D.L. A 582-2007

Through the analysis of Judy Baca's mural, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, Baca's reevaluates muralism to create her revisionist take on the Mexican tradition of muralism. The piece combines different cultural and historical perspectives that convey the diversity of California, and bring people together through shared experiences. In addition to portraying the histories of minority races, ethnicities, religions and sexuality, the piece was created by a diverse team of community members who each contributed their own viewpoints to the piece. Unlike the traditional practice of muralism, Baca works with community members to create a mural that includes a varied sense of identity so as to facilitate social change and foster community.

In this thesis, I am interested in transnational feminist scholarship and dialogue. Through close readings of Helena Maria Viramontes's texts, I place her writing in conversation with several transnational feminist scholars and themes. I begin with home, a frequently discussed topic within transnational feminism, as the experiences of diasporic and migrant populations challenge the notion of home. I locate the multiple homes presented in Viramontes's texts, arguing that these homes are unreliable spaces for their residents. I then consider male characters and masculinity in Viramontes's stories, as these men significantly influence the homes of women. In Viramontes's later texts, some of these characters support the women in their lives, as well as embrace the multiplicity of masculinity. I also explore invisibility and hypervisibility, two themes which figure prominently within transnational feminism and Viramontes's texts. Viramontes makes visible women, workers, and youth, challenging their invisibility and hypervisibility. In my analysis, I include Viramontes's two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Their Dogs Came With Them (2007), as well as two short stories, "Growing" (1983) and "The Jumping Bean" (1992). By analyzing these works, which were published over a period of twenty four years, we can more intricately see Viramontes's exploration of transnational feminist themes.

The 1960s and 1970s represent a pivotal period in US history and there is a growing body of critical research into how the massive changes of the era (re)shaped institutions and individuals. This dissertation furthers that research by focusing its attention on the creation of the Chicano Indian American Student Union (CIASU) at The University of Iowa in 1971 from an Interdisciplinary perspective. CIASU as the subject of study offers a site that is rich in context and content; this dissertation examines the ways in which a small group of minority students was able to create an ethnically defined cultural center in the Midwest where none had existed prior and does this by looking at the intersection of ethnic identity and student activism. Covering the years 1968-1972, this work provides a "before" and "after" snapshot of life for Chicano/a and American Indian students at Iowa and does so utilizing only historical documents as a way of better understanding how much more research needs to be done. I explore the way in which various social movements such as the Anti-War Movement, the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Women's Movement and the cause of the United Farm Workers influenced founding members Nancy V. "Rusty" Barceló, Ruth Pushetonequa and Antonio Zavala within their Midwestern situatedness as ethnic beings. My dissertation draws from and builds upon the work of Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera by interrogating the ways in which CIASU and its "House" acted as a self-defined "borderlands" for the Chicano/a and American Indian students. I examine the ways in which the idea of "borderlands" is not limited to any one geographical area but is one defined by context and necessity. Also interrogated is how performativity of ethnic identity worked as both cultural comfort and challenge to the students themselves as well as to the larger University community through the use of dress and language, especially "Spanglish". This dissertation examines the activism of CIASU within the University context and out in the Chicano/a and American Indian communities as liberatory practice and working to affect change. Specifically, presenting alternatives for minority communities through actions such as Pre-School classes and performances of El Teatro Zapata and Los Bailadores Zapatista and recruitment of Chicano/a and American Indian high school students. On campus, activism through publication is examined; El Laberinto as the in-house newsletter provides insight into the day-to-day concerns of the students and Nahuatzen, a literary magazine with a wider audience that focused on the larger political questions of the day, taking a broader view of the challenges of ethnic identity as a way to educate and inform. This dissertation views CIASU as a "bridge"; the students worked to create alliances between themselves and the larger University population as well as Chicano/a and American Indian communities. With the recent fortieth anniversary of CIASU it is evident the founding members' wish "to preserve our heritage and our identity" (Daily Iowan, November, 1970) continues and the organization they founded, now known as the Latino Native American Cultural Center, still serves the needs of Latino and American Indian students at Iowa.

As systems of accountability and efficiency continue to permeate public education institutions it is important that research engage the various factors that embody how these systems come to be, whose knowledge gains access to informing their designs, and whose interests are served. Texas has long been recognized as a testing ground for such policy designs, although researchers’ points of departure on such systems have solely focused on the outcomes of these policies in practice. Research on the political construction and discourses that define the underlying goals of these systems continue to be ignored by researchers. Analyses of Texas-inspired federal policies have also predominantly taken an outcomes-based approach, or at most have had episodic engagements with political processes peering down from the balcony to observe the interaction of the obvious actors. To this end, this three-year ethnographic study conceptually and methodologically engages the various dimensions—such as race, class, history, interest, power, and agency—that embody the political lineage of Texas’ new system of Accountability and College Readiness across various contexts. This study further contributes to the dearth of literature that examines the role of research and university researchers in policy debates, and the limits and possibilities of politically engaged scholars in such processes. / text

Through fifty-three in-depth interviews with activists, community members, immigrants, students, and allies, this dissertation research explores the Austin Immigrant Rights Coalition (AIRC), a nonprofit immigrant rights organization in Austin, Texas that formed as a response to the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (H.R. 4437) in the spring of 2006. Three layers of questions guide this research: (1) How did AIRC emerge from the established organizations and activist networks in Austin, Texas? (2) What did AIRC do after the 2006 marches and what is its relationship with organizations in Austin? (3) What are the different ways AIRC has attempted to mobilize Latino(a) and pro-immigrant activism? My dissertation demonstrates that the 2006 mobilizations in Austin, Texas were part of a concerted effort by non-profit organizations, grassroots groups, activists, allies, and college and high school students. Amongst these many active participants, Latinas took a lead. The prominence of the work of similar coalitions throughout the U.S. during La Primavera Latina of 2006 and the lack of prominent male leadership suggests that across the nation, as in Austin, a new type of organizational lead is emerging in the Immigrant Rights Movement (Ramírez Perales-Ramos, Arellano 2010). The 2006 mobilizations reveal a different type of leadership, not an absence of one. In Austin, Latinas took on various leadership roles to move the AIRC forward during and beyond the 2006 marches. This dissertation explores the significance of new leadership, a process approach to leadership which I term “doing leadership.” The four processes of doing leadership embody shared leadership, leadership that serves the community, leadership that leads by obeying, and leadership unfolds behind the scenes. / text

Between Women: Alliances and Divisions in American Indian, Mexican American, and Anglo American Literatures of Protest to Colonialism investigates nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers' negotiation of women's rights discourses. This project examines the split between nineteenth-century women's rights groups and the Equal Rights Association to assess how American Indian, Mexican American, Anglo women, and, more recently, Chicana writers provide theoretical insights for new directions in feminisms. This study is grounded historically in order to learn from the past and continue efforts toward "decolonizing feminisms," to borrow a phrase from Chandra Mohanty. To that end, current feminist theories about alliances and solidarity are linked to ways that writers intervene in feminisms to simultaneously imagine solidarity against white male colonialist violence and object to racism on the part of Anglo women. Like all the writers in this study, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) challenges Anglo women to not be complicit with Anglo male colonialist violence. Winnemucca's testimony illuminates the history of alliances between Anglo and Native women and current debates amongst various Native women activists regarding feminism. Between Women traces how Anglo American writer Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona (1884) protests effects of U.S. colonialism on Luiseno people and her negotiation of feminisms compared with Winnemucca's writing and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), novels that protest the effects of U.S. colonialism on Mexican Americans, particularly women. It then compares Ruiz de Burton's writing to Helena Mari­a Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Cherri­e Moraga's Heroes and Saints (1994), texts that acknowledge the difficulties of forming alliances between women in the context of exploitation, pesticide poisoning of Chicanas/os, and border policies. The epilogue points to Evelina Lucero's Night Sky, Morning Star (2000), demonstrating how an understanding of the history that Winnemucca engages elucidates American Indian literature in the twenty-first century. By looking deeply at how nineteenth-century conflicts effect us in the present, scholars and activists might better assess tactics for feminisms in the twenty-first century that enact an anti-colonialist feminist praxis.

Zugl.: Siegen, Univ., Bachelorarbeit

This paper is an exploration of the meaning of mixed racial identity and the representation of such experience by multiracial artists. By analyzing the art of Amalia Mesa Bains, Richard Alexander Lou, and Samantha Wall, I examine how such self identified artists address the concept of the mixed race and in-between experience noting whether they take a celebratory approach or more resistive approach. I then expand on why I chose this topic and why I used specific methods to create and depict my own personal multiracial experience.

abstract: At the heart of this dissertation is a push for critical genealogy that intervenes into two major theoretical bodies of work in rhetoric and composition -- affect studies and queer latina rhetorics. Chapter one intervenes into emerging discourses on publics and affect studies from seamlessly recovering "the body" as an always-already Western body of rhetoric in the advent of this renewed interest in emotion, embodiment, and structures of affect as rhetorical concepts showing the long history of theorizing by queer mestizas. Chapter two focuses on one register of affect: anger, which articulated from the works of writers such as Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa offers a complex theory of agency for the subaltern subject. Chapter three links emotions like anger and melancholia to the corporeal rhetorics of skin and face, metaphors that are abundant in the queer mestiza and chicana writers under discussion, revealing the dramatic inner-workings of a the queer mestiza subject and the inter-subjective dynamics between the racialized and gendered performance of that body. By re-rooting affect in the queer colonized, yet resistant body, the link between the writing subject and colonial violence is made clear. Chapter four looks at the autoethnographic process of creating an affective archive in the form of queer racial melancholia, while Chapter five concludes by taking writing programs to task for their view of the writing archive, offering a radical new historiography by means of a queer chicana methodology. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014