This thesis explores the storytelling strategies utilized by Mexican migrant workers and their families. Through the use of autoethnography, I examine how these storytelling strategies are created and how they function. Juxtaposing formal and informal interviews of my immediate family with my own personal narrative, I identify five Mexican storytelling archetypes: la llorona, el machismo, el güero, el patrón, and el indígeno. Using a methodological framework provided Kristin Langellier and Eric Peterson, I analyze how these storytelling strategies are used to sustain cultural norms and create family identity. Finally, I discuss a performance I created titled “30 Days: A Story of Confinement” that staged conceptualizations of these storytelling strategies.

Looking for best teaching practices has always been an important issue for educators. Teacher education programs, school districts, and researchers have gone to great lengths to train teachers to teach "better." Yet, students are still not performing well in school, specifically minority students. The achievement gap and dropout rates only get larger between Latino students and their White peers. According to National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES, 2002), in the United States the drop out rate for Latino students is 23.8% compared to 6.8% for White students. With such disparities occurring, what is being done to address this large, under-performing population? What do Latino students need in order to succeed in the American school system? One of the known ways to help Latino students succeed is culturally responsive teaching (Banks, 2006). Are culturally responsive teaching practices the best pedagogical approach for Latino students? And if so, do teachers understand what these practices entail? This inquiry was a qualitative study highlighting the teaching practices of three self-identified culturally responsive teachers working in an inner-city school that is predominately populated by low performing Latino students. This study involved observations and interviews with three teachers and employed ethnographic methods highlighting not only what culturally relevant teachers in classroom practices with Latino students, but also how these practices help teachers' efficacy improve.

In contrast to the municipalities across the United States that restrict migration and criminalize the presence of immigrants, Philadelphia is actively seeking to attract immigrants as a strategy to reverse the city’s limited economic and political importance caused by decades of deindustrialization and population loss. In 2010, the population of Philadelphia increased for the first time in six decades. This achievement, widely celebrated by the local government and in the press, was only made possible through increased immigration. This dissertation examines how efforts to attract migrants, through the creation of localized policy and institutions that facilitate incorporation, transform assertions of citizenship and the dynamics of race for Colombian migrants. The purpose of this research is to analyze how Colombians’ articulations of citizenship, and the ways they extend beyond juridical and legal rights, are enabled and constrained under new regimes of localized policy. In the dissertation, I examine citizenship as a set of performances and practices that occur in quotidian tasks that seek to establish a sense of belonging. Without a complex understanding of the effects of local migration policy, and how they differ from the effects of federal policy, we fail to grasp how Philadelphia’s promotion of migration has unstable and unequal effects for differentially situated actors. This becomes evermore salient as increased migration wrought through local policy efforts guarantees that Philadelphia will continue to uneasily shift away from its Black-White racial polarity. Second, I explore how the racialization of Colombians is transformed by the dynamics of localized policy in Philadelphia, where their experiences of marginalization as Latinos belies the construction of immigrants as a highly valued group, and shaped by the particularities of Colombian history, the imperial nature of US-Colombia relations, and shifting geopolitics among Latin American nations. The dissertation highlights how Colombians seek to meaningfully distinguish themselves from other Latinos by examining the ways changes in Latin America have shaped and continue to shape the politics of race in the US, and thus how Colombians navigate and produce the boundaries between groups. The dissertation contextualizes Colombian migration within three significant shifts in the contemporary US.: 1) the increasing attempts of states, municipalities and cities to craft their own immigration policies, specifically declining cities attempting to rebound from population loss and deindustrialization, 2) the emergence of Latinos as the largest demographic minority group and their increasing heterogeneity with respect to race, legal status, class and national origin and 3) heightened attention to citizenship as legal status and performances and practices of belonging. This research contributes to the theorization of racial formations and citizenship by providing critical information about local immigration policies as transforming intra- and inter-group relations, thus offering an analysis of Philadelphia as a new immigrant destination. / Anthropology

This thesis explores the impact of Latinidad in Latino political participation, especially in regard to voting behavior. Although Latinos often have been portrayed as a decisive electoral group, the reality is they have not fulfilled the expectations imposed upon them. Therefore, I argue Latinos with different levels of group consciousness will engage differently in politics, which affects the voting statistics of the ethnicity in Censuses, reports and surveys. The use of pan-ethnic terms and the constant stereotypes of Latinos all being “the same,” has caused separation rather than cohesiveness within the minority group, which has resulted in low political engagement. I propose that those Latino immigrants and their descendants who do not have a strong attachment to the pan-ethnicity will behave differently than those who identify themselves in pan-ethnic terms. Consequently, I have come to wonder how Latinidad impacts those who are not part of the main Latino subgroups —Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans— and have been denominated the “other Latinos” when engaging in politics? South Americans, Central Americans, and Caribbean immigrants have been smashed into a group where they do not occupy a significant place. I suggest that differences in country of origin will have an impact on how Latin American immigrants will participate in American politics. To test my hypothesis, I have made a secondary analysis of existent literature. This analysis includes crosstabulations of data obtained from the 2012 National Survey of Latinos, conducted by the Pew Research Center. Through the analysis of the data and the existent literature, I have concluded that the pan-ethnic terms are not strongly entrenched in Latino’s regular use of identity. Respondents mostly said to not have a preference for either term, still their vote intention was high. Differences are noticeable among Latinos/Hispanics that have different ancestries, however, these are sometimes stabilized by citizenship. The data proved that the identity categories used for surveys directed at Latinos/Hispanics are not specific enough, given that a considerable percentage of participants were confused about how to classify themselves, which altered the results. This current study will contribute to the work of Latino studies, that for more than 50 years have tried to get to know those who make up the Latino community, by approaching identity and Latino politics from a different perspective. A perspective where those called Latinos/Hispanics can identify themselves instead of being randomly categorized.

This dissertation is a multidisciplinary study that brings together the fields of literature, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies in order to understand the motivation and meaning of English-Spanish codeswitching or language alternation in Latino literature produced in the United States. Codeswitching was first introduced in Latino literature around the time of the Chicano Movement in the 1970s and has been used as a distinctive feature of Latino literary works to this day. By doing a close linguistic analysis of narratives by four different authors belonging to the largest Latino communities in the country (Chicano, Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, and Cuban Americans), this study examines whether codeswitching is used as a mere decorative element to add ethnic flavor, performs a mimetic role of oral codeswitching, or responds to a political strategy. To reach representative conclusions, the political, social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of each community are studied in order to establish commonalities or differences in the experiences of these immigrant communities in the United States and how these experiences inform their writing. Considering the negative views held by speakers of both English and Spanish regarding the use of oral codeswitching, the need to study its use in literature is compelling. To that end, I have adopted social, and sociolinguistic theories to identify whether codeswitching operates as linguistic and symbolic capital in Latino literature, which authors may profit from to advance a Latino agenda. This work concludes that how codeswitching is used in Latino literature and the goals it ultimately achieves—if any—hinge on the positioning of the authors vis-à-vis hegemonic English monolingualism and their own experience as members of the Latino community to which they belong. Thus, the role of codeswitching may indeed be solely ornamental or ethnic or it may be a political one; that of expanding the space in which Latinos are allowed to operate. The narratives studied include Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima (1972), Esmeralda Santiago’s When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).

Immigrant incorporation in the United States has been a topic of concern and debate since the founding of the nation. Scholars have studied many aspects of the phenomenon, including economic, political, social, and spatial. The most influential paradigm of immigrant incorporation in the US has been, and continues to be, assimilation, and the most important place in and scale at which incorporation occurs is the neighborhood. This dissertation captures both of these integral aspects of immigrant incorporation through its consideration of three dimensions of assimilation – identity, trust, and civic engagement – among Latin American immigrants and American-born Latinos in Little Havana, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood in Miami, Florida. Data discussed in the dissertation were gathered through surveys and interviews as part of a National Science Foundation-funded study carried out in 2005-2006. The combination of quantitative and qualitative data allows for a nuanced understanding of how immigrant incorporation is occurring locally during the first decade of the twentieth century. Findings reveal that overall Latin American immigrants and their American-born offspring appear to be becoming American with regard to their ethnic and racial identities quickly, evidenced through the salience and active employment of panethnic labels, while at the same time they are actively reshaping the identificational structure. The Latino population, however, is not monolithic and is cleaved by diversity within the group, including country of origin and socioeconomic status. These same factors impede group cohesion in terms of trust and its correlate, community. Nevertheless, the historically dominant ancestry group in Little Havana – Cubans – has been able to reach notable levels of trust and build and conserve a more solid sense of community than non-Cuban residents. With respect to civic engagement, neighborhood residents generally participate at rates lower than the overall US population and ethnic subpopulations. This is not the case for political engagement, however, where self-reported voting registration and turnout in Little Havana surpasses that of most benchmarked populations. The empirical evidence presented in this dissertation on the case of Latinos in Little Havana challenges the ways that identity, trust, and civic engagement are conceptualized and theorized, especially among immigrants to the US.

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