The media are powerful agents of socialization in modern society influencing values, beliefs, and attitudes of the culture that produces them. Both the quantity and quality of Latino images in the media may reflect and reinforce the place of Latinos in United States society. This study examines how Latinos are portrayed in television entertainment programming by addressing two major research questions: 1) What is the extent of Latino recognition on prime-time television? and 2) What is the extent of respect accorded Latinos on prime-time television? A one-week sample of prime-time television programming airing on three networks yielded 47 programs and 807 characters for analysis. Using content analysis methodology, recognition is identified by examining the frequency and proportional representation of Latino television portrayals and respect is measured by examining the types and significance of these roles. The results indicate an overall lack of diversity on prime-time television with only 11 of the 47 programs analyzed reaching 50% or more of the maximum possible diversity in their racial and ethnic portrayals. Specifically, Latinos represent only 3% of primetime television characters, less than one-fourth of their proportion of the nation's population. Compared to non-Hispanic Whites, Blacks, and Asians, Latinos are the group least likely to occupy major roles in prime-time entertainment shows and represent only 1.9% of the total opening cast credits. Latinos are still presented stereotypically but are more often presented in a generic fashion with no reference to ethnic cultural experiences. The extent of recognition and respect accorded Latinos in prime-time television is severely limited, thus there is a need for continued research and dialogue regarding symbolic media images of Latinos. The findings have implications for social scientists interested in media forms and content as cultural artifacts, members of the television media industry responsible for program development and distribution, and college media educators responsible for training young media professionals.

Despite rapid growth and expansion of Hispanic immigrant families to the United States over the past several decades, there is a clear underrepresentation of literature dedicated to mental health treatment and prevention for this population. Even fewer studies have examined the predictors of parenting stress in Hispanic immigrant mothers. This present study aimed to identify the salient predictors of parenting stress in a sample of Hispanic immigrant mothers (N = 110) living in New York City. This research utilized archival data previously collected by the Ackerman Institute for the Family in partnership with the Coalition for Hispanic Family Services in September 2014 (n = 53) and in September 2015 (n = 57) for the participants who completed the initial enrollment assessments for their First Steps parenting education program. Measures that assessed participant risk factors, social support, and parenting stress included: the Family Risk Index (FRI; Grossman, 2011), the Patient Health Questionnaire – 9 (PHQ-9; Kroenke & Spitzer, 2002), the Family Support Scale (FSS; Dunst, Jenkins, & Trivette, 2007), and the Parenting Stress Index – Short Form (PSI-SF; Abidin, 1995). It was hypothesized that risk factors (depression, educational attainment, single mother status, documentation status, and having a child with special needs), social support, and length of time living in the U.S. would all significantly predict parenting stress. In addition, it was hypothesized that social support would moderate the relationship between risk and parenting stress and that documentation status would moderate the relationship between social support and parenting stress. Results of a linear multiple regression analysis found depression significantly predicted increased parenting stress and social support significantly predicted decreased parenting stress. However, single mother status, educational attainment, having a child with special needs, documentation status, and length of time living the U.S. were all non-significant predictors of parenting stress. Results of moderated regression analyses found social support significantly moderated the relationship between educational attainment and parenting stress. Documentation status did not moderate the relationship between social support and parenting stress. Despite the limitations of this present study, implications for mental health practitioners highlight the significance of cultural values and contextual circumstances on how a Hispanic immigrant mother appraises depression, social support, and parenting stress. Individualizing prevention and intervention efforts for Hispanic immigrant mothers is recommended in order to capture both cultural values and contextual circumstances unique to each individual. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester 2016. / November 21, 2016. / Hispanic, Immigrant, Mothers, Parenting stress, Risk Factors, Social Support / Includes bibliographical references. / Debra Osborn, Professor Directing Dissertation; Sandra Lewis, University Representative; Frances Prevatt, Committee Member; Martin Swanbrow Becker, Committee Member.

Understanding and defining nation and identity in diaspora has long characterized the cultural production of Caribbean authors. Notwithstanding, Hispanic Caribbean authors that have emigrated to the United States face this question doubly as they form part of what is labeled the Latino community. While much of the Latino Studies groundwork began in Mexican American or Chicano literary circles, whose cultural background is vastly different from that of the Hispanic Caribbean, authors of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent have brought new perspectives to constructions of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation to the broadly named “Latino/a” experience. While much of the early theoretical and literary work was written by men, women writers began to produce prolifically in the late twentieth century. The first voices to be published in mass were primarily those of a privileged existence, coming from families of higher social classes within the Latino community, despite being marginalized within the context of the United States. During the late 1970s to early 1990s, literary production established that being Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican in the mainland U.S. meant being light-skinned, heterosexual, and of middle to upper-class economic status. However, during the mid-to-late 1990s and early twenty-first century, new voices came to the forefront to challenge these hegemonic constructions of Caribbean Latina identity that dominated the cultural imaginary and, instead, presented intersectional protagonists who consistently face discrimination based on their gender, sexual orientation, race, and economic class both in and outside of the Latino community. By utilizing diverse strategies of resistance, such as humor, these authors, including Achy Obejas, Jennine Capó-Crucet, Loida Maritza Pérez, Angie Cruz, Giannina Braschi, and Erika López, highlight and satirize the normative aspects of the Hispanic Caribbean diasporic cultural imaginary that marginalizes and/or excludes the voices and experiences of their characters as being representative of Caribbean Latina identity. In this sense, these authors not only represent a marginalized perspective of identity within the Latino community, but they also re-present, as in presenting anew, a more diverse image of Latina identity in the twenty-first century that departs from the homogenous, normative image of Caribbean Latinas played out in earlier narratives of identity from the early-1990s Latina literary boom. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / February 22, 2018. / Diaspora, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina Women, Race, Sexuality, U.S. Latinx Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgil Suárez, University Representative; José Gomariz, Committee Member; Jeannine Murray-Román, Committee Member; Peggy Sharpe, Committee Member.

Researchers have reported a high prevalence of depression among older Hispanics in the United States when compared to other ethnic groups. Cultural variations in the perception of depression sometimes make it difficult to recognize the disorder resulting in older Hispanic patients not being diagnosed and not receiving appropriate treatment. The purpose of this study was to explore older Hispanics’ explanatory model of depression and identify culture-specific factors that may help in the recognition and treatment of depression. A mixed-method design that combined qualitative and quantitative methods was used. Fifty participants were interviewed using Kleinman’s Explanatory Models ethnographic approach with a vignette variation, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and the Cross Cultural Measure of Acculturation (CCMA). The findings suggest that this group of older Hispanics did not recognize depression as an illness but rather as the result of life stressors and personal weaknesses. People who experience depressive symptoms were described as being crazy, bored, worried, or having a problem of the nerves. These culturally coded terms may confound diagnosis among many Hispanics who find depression an unacceptable and shameful condition. This cultural pattern seemed to prevail among low and high-acculturated individuals which may complicate the diagnosis of depression by health care providers. This study highlights the complexity and diversity of this group of older Hispanics’ conceptual model of depression. The results of this study will contribute to nursing care by providing additional information that will help professionals when working with Hispanic patients with depression. Findings expand our understanding of older Hispanics (high and low-acculturated, depressed and non-depressed) groups’ conceptualization of depression and can be used to inform the adaptation of culturally relevant approaches to better serve the Hispanic community in this country. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013.

This dissertation avers that the transpacific circulation of narrative artefacts - travel accounts, letters, relaciones, and illustrated codices- enabled the emergence of a new global history that departs from the ancient tradition of universal history. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Iberian missionaries and historians began to incorporate into their histories and chronicles of the Indies sources and material dealing with China, Japan and other regions of the Far East. The dissertation argues that this transpacific interaction enabled historians to produce synchronic modes of writing that were emancipated from ancient narrative models. To develop this argument, the dissertation examines how historians and missionaries gradually separated the reading of ancient books from their own modern experience of narrating the Far East. By incorporating sources and material produced mainly in Macau and Manila, scholars not only imported new knowledge related to East and Southeast Asia into the Iberian and European world, but they also transformed the genre of general and universal histories of the Indies developed during the 16th century in the New World. Instead of considering the gradual integration of America with Eurasia and Africa to be the main and only fact that defined the emergence of a new global history, this dissertation argues that it was the discovery of the Far East from the West Indies that enabled historians to create forms of writing global histories that departed from the tradition of universal history. The dissertation puts into dialogue coexisting models and methods of composing global histories that emerged in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. To do so, I examine the emergence of narratives that integrated the Far East into historical genres developed in the West Indies during the 16th century. In this part, I explore the writings of scholars who wrote about the Far East by projecting a perspective that emerged from their production developed in the West Indies: Martín de Rada (1533-78), Francisco Hernández (1517-1587), Juan González de Mendoza (1540-1617), José de Acosta (1540-1600), the authors of the Boxer codex (ca. 1590), Adriano de las Cortes (1577-1629), and Antonio de León Pinelo (1595-1660). Furthermore, the dissertation analyzes the emergence of global modes of writing by focusing on the writings of Jesuits who arrived in the Far East from the oriental Portuguese route, such as Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), Diego de Pantoja (1571-1618), and Nicolas Trigault (1577-1628). These correlated productions incorporated the Far East into the narratives of the Iberian world by redefining categories associated with the Orient and reformulating methods of historical writing. By building a corpus of sources that refer to the arrival of Iberians to the Far East, this dissertation advances the thesis that the creation of systems of exchange and the transpacific circulation of relaciones, letters, and codices made possible and shaped new forms of composing global histories in the early modern Iberian world.

This research attempted to uncover the sociopolitical ideologies, ethnic discrimination, and class oppression that create sustained social dominance through resource control in the unicorporated community of the Salton Sea located in Eastern Riverside County, California in regard to public transportation issues.

The current study explored factors that might be related to immigrant students’ academic achievement in the United States. To be specific, this study examined the relationships among parental involvement, students’ self-esteem and students’ academic achievement in immigrant families. In this study, I focused on the ethnicities of Hispanic and Asian immigrants in the United States. Furthermore, the current study investigated the extent to which Hispanic and Asian immigrant students’ self-esteem mediated the relationships between parental involvement and students’ academic achievement. Parental involvement included four dimensions: parental expectations, parental monitoring, parent-child communication, and parental participation in school activities. Using path analysis and multi-group path analysis, data were analyzed from 1,070 immigrant students, who attended 11th and 12th grades, and their parents from the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study (1991-2006). After removing the variable of parental monitoring from the path analysis due to no relationship with students’ self-esteem and GPA (with other variables controlled), findings showed that, parental expectations positively predicted students’ self-esteem and their academic achievement; parent-child communication positively predicted students’ self-esteem, but negatively predicted students’ academic achievement. In addition, parental participation in school activities positively predicted students’ self-esteem; however, there was no significant relationship with students’ academic achievement. Additionally, students’ self-esteem was not related to students’ academic achievement and had no mediation effect on the relationships between parental involvement and students’ academic achievement. These findings showed no differences between Hispanic and Asian immigrant families. Keywords: parental involvement, academic achievement, self-esteem, immigrant families, CILS / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Spring Semester 2019. / April 17, 2019. / academic achievement, Asian and Hispanic immigrants, CILS, immigrant families, parental involvement, self-esteem / Includes bibliographical references. / Jeannine E. Turner, Professor Directing Thesis; Alysia Roehrig, Committee Member; Yanyun Yang, Committee Member.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "December 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-82). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This study was undertaken to evaluate gender differences in predictors of substance use in clinic-referred, Hispanic American adolescents with substance use disorders. Individual (disruptive behavior disorders, depression) and family variables (family conflict, parental monitoring) were evaluated as predictors of the initial level and change over time in marijuana use, and gender was evaluated as a moderator of the associations. The study involved an analysis of an existing dataset of 113 Hispanic American adolescents (93 boys; age 12 to 17) referred for outpatient treatment for substance abuse and their parental guardian. Participants and parental guardians completed questionnaires and a structured interview to report on predictor variables at baseline and marijuana use at baseline and 3-, 6-, 12-, and 18-months post-baseline. Latent growth curve modeling was conducted to evaluate the study hypotheses. Adolescents reported high levels of marijuana use at baseline and relatively stable levels of marijuana use over time. Treatment and gender effects influenced the marijuana use trajectory. Girls exhibited more impaired psychosocial functioning than boys, including worse disruptive behavior problems and depression and lower levels of parental monitoring. Depression was negatively associated with marijuana use longitudinally. Overall, individual and family risk factors are associated with adolescent marijuana use in complex ways. Implications for intervention are discussed.