This dissertation examines how Guatemalan converts transformed missionary Protestantism into a locally contextualized religion in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Using archival materials from local religious groups and public archives in Guatemala alongside missionary documents from the United States, this research identifies how converts adopted certain missionary teachings but reinterpreted or rejected others. This selective application not only altered the definition of Protestantism in Guatemala but also affected the early growth of the movement by creating contextualized forms of Protestantism that attracted more interest than foreign versions. The first section of the dissertation analyzes the theologies and goals that early missionaries brought to Guatemala and explains the intramural conflicts that created the first Protestant communities in the country. Between 1882 and 1921, five North American Protestant denominations and several independent missionaries entered Guatemala, each with particular ideas about how to improve the country both spiritually and materially. This internal diversity provided new converts with the ability to choose between multiple versions of Protestantism, but more importantly it also taught them how to carve out their own space between imported religious ideologies. The second section of the dissertation analyzes how local believers reinterpreted Protestantism within those spaces by pursuing four important areas of innovation: theological primitivism, Pentecostalism, political involvement, and nationalism. Despite protests from many foreign missionaries, between 1920 and 1944 numerous Guatemalan Protestants adopted variations of these four themes in attempts to create a culturally and socially relevant religious product. As new converts opted for these new local communities over missionary-led options, these four themes became defining hallmarks of Guatemalan Protestantism, which by the twenty-first century was practiced by one-third of the country’s population. This dissertation argues that these contextualized challenges to missionary ideas in the early twentieth-century made Protestantism an attractive local product in Guatemala and sparked the movement’s growth. It also demonstrates how poor and working class Guatemalans in the early twentieth century used Protestantism as a tool to participate in national conversations about race, gender, and class. / text

"Re-centering Central America: Women Writers Undisplaced" endeavors to unpack and unravel the meaning, genealogy and implications of the US's patriarchal relationship with Central America, formative of a jumble of misconceptions of "otherness" on a global scale. This legacy is mirrored in the region's cultural production. Central American discourse itself has long ignored or marginalized "other" subjectivities. I trace a genealogy of Central American narrative discursivities by women to interrogate questions of female subjectivity and the inadequacy of hegemonic identitary formulations that often elide gender, ethnicity, and other regulatory trajectories in subject-formation. My dissertation is the first project in the US to examine how an undercurrent in which colonially derived social relations underwrite contemporary Central America is interrogated and re-visioned in literature produced by women. I focus on six Central American authors: Yolanda Oreamuno (Costa Rica), Claribel Alegría (El Salvador), Carmen Naranjo (Costa Rica), Rosario Aguilar (Nicaragua), Gloria Guardia (Panamá), and Jacinta Escudos (El Salvador). No systematic study has looked at how literary techniques and representations by these authors articulate a literary counter-statement to the patriarchal legacy informing Central American modernity between 1949 and the present, as well as to traditional formulations of subordinate subjectivities in which norms, rhetorics and assumptions of machismo and social exclusion of women inhabit and still animate the US's understanding of its inhabitants. My dissertation tracks the continuity between these authors' work to establish a problematization of sovereign subjectivity by refiguring the nature of the speech act as in flux, so as to eliminate authoritativeness and open up space for contestatary speech and agency. Judith Butler establishes that agency is achieved when the subordinated subject expropriates the "sovereign conceit" of the speech act, revealing discourses capable of destabilizing and even dismantling the epistemologies of the so-called "sovereign subject." By establishing a broad definition of sovereignty as any identitary construct that presupposes integral subjectivity or that attempts to impose such myths on subordinate subjects, I analyze the implications of these authors' narratives in destabilizing and revealing the farce of sovereign subjectivity. / text

This qualitative study addresses the interrelation of residency status, ethnic identity formation and schooling among young children of immigrants from Mexico and Central America in mixed legal status families in Central Texas. Through critical case studies, the researcher worked with Latino children of immigrants and undocumented immigrant mothers. The dissertation examines the following question: What is the interconnection between immigration experiences, residency status, and ethnic identity for children in mixed status families from Mexico and Central America? Informed by identity formation theories, Critical Race Theory, LatCrit theory and Chicana Feminist epistemology, this study shows how undocumented immigrant mothers support the development of an ethnic identity development in their children. A reason to work towards understanding identity formation among children of Latino ancestry is to open a space where their unique experiences are valued just as much as those of mainstream students. Latinos in the United States are not a homogenous group; we have diverse social, cultural, racial, and linguistic backgrounds. Schools and communities have inadvertently overlooked Latino children of immigrants by classifying them with the 1.5 and 2nd generation Mexican American students, but this classification does not acknowledge their unique needs and their particular familial experiences. This study also brings to light the experiences of undocumented immigrant mothers as important to the analysis of the phenomenon of immigration itself. This project is relevant to the growing field of immigration studies, education, educational administration, and anthropology of education, among other fields because it concentrated on young children ages 7-10, what the researcher considered an under researched population. The intention of this research is to disrupt monovocal, discriminatory discourses about Latino immigrants. Preliminary findings suggest the need to reframe Latino children of immigrants as individuals with rich, complex lives composed of different elements such as legal status, English/Spanish languages, immigration experiences/traumas, cultural traditions, and family composition. We need to work at the intersections of these different dimensions of identity and experience as well as to consider how each aspect is relevant for the education of children of immigrants of Latino descent. / text

The topic of my dissertation is the architectural symbolism of the Maya ballcourt. The typical Mesoamerican ballcourt is a sunken playing surface that is situated between two parallel mounds that form a cleft in the earth, resembling the cleft Mountain of Creation. In fact, the ballcourt was an architectural analog of the Mountain of Creation and they shared a number of associations. In Chapter 1 I discuss previous research on the ballgame pertinent to my arguments. Chapter 2 is an analysis of a particular ballgame between a bird and a deer that I interpret as metaphorical of the hunt, sacrifice, and the vision quest. Chapter 3 is a summary of the concept of the sacred mountain in various locations around the world with an emphasis on Central America. In Chapter 4 the discussion focuses on the pattern as it appears in its most complete form at Y axchilan. The connection between dance and the cleft in the Mountain of Creation is analyzed in Chapter 5. First Father and his importance regarding creation, the ballgame, and the ballcourt is the emphasis of Chapter 6. Elements of the pattern as they appear at Copan and Piedras Negras is the topic of Chapter 7. Within Chapter 8 I discuss elements of the pattern as they appear outside the Maya area at Teotihuacan, El Tajin, Tenochtitlan, and in various central Mexican codices. I conclude that the association between the ballcourt and the cleft Mountain of Creation, which began at the Olmec site of La Venta, permeated the cosmology of later civilizations, with the Maya serving as the prime example. Elements of this cosmo-political pattern were so widespread as to make it abundantly clear that this overall pattern served as the ideological foundation of Mesoamerican civilization from the time of the Olmec until the coming of the Spaniards. / text

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Guatemala's Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) and the Asociacion de Mujeres Nicaraguenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza (AMNLAE) in Nicaragua exemplify the resurgence of social movements arising from the turmoil in Central America. They are female collective agents pursuing the self-defined interests of their membership. Via humanitarian activism, the GAM struggles to locate the desaparecidos, while AMNLAE exercises institutional activism as a means to incorporate women and promote gender-specific interests. Women in both groups became active to protect "practical gender interests" and, as a result, women's level of consciousness is growing but the acquisition of a gender awareness does not necessarily follow political conscientization. The growing level of political participation and consciousness provides the women with training to become active and efficacious participants in the dynamics of their country.

A central issue in climate change research is to identify what species will be most affected by variations in temperature, precipitation or CO2 and via which underlying mechanisms. Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) have been used to address questions of habitat shifts, extinctions and changes in carbon and nutrient cycling. However, DGVMs have been criticized for assuming full migration and using the most generic of plant functional types (PFTs) to describe vegetation cover. My doctoral research addresses both of these concerns. In the first study, I added two new tropical PFTs to an existing regional model (LPJ-GUESS) to improve vegetation representation in Central America. Although there was an improvement in the representation of some biomes such as the pine-oak forests, LPJ-GUESS was still unable to capture the distribution of arid ecosystems. The model representations of fire, soil, and processes unique to desert vegetation are discussed as possible explanations. The remaining three chapters deal with the assumption of full migration, where plants can arrive at any location regardless of distance or physical barriers. Using LPJ-GUESS, I imposed migration limitations by using fat-tailed seed dispersal kernels. I used three temperate tree species with different life history strategies to test the new dispersal functionality. Simulated migration rates for Acer rubrum (141 m year-1) and Pinus rigida (76 m year-1) correspond well to pollen and genetic reconstructed rates. However, migration rates for Tsuga canadensis (85 m year-1) were considerably slower than historical rates. A sensitivity analysis showed that maturation age is the most important parameter for determining rates of spread, but it is the dispersal kernel which determines if there is any long distance dispersal or not. The final study demonstrates how northerly refugia populations could have impacted landscape recolonization following the retreat of the last glacier. Using three species with known refugia (Acer rubrum, Fagus grandifolia, Picea glauca), colonization rates were faster with a northerly refugia population present. The number of refugia locations also had a positive effect on landscape recolonization rates, which was most pronounced when populations were separated. The results from this thesis illustrate the improvements made in vegetation-climate models, giving us increasing confidence in the quality of future climate change predictions.

A central issue in climate change research is to identify what species will be most affected by variations in temperature, precipitation or CO2 and via which underlying mechanisms. Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) have been used to address questions of habitat shifts, extinctions and changes in carbon and nutrient cycling. However, DGVMs have been criticized for assuming full migration and using the most generic of plant functional types (PFTs) to describe vegetation cover. My doctoral research addresses both of these concerns. In the first study, I added two new tropical PFTs to an existing regional model (LPJ-GUESS) to improve vegetation representation in Central America. Although there was an improvement in the representation of some biomes such as the pine-oak forests, LPJ-GUESS was still unable to capture the distribution of arid ecosystems. The model representations of fire, soil, and processes unique to desert vegetation are discussed as possible explanations. The remaining three chapters deal with the assumption of full migration, where plants can arrive at any location regardless of distance or physical barriers. Using LPJ-GUESS, I imposed migration limitations by using fat-tailed seed dispersal kernels. I used three temperate tree species with different life history strategies to test the new dispersal functionality. Simulated migration rates for Acer rubrum (141 m year-1) and Pinus rigida (76 m year-1) correspond well to pollen and genetic reconstructed rates. However, migration rates for Tsuga canadensis (85 m year-1) were considerably slower than historical rates. A sensitivity analysis showed that maturation age is the most important parameter for determining rates of spread, but it is the dispersal kernel which determines if there is any long distance dispersal or not. The final study demonstrates how northerly refugia populations could have impacted landscape recolonization following the retreat of the last glacier. Using three species with known refugia (Acer rubrum, Fagus grandifolia, Picea glauca), colonization rates were faster with a northerly refugia population present. The number of refugia locations also had a positive effect on landscape recolonization rates, which was most pronounced when populations were separated. The results from this thesis illustrate the improvements made in vegetation-climate models, giving us increasing confidence in the quality of future climate change predictions.

Chultuns have served as a source of curious debate for most Maya archaeological projects. Although there is great speculation about the function(s) served by the chultuns, few theories are concrete. This study attempted to determine the specific use of chultuns as relevant to this particular site. During the 1989 field season at Caracol excavations were carried out in six chultuns. A team composed of one student and several workman were assigned to investigate each group. At least one test pit was placed within each group to search for other diagnostic material to compare with the artifacts recovered from the chultun. The data collected indicates that the chultuns of Caracol were primarily related to a burial function. However, the possibility cannot be ruled out that a different function was intended for these features and that they were only used as burial chambers when they were about to be abandoned. / Department of Anthropology