Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of History, March 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis(M.S.)--Auburn University, 2005. / Abstract. Vita. Includes survey instrument. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Boston University Graduate School, 1963.

Thesis, PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-275). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 259-275).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 761-806).

This research examined the political narratives of national leaders regarding an international border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua from 2010-2015 and the subsequent social relations in an affected border village known as Delta, Costa Rica. Based on eighteen months of qualitative and quantitative ethnographic research conducted on the binational border, this work documents political discourses about the conflicted territory, referred to as Isla Calero or Isla Portillos, through first-hand interviews with national figures and military officials central to the conflict. These discourses are then juxtaposed to the lived realities in the village through an ethnographic analysis of social relations and community happenings amid this conflict. Particular attention is paid to the patrón-peon relationship between Costa Rican farm owners and Nicaraguan migrant workers, and how this relation exists in the midst of an unprecedented influx of police, military personnel, and security infrastructure beginning in 2010. To accomplish this goal, the first section of this work provides a detailed report of the rapid changes and security developments that took place in the community of Delta, Costa Rica. An analysis of the different political discourses and narratives to justify these rapid actions follows. The local reality of how this conflict was experienced by villagers of Delta, Costa Rica comprises the second half of this work in the form of an ethnographic account of the social relations and daily interactions between landowners, migrant workers, and the National Police in the border community. The findings highlight the disconnect between national-level political narratives and local experiences of conflict and how a transborder identity supersedes constructed barriers based on nationality, race, ethnicity, language, and even notions of (il)legality.

This dissertation traces the state-directed agricultural migration of 200,000 Japanese farmers to rural Brazil in the 1920s and 30s. From its origins in late nineteenth century Japanese interpretations of German economic and colonial theory to its end in the mid-1930s under the populist Estado Novo government of Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas, my research connects this migration scheme to nation-state and empire-building projects in Japan and Brazil. Using Japanese, Portuguese, and English-language sources from archives in Japan, Brazil, and the United States, it argues that this state-directed migration scheme was an attempt by Japanese and Brazilian intellectuals and policymakers to use international migration to solve the crises of rural labor that stemmed from rapid industrialization and economic development. Japanese policymakers believed that their surplus agricultural labor could be settled in isolated Brazilian nucleos, where daily life for settlers was still dominated by Japanese cultural and government institutions. Japanese emigrants in Brazil saw themselves as imperial subjects performing service for a Japanese settler colonial project, and Japanese state institutions continued to define their everyday lives. Japanese government-produced guidebooks and migrants’ own writings in Brazil’s Japanese-language newspapers reveal how the unique circumstances of state-directed migration blurred the distinctions between migrants and colonists. In Brazil, the Japanese found themselves trapped between two competing visions of the Brazilian nation. They owed their existence there to the loose federalism of the Old Republic (1889-1930) that allowed individual Brazilian states to set their own immigration policies. Under the terms of the 1891 Brazilian Constitution, wealthy Southern states, like São Paulo, could offer land concessions to foreign immigration companies without federal oversight, meaning they were free to enact racial preferences for immigrant labor at the expense of the country’s poorer, racially-mixed citizens in the Northeast. However, when the Old Republic fell in the 1930 Brazilian Revolution, the Japanese community quickly became a racialized symbol of the old political order’s regional political and economic inequality. Influenced by new fascist governments in Europe and anti-immigrant sentiment that had swept the Western Hemisphere, the Getúlio Vargas-led Provisional Government redefined national identity and redistributed political power. Furthermore, Vargas’s expansion of participatory politics in the early 1930s merged a strain of nativism with his efforts to erase São Paulo’s regional dominance. His government limited the economic rights of non-citizens in 1932 and introduced the first national immigration policy, a strict quota, in 1934. Through an analysis of Brazilian constitutional theory and the debates surrounding the country’s first national immigration policy – which was written directly into the 1934 Brazilian Constitution – my research demonstrates how regional competition motivated and racialized Brazilian immigration policy at the expense of the country’s Japanese community. As neither Europeans nor Brazilians, the Japanese found themselves victims to more powerful political and racial ideologies in 1930s Brazil. In response to nativist efforts to close Japanese language schools in 1935 and 1936, the Japanese government attempted unsuccessfully to intervene on the community’s behalf. When news of the restrictions on Japanese Brazilian life reached Japan, the Japanese government used it to further justify its withdrawal from the international community and ramp up its colonial efforts in Manchuria. By 1937, when the Japanese settlement experiment came to an end, both the Japanese government and the Japanese in Brazil had already shifted their gaze to Manchuria as the preferred destination for surplus Japanese farmers, and Japanese government officials applied many of the same organizational techniques to facilitate agricultural emigration to Japan’s East Asian colonies.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- McMaster University, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 286-308). Also available via World Wide Web.