Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, Dec. 1919. / Typewritten (carbon copy). Bibliography: p. 234-245.

abstract: The subject of bilingual language use in the southwestern United States has been widely researched. However research pertaining to the Phoenix Metropolitan area is lacking. Studies have shown that language choice is governed by linguistic as well as social constraints (Gumperz, 1977; Poplack 1980; 1981). This study examined and compared the code-switching behaviors of two communities in the southwestern United States: Antonito, Colorado and the Phoenix Metropolitan area in Arizona. The study explored the social and linguistic factors that are said to govern code-switching behaviors such as the type of switches made (intra-sentential or single lexical switches), the position in the utterance where the switch occurs (final or other), the direction of the switch (an utterance beginning in English and ending in Spanish, or beginning in Spanish and ending in English), the gender and level of education of the participants (college or above; high school or below), the ethnicity of the interviewer (Anglo or Hispanic), as well as which of the aforementioned social and linguistic factors most favored intra-sentential switches. The study used corpus data, with four participants from each community for a total of eight interviews. Participants from each corpus were selected to control for gender, the highest level of education achieved and the ethnicity of the interviewer. The study found that in the corpora looked at, linguistic factors such as position of the switch and direction of the switch affected intra-sentential switches more than social factors, although in terms of frequencies within individual factor groups, social factors such as the ethnicity of the interviewer, and the participant's level of education were found to be significant in affecting code-switching behavior. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Spanish 2013

abstract: The characteristics of the wintertime 500hPa height surface, the level of non-divergence and used for identifying/observing synoptic-scale features (ridges and troughs), and their impact on precipitation are of significance to forecasters, natural resource managers and planners across the southwestern United States. For this study, I evaluated the location of the 500hPa mean Pacific ridge axis over the winter for the period of 1948/49 to 2011/12 and derived the mean ridge axis in terms of location (longitude) and intensity (geopotential meters) from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis dataset. After deriving a mean ridge axis climatology and analyzing its behavior over time, I correlated mean location and intensity values to observed wintertime precipitation in select U.S. Climate Divisions in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico. This resulted in two findings. First specific to the 500hPa ridge behavior, the ridge has been moving eastward and also has been intensifying through time. Second, results involving correlation tests between mean ridge location and intensity indicate precipitation across the selected Southwest Climate Divisions are strongly related to mean ridge intensity slightly more than ridge location. The relationships between mean ridge axis and observed precipitation also are negative, indicating an increase of one of the ridge parameters (i.e. continued eastward movement or intensification) lead to drier winter seasons across the Southwest. Increased understanding of relationships between upper-level ridging and observed wintertime precipitation aids in natural resource planning for an already arid region that relies heavily on winter precipitation. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Geography 2013

This dissertation analyzes the interactive relationship between narrative and spatiality in contemporary novels and films set in the southwestern region of the United States. While space and place have sometimes been regarded as static backgrounds of narrative events, what supports the entire study is the view of spatiality as an essential constitutive element of every fictional narrative and as a dynamic product of intersecting relations observed at the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual levels. In Larry McMurtry’s and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, the circular pattern repeated in the narrative prevents it from developing into a Bildungsroman and constructs a claustrophobic space, which can be opposed to the open space of freedom often identified with the West. Max Evans, in Bobby Jack Smith, You Dirty Coward!, constructs a parodic post-Western narrative and remaps the mythic West by juxtaposing various social relations that have often been repressed in classic Westerns. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead merges historiography with cartography in its attempt to retrieve the fragmented past and construct a space in which everything converges in the present. While the narrative space of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing emerges as a meshwork of intersecting lines of narrative that is always in the state of becoming, McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and its film adaptation by Joel and Ethan Coen create a closed space of which there is no way out by mapping the narrative space with various signs, signals, and traces that always point at what remains off the map. And the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada are an uncanny space in which the familiar and the strange, the homely and the unhomely, and the real and the imaginary become inseparable. By juxtaposing these heterogenous fictional cartographies, this study aims to map the polyphonic narrative space of the contemporary Southwest. The reading of individual texts here is partly informed by theories of spatiality developed in various fields. This study hopes to situate itself in the growing interdisciplinary field of literary geography as well as to make a contribution to the understanding of the individual works.

The maintenance, performance, and practice of Mexican music formed part of a resistance effort against cultural, political, economic, gendered, and geographic marginalization throughout the course of the twentieth century in Tucson, Arizona. This project defines iconic, popular Mexican music as música cósmica, a term inspired by José Velasco’s raza cósmica, and which refers to the music’s role as a unifying cultural expression for individuals of Mexican descent in Tucson and other diaspora communities. This project draws from new and archived interviews, newspapers, recorded performances, radio programs, and other ephemera of Tucson’s musical past to outline how la música cósmica formed part of an organic cultural expression of the people of the U.S. southwest, one that informed and was informed by the corpus being developed and promoted out of Mexico City. The process of maintaining la música cósmica in Tucson as a source of collective identity and resistance involved a deep commitment to maintaining musical places, spaces, and talents in the face of political, social, and geographic marginalization, including the physical destruction of Mexican homes and businesses in the name of urban renewal. Community leaders and music teachers viewed the teaching of música cósmica to Tucson youth as part of a social justice educational revolution, yet to teach the music they first had to overcome the internalization of anti-Mexican sentiment that viewed Mexican cultural expressions as inferior and overtly feminine. They reclaimed pride in this marginalized identity, the feminized fatherland or madre patria, through reframing the interpretation of the music as a cultural expression requiring precision, excellence, and that held monetary value. Music teachers employed a commitment to excellence and an insistence on paid performances to transform the perception of the music from that of an expression of inferior culture to one worthy of pride, respect, and admiration. Tucsonans approached the teaching and performing of la música cósmica with a profound sense of duty, one that inspired heroic acts of dedication and united Tucsonans of Mexican descent in spite of otherwise deep and painful divisions over political ideologies, popular tastes, skin color, personal experience, and the process of social change. The deep scar left by urban renewal, neighborhood demolition, and family relocation left many bitter divisions among members of Tucson’s community of Mexican descent. Nonetheless, la música cósmica continued to play a unifying role, and Tucsonans came together across these differences to ensure its survival, and to ensure their own cultural survival in the city´s public narrative as a result. By the 1980s, Tucson boasted numerous youth mariachi programs and hosted the first annual International Mariachi Conference, converting a city that continued to struggle with its collective identity into a global center for the teaching and performing of Mexican music.

the problem with which this investigation deals is that of internal migration among Mexican-Americans living in the Southwest. Four factors, life cycle, family status, socioeconomic status, and housing and their effects on migration are considered.

The tectonic region that encompasses Southwestern Montana is a petrologically complex area containing several batholiths and thrust faults, underlined by Precambrian basement rock and capped by sedimentary rocks. Intrusive volcanism of Southwest Montana best represented by the Pioneer and Boulder batholiths is a product of the eastward subduction of the Farallon Plate underneath the North American Plate during the Mesozoic time. Geochemical modeling made evident that the Pioneer and Boulder batholiths have a comagmatic relationship. This conclusion is derived from variation, spider and REE diagrams along with petrographic and geochemical models. The intrusion of these batholiths is likely related to the emplacement of a detached portion of the Idaho batholith known as the Sapphire block. Future models that are outside of the scope of this research must consider the evidence proposed in this document to produce an overarching model for the intrusion of the Pioneer and Boulder batholiths in the incredibly dynamic tectonic setting of the Mesozoic.

abstract: The Desert Southwest has no shortage of representations in literature, art, and film. Its aesthetics—open horizons, strange landscapes, and vast wilderness—inform and saturate the early Western films of John Ford, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and continue in today’s popular imaginations. My work acknowledges such contributions and then it challenges them: why are those names more widely associated with the Southwest than Luis Alberto Urrea, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, or Pat Mora? The project intersects the environmental humanities, critical theory, and cultural studies with the Desert Southwest. It explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders, and languages, as well as nonhuman forces and intensities like heat, light, and distance. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void or wasteland, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality of desert place. My work is interdisciplinary because the desert demands it. It begins with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian in order to reorient readers towards the rupture of the US War With Mexico which helped set the national and cultural borders in effect today. I then explore Denis Villeneuve’s film Sicario to emphasize the correlation between political hierarchy and verticality; those who can experience the desert from above are exempt from the conditions below, where Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood take place. The novels expose the immanence and violence of being on the ground in the desert and at the lower end of said hierarchies. Analyzing Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Mora’s Encantado enables what I term a desert hauntology to produce a desert full of memory, myth, ancestors, and enchantment. Finally, the project puts visual artists James Turrell and Rafa Esparza in conversation to discover a desert phenomenology. The result is an instigation of how far is too far when decentering the human, and what role does place-based art play in creating and empowering community. John Ford was from Maine. Georgia O’Keeffe, from Wisconsin. Edward Abbey, Pennsylvania. As someone born and raised in the Desert Southwest, I’ve written the project I have yet to encounter. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2020

The dissertation is a collection of creative and non-fiction work, including a novel with critical introduction, four short stories, and three essays. The novel is a modern day Grail quest that takes place primarily in the Southwestern United States. The short stories are mostly set in the southwest as well, and take for their topic what Paul Fussel refers to as "hope abridged." The essays are non-fiction.

A city requires the architecture that comprises it to stitch together its urban fabric, creating connections between various, potentially disconnected, parts. Architecture mediates its surrounding public and open spaces, including plazas, streets, and parks. To fully understand a site of a future development, it is first important to understand the current and future conditions of the area within which the site is located, and in some cases its historical context as well. Only then can designers produce architecture that responds to and provides for its urban context for current and future generations. By studying the current, historic, and future contexts of Banneker Overlook, this thesis was developed by a thorough understanding of its site as a means of influencing the program and future architectural design. Banneker Overlook in its current state is a disconnected urban park in Southwest Washington, DC, originally intended as a connection point between two parts of the city. The purpose of this thesis is to reconnect the higher L'enfant Promenade with the lower Maine Avenue and Southwest Waterfront by means of the architecture and exterior public spaces. The program chosen for the site is a large public museum called the National Museum of the American People. It will "tell the story of ALL of the American People from prehistoric times to the present" (National Museum of the American People).  A large cultural building was used because of its capability to pull Washington residents and visitors to a single location coming from various, possibly disconnected, parts of the city. As a product of the site conditions, this thesis along with its site and building program became a study of creating connections of places, spaces, ideas, and people over time and space in an attempt to understand how architecture could represent this idea at both an urban and building scale. All of these ideas can be represented in our original national motto: E Pluribus Unum, "Out of Many, One." / Master of Architecture