Changing demographics in Oregon, accompanied by a rising Latino population, serve to dispel myths that we live in homogeneous, monolithic communities. Migration studies indicate migration is reshaping communities, contributing to ethnic diversity thus challenging our notion of identity and culture. Through the medium of oral histories and ethnography, this study describes the composition of the Latino Community in Yamhill County, identifying migration, immigration, and sociohistorical processes that formed the community. This work explores ideas of ethnicity, identity, and community building and how it has shaped Latino context and experience in Yamhill County. The voices of the participants express how they interpret their context and ways in which they are shaping it to be their own. This study also investigates the ways in which the participants interpret the American dream, essentially, what success means to them and what tensions inhibit full participation in the community. Like the pioneers on the Oregon Trail, they too came in search of freedom, of opportunity, of adventure. They tolerated discrimination and isolation along their journey--yet similar to the Oregon Trail pioneers, they pooled resources, they endured hardship, they persevered--to achieve their dreams. They counter the stereotypes of minorities expecting handouts or entitlements; rather, they have pursued their dreams and hopes in the face of obstacles those from the culture of power rarely even recognize. Their pioneering spirit adds a new dimension to the stories told about the Oregon country. Their stories tell us more about our country and more about ourselves. / Graduation date: 1999

The purpose of this study is to determine the best policy for interpreting the school to the community in Latin-American areas. Special effort will be made to develop a sound public relations policy and to apply this policy in a Latin-American situation.

This study was designed to determine the relative effectiveness of a group-study approach to the teaching of spelling as compared with an individual-study approach to the teaching of spelling in the seventh grade of a school with a large number of students of Latin American extraction.

Breaking the Frames of the Past examines recent visual and literary work about the periods of historical violence in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. In my dissertation, I argue that these cultural productions can challenge the linear conception of historical time, and reveal the existent tensions and blind spots present within the cultural memory realm of each nation. By examining the specificity of the materials and the aesthetic strategies present in the works, I hope to elucidate a necessary introspective turn in memory- what I have nominated metamemory, present in works that not only seek to interrogate official national paradigms, discourses of the past, productions of knowledge, and memorial imperatives, but also works that are profoundly aware of their condition as memory objects within a cultural memory realms. Breaking the Frames of the Past is divided into two parts, Part One: Images, engages with memory at a broader collective level, and analyzes the different ways the photographic medium has been used to represent the past and craft a sense of national belonging. Part Two: Texts is concerned with subjective memory, and the overlap between childhood memories lived simultaneously within the frame of a period of historical violence. I discuss literary work written by those born during these periods of violence in order to see how from their subjective experience and through their works they can assert to the existing tensions within cultural memory paradigms. In examining novels by those who are “the Secondary Characters” of history, I argue that their use of metafictional strategies is able to counter the feeling of displacement and sense of belatedness that is present in postmemory works.

This dissertation shows how gay, trans and queer performers in Brazil, Portugal, and Angola, working in traditionally misogynistic, homo- and transphobic popular music genres, have successfully claimed and refigured those genres and repertoires through iterations of transgender voices and bodies. I show how Pabllo Vittar, Fado Bicha and Titica refigure normative gendered conventions of sex and song through trans formations of popular music genres. I locate them within a genealogy of queer Luso-Afro-Brazilian popular music practices and performances that deploy trans formations of voice, body, and repertoire. I trace a genealogy of transgender voice in Brazilian popular music to Ney Matogrosso’s 1975 debut release, through which I reveal a cacophony of queer, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian intersections; and in Portuguese popular music to António Variações 1982 debut, through whom I trace a fado genealogy of Afro-diasporic cultural practices, gender transgression and sexual deviance. Finally, I locate Titica’s music in practices of the black queer diaspora as a refiguring of Angolan postcolonial aesthetics. Together, these artists and their music offer a queer Luso-Afro-Brazilian diaspora in spectacular popular music formations that transit beside and beyond the Portuguese-speaking world, unbound by it, and refiguring hegemonic Luso-Afro-Brazilian discourses of gender, sexuality, race and nation.

This dissertation explores how the Mexican state came to embrace study abroad as a key piece of national education policy. The study begins with the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and traces the changing politics and institutional pathways of student migration through 1982. During this period, hundreds and then thousands of Mexican students hailing from the country’s middle- and upper classes chose to finish their education in the United States. The dissertation’s central argument is that this student migration shaped the process of Mexican state formation in the wake of the Revolution. Even as scholarship programs responded to the impetus to modernize, achieve development, or foment science by importing foreign knowledge, youth demand for the chance to study abroad was a key yet unrecognized factor that explains why the state supports students’ transnational ambitions. By harnessing narratives of nationalism and modernization, Mexican youth pushed the state to develop institutions that granted international scholarships. Students aspiring to go abroad pioneered the political rationales that undergirded international education policy, which was then designed and implemented by foreign-trained Mexicans. As privileged youth, students shaped the state not by organizing but by leveraging their social and cultural capital as individuals. This dissertation points out that migration was a strategy that appealed not only to Mexico’s working-classes, but also to its “best and brightest” who sought to improve their prospects with a sojourn abroad. The dissertation’s first chapter examines how study abroad, a long-standing practice of the Mexican elite, became politicized after the Revolution. It traces debates in the press to show how a lack of state discourse about student migration gave other voices the opportunity to define the stakes of study abroad. Chapter two analyzes revolutionary-era scholarship granting practices, showing that paternalism persisted from the Porfiriato to the post-Revolution. However, the chapter reveals that Mexican students introduced revolutionary ideas into their petitions for scholarships, reframing their studies as an act of patriotism. The third chapter examines three major scholarship programs in the mid-twentieth century. It looks at both selection practices and the demographic profile of those who were chosen. These programs favored an already-privileged sector of young Mexicans, its university graduates. Chapter four, also set in the mid-twentieth century, explores the lived experiences and understandings of identity of Mexican students in the United States. This chapter argues that they pursued an ideal of middle-class mexicanidad during their sojourn abroad but found that this status was one of fragile prestige. The last chapter, covering 1960 to 1982, considers the genesis and early years of Mexico’s most important, and still extant, international scholarship granting institution, the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología. This scholarship program served as a kind of social policy for young, upwardly-mobile Mexicans even as it obeyed the logic of development and science policy. The dissertation includes tables with statistical information on the Mexican students in the United States, with more detailed data for students in scholarship programs run by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Banco de México.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo analisar a questão da circulação de ideias e a construção de identidades na América Latina a partir de três ensaios produzidos entre fins do século XIX e inícios do século XX: El porvenir de las naciones hispanoamericanas (1899), do mexicano Francisco Bulnes (1847-1924); A América Latina: males de origem (1905), do brasileiro Manoel Bomfim (1868-1932) e Les democraties latines de lAmerique (1912), do peruano Francisco García Calderón (1883-1953). Por meio desses textos, este trabalho procura discutir as concepções sobre o fazer intelectual presente em cada um desses autores, o processo de elaboração e circulação das ideias no subcontinente em relação aos paradigmas europeu e norte-americano e a variedade de projetos identitários existentes na América Latina no umbral do século XX. O cotejo desses três ensaios permite que se explicite um conjunto de temas e problemas comuns que permeavam o pensamento político na América Latina da época, entre os quais é importante ressaltar a discussão sobre o lugar do subcontinente no mundo diante da expansão do capitalismo e do imperialismo entre fins do século XIX e inícios do século XX. / I intend to analyze in this research three major essays produced in Latin America in the beginning of the 20th Century: El porvenir de las naciones hispanoamericanas (1899), by Mexican Francisco Bulnes (1847-1924); A América Latina: males de origem (1905), by Brazilian Manoel Bomfim (1868- 1932) and Les démocraties latines de lAmerique (1912), by Peruvian Francisco García Calderón (1883-1953). I will emphasize the problems around the circulation of ideas and the building of identities in the subcontinent. The comparison among these three essays will allow me to discuss a whole set of common themes and issues related to political ideas in Latin America at that time and to think about Latin Americas place during the so called Age of Empire.

This dissertation shows that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) diverse Cubans organized to support the Spanish Second Republic, overcoming differences to coalesce around a movement they defined as antifascism. Hundreds of Cuban volunteers--more than from any other Latin American country--traveled to Spain to fight for the Republic in both the International Brigades and the regular Republican forces, to provide medical care, and to serve in other support roles; children, women, and men back home worked together to raise substantial monetary and material aid for Spanish children during the war; and longstanding groups on the island including black associations, Freemasons, anarchists, and the Communist Party leveraged organizational and publishing resources to raise awareness, garner support, fund, and otherwise assist the cause. The dissertation studies Cuban antifascist individuals, campaigns, organizations, and networks operating transnationally to help the Spanish Republic, contextualizing these efforts in Cuba's internal struggles of the 1930s. It argues that both transnational solidarity and domestic concerns defined Cuban antifascism. First, Cubans confronting crises of democracy at home and in Spain believed fascism threatened them directly. Citing examples in Ethiopia, China, Europe, and Latin America, Cuban antifascists--like many others--feared a worldwide menace posed by fascism's spread. Second, despite their recent anticolonial struggle against Spain, Cubans cared deeply about its fate for reasons of personal, familial, and cultural affinity. They interpreted the Republic as a "new" Spain representative of liberation and the Nationalists as seeking return to the "old" Spain of colonial oppression. Third, pro-Republican Cubans defined antifascism in Cuban terms. People of many different backgrounds and views united around a definition of antifascism closely related to their shared domestic political goals: freedom from strongman governance, independence from neocolonial control, and attainment of economic and social justice. Radical, moderate, and even largely nonpolitical individuals and groups in Cuba found in antifascism and support for the Spanish Republic a rallying cry with broad appeal that allowed them to strengthen solidarity at home and abroad. Cubans defined antifascism in both negative and positive terms, as a movement against fascism but also toward unity, democracy, sovereignty, and justice.

This dissertation examines the practices of leisure and consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires through both intellectual and mass cultural productions. Using works by authors such as Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt together with articles, images, and texts from the Argentine mass media, I examine how national, social and civic identities were intimately tied to, and were constituted through, technologically mediated leisure practices. Sports and film spectatorship, the reception of radio and the reading popular texts were all activities that opened spaces for the rehearsal of forms of citizenship and encouraged the formation of communities and publics both in line with and contrary to the hegemonic and disciplinary mechanisms of the state.

This dissertation studies the creative practices of citizens who use cultural resources to engage in political criticism in contemporary Cuba. I argue that, in order to become visible as political subjects in the public sphere, these citizens appeal to cultural forms and narratives of self-representation that elucidate the struggles for recognition faced by emerging social actors. I examine blogs, garage bands, art performances, home art exhibits, digital literary supplements, improvised academies, and informal networks of publication that, as forms of aesthetic experimentation with stories of everyday life, disclose a social text. I suggest that their narrative choices emphasize their status as 'regular citizens' in order to distinguish themselves from both traditional voices of political opposition and institutionally accredited cultural producers--professional artists, academics, musicians. This recasts sites of cultural production as models of alternative citizenship where the concept of the political is re-imagined and where the commonplace, pejorative meaning of the term amateur is contested. On the fringes of the republic of letters, adjacent to traditional sites of cultural production, these oblique uses of culture consequently question legitimate forms of public speech. They demand that the way in which the relationship between aesthetics and politics in Cuba has been traditionally studied be reconsidered. Read in tandem with discourses against and about them from the lettered city--in literature, cultural criticism, film, and visual arts--I also follow the trope of the amateur under revolutionary cultural politics. I suggest that these contemporary voices have a contradictory genealogy in the cultural practices of the early decades of the Cuban Revolution. I try to show that these cultural practices become politically and socially significant because they try to resist--though not always successfully--cooptation by two forces: the remnant of bureaucratic, state-capitalist tendencies on one hand, and the rapid commercialization of popular culture for a foreign audience on the other. As a result, both the reconfigurations of the cultural field and the contested meanings of democracy in post-Cold War Cuba are re-examined through a reading of informal hubs of cultural production. The functions of culture in late socialism can be then comparatively studied by looking at an institutional framework in transition through the social and political subjectivities that are both expressed in, and constituted by, corresponding aesthetic practices and forms.