially constructed meaning of that same border.