This autoethnography narrative examines my journey as a first-generation Mexican immigrant woman from birth, through completion of the doctorate degree at California State University, San Bernardino. The purpose in writing this autoethnography is to present a personalized account of my experiences growing up, in communicating between two languages, the structural and personal motivators behind maintaining a heritage language (Spanish), and to reflect, in my experience, how I have negotiated with multiple social identities, including ethnic, academic, and bilingual identities. In this self-study, I bring the reader closer to Mexican-American identity, language, and culture. Specifically, this qualitative analysis of Spanish Heritage Language (SHL) and identity will examine the following questions: a) How did I perceive and negotiate my bilingual identity?; b) What obstacles did I face when speaking English, Spanish or both?; c) What role does SHL have in identity development? I have chosen a qualitative approach, specifically an autoethnography, to answer these questions in order to add to existing literature rooted in the lived experience of Spanish heritage language maintenance. This approach allows me to be the researcher, subject, and narrator of the study, and allows me to reflect on my education as a bilingual and bicultural immigrant student. The autoethnographer’s subjective experiences (my stories) become the primary data and encompass looking at a culture through the lens of the researcher. While searching for themes written in vignettes, my journey is an account of two worlds, which coexist, in the infinite intricacy of language learning, speaking, thinking, and being.

The growing number of minority populations living in the United States makes it mandatory that all health care organizations seek to be culturally sensitive. There is no consensus on the definition of the term cultural sensitivity. The goal of this thesis is to define what cultural sensitivity means in a rural health center, from the perspective of the staff as well as the Hispanic patient. Anthropological methods, such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival data analysis, show that the qualities that Hispanic patients value in a clinic are 1) attention, 2) availability of Spanish language, 3) financial assistance, 4) solution to their health problems, 5) presence of Hispanics around the clinic, and 6) clinic services. Furthermore, 90% of staff responses indicate acceptance and respect of patients health beliefs and practices. Results demonstrate that while the clinic is culturally sensitive, there are a few recommendations that would improve the quality of care that Hispanics receive. Based on the results of the data collection, a practical model for other rural health centers to build upon a culturally sensitive health care system is developed.

The present study modified an intervention known as the expressive writing paradigm to assess its efficacy in reducing academic worry, general anxiety, and general psychological distress in a sample of Mexican origin college students. Traditionally, the expressive writing paradigm involves having participants write about a topic of concern for 15 consecutive minutes, 3 consecutive days, without attending to details about grammar or punctuation. The aim of the present study was to modify the writing paradigm into a more structured, problem-focused writing intervention and to assess whether this modification would facilitate the reduction of Latino participantsí academic worry and produce a reduction of their overall worry and psychological distress. The expressive writing paradigm was modified by incorporating components of cognitive behavioral therapy, and specifically cognitive restructuring, into the new writing intervention. It was hypothesized that by combining the writing paradigm and cognitive restructuring techniques, the benefits derived from the expressive writing paradigm would likely be enhanced. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions ñ the traditional writing paradigm (TWP) condition, the structured writing intervention (SWI) condition, or to a control group condition. This study also assessed the relation of level of acculturation and traditional Mexican family values on the efficacy of the treatment interventions. Assessments were conducted at pre-treatment, post-treatment, two week follow-up, and one month follow-up. Results indicated that the TWP condition outperformed the SWI condition at post-treatment in reducing overall psychological distress. However, these effects did not last at follow up assessments. Additionally, family value scores served as a moderator of treatment effects. The results of this study highlight the importance of conducting culturally-informed intervention research to assess the validity of the assumption clinicians currently use to guide their treatments. These findings also highlight the importance of focusing on patients' values when formulating treatment interventions. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. / text

This dissertation is a qualitative study that focuses on ten pre-service teachers as students in an undergraduate teacher preparation program at a 4-year university in Texas and follows four of them into the classroom as novice teachers. The primary data consists of paired (auto)biographical dialogues, oral (her)story interviews, ethnographic classroom observations, and participant interviews. Cross-cultural insights provided by this work aim to inform multicultural approaches to teacher education and novice teacher induction by providing tools for identifying and integrating the cultural resources of maestras in school contexts. Participants in this study learn to become maestras in the home at an early age by contributing to the household and caring for others in various ways, including as bicultural brokers, translators, surrogate parents, and by tutoring relatives, family friends, and neighbors. The term maestra includes both Latina bilingual education pre-service (student) teachers and Latina novice (first- and second-year) teachers. Analysis indicates that the maestras draw upon their "funds of knowledge" or cultural resources as they formulate their philosophies of education in making decisions about majoring in bilingual education. This study also found that they relate their "pedagogies of the home" or cultural strategies for survival and lived experiences to the academic theories learned at the university and the knowledge gained through their classroom student teaching as they decide whether or not to pursue a career as bilingual education teachers after graduation. I argue that maestras are receptive to becoming critically conscious educators as they articulate their situatedness as gendered, raced, and classed Latinas. However their situatedness is not integrated with their teacher preparation or their novice teacher induction. U.S. public school culture does not understand or facilitate processes for maestras to create transformative practices. Thus the maestras in this study create their own on-the-ground consciousness raising. Implementing opportunities for maestras to uncover, reflect, discuss, and act upon their varied perspectives allows them to formulate culturally sensitive pedagogies for affirming diversity at every level in schools and in the larger society. Retaining highly qualified maestras is critical to increasing Latina/o students' opportunities for academic access and success through the Pre-K--16 educational pipeline. / text

This qualitative dissertation study examined the ways that nine gifted, bilingual Mexican/Mexican-American students negotiated paradoxes in their academic, linguistic, and cultural identities in a public high school in a large, south central Texas city. One theoretical lens, Critical Race Theory/Latino Critical Race Theory (CRT/LatCrit) was combined with phenomenological research methods to privilege the students' perspectives during the data collection process. An additional theoretical lens, the concept of Figured Worlds, was used to contextualize the setting, Chase High School. Both CRT/LatCrit and Figured Worlds were used to analyze interview, classroom and field observation, participant, school, and district artifacts, federal, state and local data collected over ten months of study. The investigation revealed that the participants braided the domains of community cultural wealth -- aspirational, navigational, linguistic, social, resistance, and familial capital -- into practices that grounded them in their bilingual, bicultural Mexican/Mexican-American identities as successful students. / text

El Plan de San Diego is the name of an important document in Texas history, but the document and surrounding history is usually discussed with little or no reference to the town of San Diego, Texas, the people who lived there, or the cultural landscape. The Plan de San Diego is an unsuccessful rebellion that is one of the few documented irredentist revolts in U.S. History, it is also a written document calling for return of lands in a multi-ethnic call to arms advocating the recovery of territory by people of Mexican descent in 1915, named for the town San Diego, TX. After the discovery of this Plan, Mexican-Americans were persecuted, violently suppressed, and murdered: 300-5,000 people of Mexican descent died violently following the discovery and publication of the Plan de San Diego in what historians have called the “Bandit Wars”. San Diego, Texas residents and the entire U.S.-Mexican borderlands changed after the discovery of the Plan. My research investigates the political landscape and changes in material and cultural assemblages during and after the Plan, examining how descendant communities retained ties to place and remembered this event in the community of San Diego. Archival research, Historical archaeology and media representations of San Diego explore expose the everyday lives, settlement patterns, and subsistence strategies of the residents of San Diego before and after 1915, showing the material and social effects of the failed rebellion. The socio-political landscape that helped create Mexican-American culture in San Diego is a silenced, violent, and misunderstood chapter of Texas history that shapes the current borderlands and contributes important insights into the study of sites of rebellion and retaliation worldwide. / text

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