Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Dr. Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, Florida State University, School of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Psychology. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 23, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 310-333).

The simultaneous phenomena of a shortage in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) labor force coupled with the growing Latino population in the U.S. dictates a need for higher education institutions to ensure the success of Latino students in the STEM disciplines. Current trends indicate that Latino males are interested in pursuing a STEM major, but are attaining STEM degrees at low rates. Furthermore, prior research has shown that over half of all STEM degree pursuers change majors within the first two years and that the first few weeks of college are critical for Latino students. As such, this dissertation used a qualitative, phenomenological approach to examine the first-semester lived experience of Latino males in the STEM disciplines using a science identity framework. Overall, this study had five major findings. First, the findings from this study challenged the existing science identity framework by emphasizing competence as opposed to recognition. Second, participants considered the importance of having a supportive scientific community within their first semester. At the same time, they also highlighted the competitiveness and exclusivity of the scientific community as a major factor that drew them into pursuing a STEM major. Third, the high-achieving participants in this study stressed the importance of being innovative, thinking out of the box, and connecting patterns in approaching their subject areas. Fourth, students in this study had to negotiate their science identities with other parts of their identities, such as their racial identities, gender identities, religious identities, creative identities, and musical identities. Finally, participants in this study who were enrolled in a critical thinking seminar developed a thorough understanding about science within a broader context, and gained knowledge about how the scientific community interacts with other industries, such as business, law, and politics. Given these findings, this study expanded, challenged, and added to the existing literature about Latino men in the STEM disciplines. / text

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Previous research offers insights about characteristics of successful superintendents and provides generic lists of attributes (Collins, 2005 and Schleuning, 2003). However, little is known about specific characteristics of Hispanic male superintendents who have been successful in ascending to a superintendent position (Padilla, 2003, Garza, 2003 and Rueda, 2002). Given the current need to select superintendents who reflect the current population changes, further inquiry of the personal and professional attributes from a board presidents’ perspective is needed with a specific focus on male Hispanics who have been selected to serve as superintendent. The purpose of the study is to identify attributes (characteristics) that Texas school board presidents believe are important when having selected a Hispanic male superintendent. The study investigated four research questions: (a) the perceptions of Texas public school board presidents regarding the most important personal attributes when having selected a Hispanic male superintendent; (b) the perceptions of Texas public school board presidents regarding the most important professional attributes when having selected a Hispanic male superintendent; (c) the size (student enrollment) of a school district affect the perception of school board presidents regarding the important attributes; and (d) geographic location affect the perception of school board presidents regarding the important attributes? The study followed a quantitative research paradigm. A descriptive research design approach was used. Thus, a survey was used as instrumentation to collect data (Schleuning, 2003). Texas public school board presidents’ who were serving, and who selected and hired Hispanic male superintendents for 2008-2009 school year were surveyed. Data was analyzed: using descriptive statistics including means and standard deviations, one-way analyses and analyses of variance. Findings revealed that Texas public school board presidents regarding the most important personal attributes when having selected a Hispanic male superintendent are; level of education, previous experience in school administration, and years of experience in education. The most important professional attributes are; honest/fair standards, personal integrity, and visionary leadership. Findings also suggest that enrollment size and geographic location does not affect the perception of school board presidents when selecting a Hispanic male superintendent. / text

<p> Why are Mexican miners absent from Nevada's historical record? Legends of lost Spanish mines abound, and Hispanic place names dapple the state, but the stories of Hispanic miners themselves are missing from Nevada histories. This is partly because the best evidence for their presence exists not in archives or libraries, but on the landscape, in the form of the arrastras they left behind. Arrastras are a Hispanic mining technology, small-scale milling and amalgamating machines built to extract just such mineral wealth as the Nevada desert contained. Best used on high-grade and free-milling ore, by a small and mobile mining population, arrastras were never well documented and were rarely paired with an official claim. This study investigates the region's Mexican past through an exploration of its early mining geography, with a focus on Nye County and an emphasis on arrastras as evidence of the presence and activities of these miners. </p><p> Using artifacts like arrastras as evidence can be fraught with challenges, both of simple location and of interpretation. To address this, a GIS prospecting model using fuzzy logic was built to focus field searches for arrastras, and a thorough literature review undertaken. Five arrastras were located, and evidence from archives and mining histories was used to help place each arrastra in its possible local and regional context. A balance was maintained between archive and artifact, and it is this study's position that archival content can be understood as an artifact of its own. </p><p> History is often perceived to be the true story of the past, but we forget that a true story is not necessarily a whole story. There are arrastras in Nye County, and they are absent from the written record. Careful consideration of these artifacts in conjunction with existing written records strongly suggests Mexican mining presence in the region in the years before Nevada's 1864 statehood. </p>

<p> Hispanic students' life experiences are influenced by factors related to cultural capital that are imbedded in the fabric of the family's culture and interwoven in the tapestry of the school setting in relationship to student engagement. Many researchers have argued that middle-to-upper class parents who possess high-status capital know how to navigate a school system that is congruent with the dominant group. In contrast, working-class minority parents are perceived as lacking cultural capital, and consequently struggle to access school resources necessary to benefit their children's educational attainment. This dissertation is concerned with examining how the role of cultural capital from home and school settings influence student engagement of Hispanic students, by using the theoretical framework derived from Bourdieu's (1986) <i>cultural capital</i>. This qualitative narrative inquiry looked at 30 participants comprised of two administrators, three counselors, seven teachers, nine parents and their nine students from the only high school in a small bedroom community located in one of the largest counties in Southern California. The authentic "voices" of the participants were captured through individual face-to-face audio taped interviews, which were coordinated, transcribed and synthesized over a three month period. The data was triangulated using the responses of the participants to answer the three research questions. The analysis of the findings revealed that minority Hispanic students possess familial and school cultural capital that influences student engagement. This work implies that Hispanic students have access to cultural capital at school through the extra assistance received from teachers and counselors, coupled with parent's strong desire not only to see their children succeed in academia but also vicariously fulfill the parent's own personal academic and career dreams and aspirations. Recommendations were made to inform educators how to avoid assumptions that Hispanic working-class students lack cultural capital. </p>

Representations of indigeneity abound in late-twentieth-century Chicano/a cultural productions, occupying genres as diverse as the political treatise, novel, poem, and news report. The work that follows traces the construction and ideological implications of indigenous Mexican culture, or 'Indian' signifiers in Chicano/a cultural production, a fundamental but often overlooked feature of Chicano/a subject formation. I bring Chicano/a indigenism into conversation with two historical and social phenomenon, Mexican indigenous migrants in the US and post-Revolutionary Mexican national discourse, to explore their influences and challenges to notions of authenticity and nationalism. "Mestizaje," a product of Mexican post-Revolutionary national discourse, subsumes the "Indian" within the Chicano/a and ultimately within the Chicano/a political imaginary. I argue that Mexican indigenous migrants in the U.S. constitute a new critical mass that contests mestizaje and Chicano/a as potential decolonial constructs. Such socio-political projects, I argue, forces us to rethink the uses of indigenism in the production of racialized Chicano/a political identities such as "la raza cosmica" and radical epistemological frameworks such as Anzaldua's "mestiza consciousness." While, the mythologization of the Mexican Indian is a strategy that initiates counter-hegemonic discourse it also simultaneously undercuts the emancipatory objectives of its authors. I employ a comparative framework to conduct an analysis of Chicano/a and indigenous cultural productions and reveal the multifaceted positionings of ethnic subjects in the U.S. For example, the affiliations and divisions between Oaxacan indigenous migrant and Chicano/a strategies of decolonization bring to light the complex and contradictory impulses embedded in the relationship between first world and third world marginalized subjects who, while occupying vastly different subject positions, are bound together by negotiations of citizenship and language, as well as formations of nation, race, class, and ethnicity.

My dissertation interrogates mestizaje and nationalism to rethink academic tendencies that construct resistant methodologies and singular national representations of hybrid theories and racial identities. To ground this argument, chapters one and two analyze how nationalism compromises current theoretical and feminist uses of mestizaje. The introductory chapter traces the influence of Latin American cultural theorists such as Jose Vasconcelos (1925) and Fernando Ortiz (1940) on contemporary U.S. Latino/a cultural critics. I argue that by selectively borrowing theoretical elements from Ortiz and Vasconcelos, U.S. Latino/a scholars unintentionally consolidate divergent Latino/a histories as well as ignore issues of nation building, class differences, and racial tensions to promote a unitary discourse of subversive mestizaje. Likewise, my analysis of Jovita Gonzalez's novel Caballero (1930) reveals how Gonzalez's feminist tactics counteract Mexico's patriarchal oppression of women by going against traditional feminist themes esteemed in Chicano/a Studies. For Gonzalez, nationalist tropes of indigenous curanderismo (spirituality) and magical realism insufficiently respond to the needs of oppressed Mexican American women. The final two chapters evaluate the ramifications of constructing unitary racial identities of whiteness and blackness. My final investigation uncovers the existence of ethnicities within North American racial categorizations of whiteness and blackness that provide new insights to mestizaje 's disruption of ordered classifications of race in the United States. Chapter three argues that the southeastern European immigrant experience of racial inclusion and exclusion from Anglo Saxon whiteness allowed Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton to play off of new conceptions of whiteness in an evolving imaginary of white U.S. mestizaje to write her novels The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). Chapter four examines the rise of the New Negro Movement during the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural event that required the erasure of individuals in the black community who did not mirror the collective identity of African Americans. This chapter specifically studies Puerto Rican archivist Arthur A. Schomburg as a figure who broadened the conception of the New Negro to recognize the intellectual participation and contribution of Afro Caribbeans to the Harlem Renaissance.

The present study examines the Great Temple of the Aztecs as it has been seen through the eyes of different people through time. It does not intend to be a comprehensive history of the Temple's interpretations, as many important viewpoints have been discarded for the sake of the central questions. It exemplifies three important moments in which the Great Temple of the Aztecs was "reinvented": sixteenth-century New Spain, the Enlightenment in New Spain and Europe, and the Mexican post-revolutionary PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) regime in the twentieth century. It concentrates on interests of three different groups of people which had different visions and agendas to fulfill: the regular orders during the sixteenth century (Franciscans and Dominicans), the early philosophers of history during the eighteenth century, and the scholars, scientists, artists and architects involved in the national reconstruction after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. This dissertation contains a history of the "ideas" of the Temple, revealing, among other things, the way in which contemporary Mexicans have constructed their identity and ways of action. The general ideas of "the Great Temple of the Aztecs" mediated by different viewpoints -as is the scientific one, or the one of the ruling party- say more about contemporary fields of knowledge and national politics than about the temple or the Aztecs "itself." The reading of these different interpretations does not intend to discredit them, but to raise the broader issue of the complexity of human self-understanding. The challenge would be to "loosen" rigid rational understandings in order to visualize the world as something that is given, alive, and unique. This would raise the possibility / La présente étude examine le Grand Temple des Aztèques comme il a été vu à travers les yeux de différentes personnes à différents moments de l´histoire. Il n'a pas l'intention d'être une histoire de l'interprétation du Temple, puisque de nombreux points de vue importants ont été mis de coté pour approfondir la question centrale. Il insiste sur trois grands moments dans lesquels le Grand Temple des Aztèques a été "réinventé": le XVIe siècle en Nouvelle-Espagne, le siècle des Lumières en Europe et en Nouvelle-Espagne, et le Mexique post-révolutionnaire du XXe siècle. L´attention est concentrée sur les intérêts des trois différents groupes de personnes qui avaient des visions différentes et des agendas à remplir, à savoir: les ordres réguliers durant le XVIe siècle (Franciscains et Dominicains), les premiers philosophes de l'histoire au cours du XVIIIe siècle, et les penseurs, scientifiques, artistes et architectes impliqués dans la reconstruction nationale après la révolution mexicaine de 1910. Cette thèse contient une histoire de "l'idée" du Temple, révélant, entre autres choses, la façon dont les Mexicains contemporains ont construit leur identité et leurs moyens d'action. Les idées générales du "Grand Temple des Aztèques" médiatisées par différents points de vue,-comme le scientifique, ou celui du parti au pouvoir-, dit encore plus sur la politique ou sur l'état des domaines de la connaissance contemporaine que sur le temple ou sur les Aztèques eux mêmes. La lecture de ces différentes interprétations n'a pas l'intention de les discréditer, mais de soulever la question plus large de la complexité de l'auto-compréhension de l'homme. Le défi serait de lacher un peu la p