As intolerance against Mexican Americans and Mexican migrants persists in the United States-- apparent in the passage of Arizona State Bill 1070, Arizona House Bill 2281, and multiple English-only laws-- Chicanas and Mexicanas continue to resist by sustaining relationships and knowledge through storytelling. This dissertation employs a floating borderlands framework to explore how Chicanas and Mexicanas in the United States-Mexico borderlands use storytelling in oral and written traditions to keep cultural and regional knowledge. Floating borderlands is an interdisciplinary framework that reveals survivance, that is, survival as an act of resistance, through cultural maintenance, agency, and creativity in lived experiences. Drawing upon concepts and research from disciplines that include Mexican American Studies, American Indian Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Education, floating borderlands reveals how storytelling helps Chicanas and Mexicanas maintain an understanding of home and homelands that facilitates resistance to obstacles such as racial and gender discrimination and challenges to their right to be in these spaces. This dissertation acknowledges multiple forms of knowledge keeping by Chicanas and Mexicanas throughout the last two centuries; recognizes intersectionality; and complicates or creates multiple layers in narratives of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This project is directly informed by narratives of Chicana and Mexicana life in the borderlands. It centers oral and written traditions, including my original poetry. Key words: Chicanas, Mexicanas, border, borderlands, floating borderlands, survivance, oral traditions, written traditions, home, homelands, migration, identity, cultural maintenance, poetry, story.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of parental educational involvement, acculturation and self-esteem on the academic performance and academic aspirations of Mexican American adolescents.

This study sought to investigate the Spanish and English receptive pictorial vocabulary of four- and five-year-old bilingual Mexican-American children. The performance of bilingual Mexican-American children on the Mexican-American Inventory of Receptive Abilities--MIRA (Nelson-Burgess and Meyerson, 1975) and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test--PPVT (Dunn, 1959) was compared to that of monolingual Anglo-American children of the same relative age range and socioeconomic level.

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This person-centered ethnography focused on the ways one exemplary veteran Mexican American bilingual educator’s (MABE’s) cultural resources and professional experiences influenced her teaching practices. The study examined her life history and classroom practices to explore the trajectory of her identity making. The framework utilized in this research included a sociohistorical/sociocultural lens and Chicana/Latina feminist theories. Specifically, my research investigated the multiple spaces where a MABE navigated between an additive bilingual education model and a subtractive one. The study relied primarily on data collected from oral life history interviews augmented by participant observations at a school in a large, central Texas district. The participant, a first grade teacher with 28 years of classroom experience in the same district, was interviewed over a four-year span. Further, classroom observations occurred during a full school year. Additional interviews with educators who worked with the participant at critical moments in her professional life provided not only triangulation of information, but also a multiplicity of perspectives and foci on the educational landscapes wherein she operated. Narrative analysis of the data involved the decoding and deconstruction of a MABE’s active participation in the processes of performing and (re)presenting her identity production including being silenced and speaking up. The findings revealed a dialectic and dialogic process between personal experiences, early schooling, impositions of policies, and daily-lived classroom experience while constantly navigating and negotiating the challenges of educating culturally and linguistically diverse students. A primary finding revealed the construct of autobiographical consciousness as a MABE’s critical awareness of the historical legacy, lived experiences, and the contexts in which she teaches. The study documented silencing through marginalization, as well as establishing voice through agency to understand construction and reconstruction of identities. / text

Why are so many girls becoming pregnant in Brownsville, Texas? I encountered this question as a result of my field work. Teachers, school administrators, community officials, parents, and even students pose this question as part of a local concern over the high birth rate among Brownsville youth. As a response to this concern, I engage with this overarching research question by exploring the sex lives and romantic experiences of young mothering teens in Brownsville, through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. However, as part of a larger mission of problematizing common misconceptions and misunderstanding regarding Mexican-origin youth and their sex lives, this thesis offers a Chicana feminist/borderlands analysis of what the young women shared concerning their sexual experiences. Through their stories, I situate teen pregnancy as a symptom of a complex web of discourses, practices, social institutions, and ideologies regarding sex, thereby elucidating the socio-cultural factors that make young Mexicanas vulnerable to unprotected sex, and consequently unintended pregnancy in Brownsville, Texas. Throughout this thesis I focus on three social and personal venues that stood out as the most influential sources from which my informants learned and talked about sex: peers, mothers, and boyfriends. Contrary to the culture of silence presumed by the literature, the mothers and peers of the young respondents are quite vocal about sex; in fact, there is strong peer pressure for young women to have sex. However, they are expected to so within the context of a committed, heterosexual relationship in which young women give into male desire. This set of social expectations compels young women to have unprotected sex, but also to engage in unwanted sex. In the final chapter, I suggest how sex education can be improved and tailored to the particular needs of Brownsville youth—that is both women and men. / text

Postcolonial critiques have emphasized the need for Western psychology to become more reflective of the histories, worldviews, and lived realities of historically marginalized communities across the globe (Comas-Díaz, 2000; Duran & Duran, 1995; Pickren, 2009). These works have included the contributions of liberation psychologists who advocate for the need to privilege the knowledge systems, concerns, and perspectives of local communities when proposing avenues for psychological research, intervention, and theoretical development (Watkins & Shulman, 2008). Recognizing the legacies of colonialism in North America, U.S. psychologists working with Indigenous communities have advocated for better collaboration with grassroots elders, teachers, and community groups, noting the importance of recognizing the validity of Indigenous epistemologies and the colonizing tensions that still exist between Indigenous healing systems and Western psychology (Duran, Firehammer & Gonzalez, 2008; Gone, 2007; Gone & Alcántara, 2007). Against this backdrop, the present research was carried out as an immersive, long-term ethnographic study in collaboration with Alma de Mujer (Alma), a community of Indigenous-identified women in central Texas, who are committed to creating accessible spaces for their communities to practice Indigenous lifeways and healing. Employing reciprocal ethnographic methods, the author spent two years participating in events and gatherings with the Alma community, as well as conducting in-depth interviews. Community members were consulted on an ongoing basis about the development of the research. The document centers on four objectives: First, the author traces the history of the Alma community as it emerged from social liberation and psychospiritual healing movements over the latter half of the 20th century. Second, based on the women's stories, the author presents community members' narratives about how healing is situated within the community's Indigenous knowledge systems. Specific attention is given to the holistic and reciprocal nature of healing in these stories. Third, the author includes contributions from Indigenous healers who remark on their experiences of the tensions between Indigenous healing systems and Western mental health institutions. Fourth, the author concludes with a personal critical reflection as a trainee in Western psychology and considers how dialogues between local Indigenous communities and Western psychology might be further explored. / text

This paper traces La Llorona’s evolution from ancient Aztec cosmology to Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, a contemporary novel by Felicia Luna Lemus. I argue that the protagonist’s entrenchment in her own Llorona myth ultimately inhibits the development of a queer community in collaboration with the community of her birth. While Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties leaves the tension between familial duty and personal desire unresolved, the constant narrative oscillation between past tea parties with Leti’s grandmothers and present tea parties with Leti’s chosen lesbian familia opens a space for new kinship structures to emerge, remapping the contours of the Mexican-American family and a woman’s role within it. / text

The purpose of this study was to do a comparative analysis of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), a test of intelligence which is frequently used with Mexican American students, and its Spanish translation the Escala de Inteligencia Wechsler Para Ninos-Revisada (EIWN-R). The WISC-R was administered in English to 109 bilingual English proficient Mexican American students, and the EIWN-R was administered in Spanish to 109 other than English proficient or monolingual Spanish speakers. Language proficiency was determined according to students scores on the Language Assessment Scales (LAS). The groups were matched by sex, school and grade. Students tested were students who were referred for testing because of academic difficulties or students placed in Special Education classes who are required to be re-evaluated every three years. Using Confirmatory factor analysis, the first objective was to determine if the factor structures underlying the EIWN-R and the WISC-R are equivalent to the factor structure of the WISC-R normative population. The correlation matrices of both groups were compared to the correlation matrix of the normative population. Factor structures of the WISC-R and the normative population were found to be statistically different, while the factor structures of the EIWN-R and the normative group were not found to be different. The second objective was to determine if the subtest means of the WISC-R and EIWN-R were significantly different. To determine this, the subtest means of both groups were subjected to MANOVA. Significant differences between subtest means were found on four of the subtests. A MANOVA was also utilized for the third objective which set out to determine if significant differences in performance are present in the EIWN-R between those students who are placed in Special Education programs and those students who are not placed. So as not to confound the results, the EMR population was removed from the sample. Significant differences in the placed and the non-placed groups were found on eight of the eleven subtests. Implications of research findings are discussed as well as future trends regarding the assessment of language minority students.

This study identified factors contributing to Mexican-American student persistence in higher education. Tinto's model of student withdrawal was blended with Astin's theory of involvement in a theoretical framework that also gave special focus to hispanic and Mexican-American student concerns. The data consisted of unstructured interviews with a small sample of Mexican-American students at the University of Arizona. Content analysis was used to categorize the data and symbolic interaction theory was used for its interpretation. Findings about personal and institutional factors, were combined to understand persistence in the context of person/environment interaction. The personal factors influencing student persistence were "self," human support, financial adversity, commitment, acculturation, and gender differences; none of these factors stood alone, and each was present to some degree in each of the successful students. Commitment was the most important overriding theme in these personal factors. The institutional factors influencing persistence were academic preparation, use of student services, student/instructor interaction, and academic experiences. Symbolic interaction theory was the analytic framework used to interpret these factors of student persistence in the light of the meanings students attached to events in their college experiences. Empowering students to succeed is proposed as the organizing model for institutions to influence persistence.