The purpose of this research was to determine whether Native American and Hispanic women can preserve cultural identity in interracial marriages. Four women participated in this research: A Native American woman married to an Anglo; two Hispanic women married to Anglos; and a woman of Hispanic and Native American ancestry married to a Native American. Each participant provided information regarding the level of knowledge of family history, ancestry, language, traditions and practices. Primary research found social identity was another indicator, as the social setting in an environment affects stability and permanence of a cultural identity. The findings indicate preservation of cultural identity in future generations from interracial marriages depends upon a community that can articulate and pass on a level of knowledge of family history, ancestry, language, traditions and practices. Such a community will consist of one or both parents, family members, members of the community, and the children themselves.

This study examines Mexican American popular culture, including seasonal festivals, professional stage plays, journal essays, and ritual narratives in early Arizona. Through these various cultural forms, Mexican American residents negotiated and countered prevalent notions of U.S. national identity aligned with nineteenth-century ideas about Western modernity and Mexican antiquity articulated at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, in Chicago, that presented Mexican America as an 'Orient,' an internal Orient named Aztlan. Civic rhetoric in the early twentieth-century Spanish-language press created an intimate cultural landscape that casts light and shadow upon prior histories of Mexican America in Arizona. In addition to social criticism in local journals, scripted plays in print and on stage extending beyond Iberia and Mexico into the Southwest affirmed local forms of Mexican American popular culture. Staged narratives of class relations within border space defined by international economic and labor interests are also noteworthy registers of allegorical formulations of cultural identity. In addition to frontier drama and border journals, personal correspondence and candid images of rural and urban parishes also demonstrate processes by which religious farms became unfolding and inclusive demonstrations of public devotion and civic rhetoric. Popular Catholicism nurtured by an early generation of Spanish Discalced Carmelite priests in Arizona created devotional societies, public processions in religious precincts, Spanish plays in parish halls, and festival parades in commercial districts that embodied local demonstrations of Mexican American culture of Aztlan in Arizona.

"A book," write Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , is "an assemblage," one that is connected to "other assemblages." Once it is understood as such, literary interpretation becomes less a quest for meanings in the form of fixed destinations as an investigation into what the book under consideration "functions with." What, in other words, is the relation of "this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.---and an abstract machine that sweeps [it] along?". Specifically, this dissertation examines the production of ethnicity in various North American literary works from the Twentieth Century. Each section juxtaposes "State apparatus-books" with "war machine" ones. The first posit the ethnic group as a minority, as an "objectively definable state", whether of language, ethnicity, or sex, as a subsystem of a Majority, and give emphasis to such strategies as centering, unification, totalization, integration, interiority, hierarchization, and finalization as the means to affirmation. The second posit the ethnic group as "minoritarian" in nature, as a "potential, creative and created," as a becoming "over which they do not have ownership" and "into which they themselves must enter". It attempts to make its reader cognizant of the various strategies by which ethnic groups both empower and delimit themselves in the process of self-affirmation.

The purpose of this research was to explore the motives, values and expectations of Israeli Russian immigrant students and their parents who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s. Instruments administered to the students included the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)--a projective measure for assessing motives (Murray, 1938). The Thematic Apperception Test required the students to create imaginative stories in response to a series of four pictures. In addition, the students were asked to answer a Student questionnaire. The instrument administered to the parents included a Parent questionnaire. The questionnaires were used to evaluate values, expectations and opinions. The study took place in an afternoon school called the "Impulse School". All the teachers and students attending this school are Russian, and the lessons are all in Russian. Ninety-nine students participated in this study. The majority of students were ages 10-11. This group included both genders. One hundred and four parents took part in this study. Fifty-nine parents have a child who participated in the study. Every one of the parents has children attending the "Impulse School". The data from the Parent and Student questionnaires shows a lack of relationship between parent-student pairs. The adults and students have different perceptions of the academic expectations and evaluations of the students' functioning. The students perceive their parents to have higher expectations and they evaluate their schoolwork higher than their parents. The only similarity between parents and students was in both groups' definitions of success. The majority of students and parents defined success in achievement terms. This study reveals the parents' perception of the Israeli educational system as being academically weaker than the Russian one. The results agree with McClelland's (1987) assertion that correlation between the two types of measures---the projective and unconscious TAT, and the direct and conscious questionnaires, is quite low. The majority of TAT stories expose negative feelings associated with achievement motivation. By contrast, the questionnaires show that the students value good grades and express academic self-confidence. Many of the stories did not focus on achievement motivation but on the affiliation motive, despite the fact that three out of four pictures were supposed to arouse achievement themes.

Core notions from social movement research and Sociology of Law studies are integrated into development theory and power/inequality arguments to evaluate the relative importance of internal social organizations of groups, resource dependency, and the impact of the organizational learning process on Native American tribes' inclinations to take greater amounts of control over their economic, political, and social development. This frames development as a political problem, not just an economic one. An analytical model is developed that can be applied to many indigenous groups. This model is used to answer the following question: when new opportunities for sovereign expression are created through changes in the law, which sociological factors impact the ability to take advantage of it? This study raises and addresses some theoretical questions about the conditions under which collectivities opt for more self-determination and develop greater institutional autonomy. It also addresses public policy issues by identifying factors that have proven to be barriers for tribes to pursue greater degrees of self-determination.

Historians have widely studied and discussed the Progressive era in the United States, including the efforts of English-speaking women's organizations in civic activism. However, few or no studies explore the rhetorical process by which immigrant women forged a bilingual path into American society. Because of prior publicity, a number of early twentieth century immigrants tried to act upon the idea that the United States could be a fresh start for them, putting their plans for social and educational advancement into print. My study takes a structural approach to comparing the writing of three immigrant women, viewing these texts as sites of what Walter Fisher calls the narrative model of rhetoric. In particular, this analysis demonstrates how narratives made of such elements as Ernest Bormann's "fantasy themes" provide "good reasons" for action. Thus, this inquiry focuses on at least two aspects of rhetoric, particularly the role that these women's writing played in educating their communities about public issues, often employing an oblique style of stories and anecdotes. First, it explores the ways that literacy exercised an empowering role both in and beyond classrooms to open a social space for these writers, both as immigrants and as women. Secondly, my project furthers the conversation initiated by people such as Jane Addams and John Dewey by connecting their work with today's theorists such as Theresa Enos, Sally Miller Gearhart, and Sonja Foss.

High schools are key settings for adolescent development, yet life course scholars have not fully examined how schools shape transitions to adulthood. Schools are important for socializing youth, but most education research examines cognitive outcomes, like test scores, rather than behavioral outcomes, like welfare receipt. Theories about transitions to adulthood and the role of curricular tracking each focus on racial/ethnic differences, but there is little connection between the two areas of inquiry. This study explores racial/ethnic variation in the effect of curricular tracking on women's risk of young welfare receipt, and on behavioral outcomes I term the proximate causes of welfare --dropping out of high school, teenage motherhood, limited work experience, poverty, and single motherhood. In three distinct but theoretically connected essays, I study these relationships using a sample of black, Latina, and white women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Chapter 2 examines racial/ethnic differences in the effect of college and vocational tracks on behavioral outcomes of schooling. College tracks reduce women's risk of experiencing the proximate causes of receipt, but these effects are much stronger for white women than for black and Latina women. Women of color have lower risks of each of the proximate causes in vocational tracks and racial/ethnic inequality is greatest in college tracks. Chapter 3 considers whether racial variation in the effects of tracking influences pathways to welfare receipt. Tracking shapes welfare dynamics, and racial inequality in these effects is greatest in the college track. Whites benefit more from college track placement while women of color benefit more from vocational track coursework. Tracking influences welfare risks primarily through effects on teen motherhood and dropping out of school. Chapter 4 explores a mechanism through which racial/ethnic differences in the effect of tracking might operate: an "attitude-achievement paradox." Women with high educational expectations and limited preparation for college (as indicated by test scores) are extremely likely to become teen mothers. African American women are most buffered from teen motherhood risks in the vocational rather than the general or college tracks. In each section, I discuss the important theoretical and policy implications derived from these results.

This study investigated the validity of the Comprehensive Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (CTONI) as a measure of intelligence for use with Native-American learning disabled students. Forty boys and ten girls between the ages of 7 and 16 and who are Native-American Navajo students with a learning disability in reading and/or mathematics participated in this study. Each participant was administered the CTONI, the WISC-III, and the WIAT. The results from this study indicated that the CTONI exhibited less variability among its composite IQ scores than the WISC-III. The CTONI and the WISC-III Full-scale IQ, Verbal IQ and Performance IQ correlate moderately. The CTONI and WISC-III are significantly predictive of reading achievement but account for less than 11% of the common variance. Yet, the CTONI and the WISC-III are moderately correlated with mathematics achievement. Factor Analytic Results suggest that the factorial structures of the CTONI and the WISC-III for this sample of Native-American students are consistent with the factorial structures proposed by the respective test authors. The CTONI appears to be a valid measure of intelligence for use with Native American populations. The implications of the findings of the CTONI with Native-American populations are discussed.

Does learning English help undocumented Mexican transmigrants get better jobs in the United States? In this transborder ethnography, I worked with three households of undocumented people in Tucson, Arizona and traveled to their hometowns in Mexico, to better understand the context of their migration. For these migrants, speaking English did not lead to better jobs. Some employers tried to prevent them from learning English. Others were fired for using English to complain about unpaid wages. One person who was fired was replaced by a monolingual Spanish speaker. Many Americans think that all immigrants must learn English, and this discourse is common, both in the political and educational arenas. However, this study demonstrates that alongside this social discourse, there is a parallel economic discourse, urging the production of docile workers. Docility means not speaking English. Despite these findings, the discourse of "learning English in order to find better work" is a persistent one among the undocumented. I traced its origins and found that it begins shortly after a migrant arrives in the U.S. If English did not lead to better jobs, why did migrants learn it? For some people, it was because English helped them perform the identity of a U.S. citizen. They used self-consciously constructed semiotic and linguistic performances to appear Chicano/a, and these performances lessened their anxiety about deportation. For others, English was a conflicted symbol. Although it was a symbol of wealth, and therefore desirable, using it in public could easily reveal one's legal status to the wrong interlocutor. There are significant obstacles to the use of English among undocumented Mexican transmigrants, and language use is essential for language mastery. This study encourages those who teach English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) to understand the social structures that impact their students' language use. With implications for education, border, and immigration policy, this study sheds light on the lived experiences of undocumented migrants and brings language and language use into conversations about globalization. Understanding transmigrants' experiences and ideologies offers a new lens to theorizing social inequality and human agency, and ultimately, to creating more humane borders.

This study seeks to articulate in the broadest of terms the cultural legacy of Arapa (the ancestral territory encompassing Aravaipa Canyon and the confluence of Aravaipa Creek and the San Pedro River) as seen through the eyes of a group of its Western Apache descendants. It humbly attempts to sketch the basic outlines of the contemporary relationship between this place and those Apaches who possess a working cultural knowledge of it. Specifically, it demonstrates that the experiential exercise of maintaining place is a fundamentally personal one dependent on its individual actors to interact with it and in the process fulfill their obligation to enliven its history, stories and lessons anew. Finally, it illustrates how the unique historical experience emanating from Arapa has no bounds in time or meaning, proving that events of the past--namely the Camp Grant massacre, which precipitated the Apaches' forced exodus from that place--affect Apache culture and society in the present. This study enlists as its primary analytical lens the "peoplehood" matrix--the notion that indigenous peoples in this country (and elsewhere) possess a unique, place-bound sense of group and community identity shaped by lived experiences that sets them apart, both individually and collectively, from dominant society.