Recent detective novels (1985-2001) of five Chicano authors, Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava and Manuel Ramos are analyzed in relationship to Anglo-American and British detective genres, Chicano literature and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. The analysis focuses on Rudolfo Anaya's Shaman Winter, Lucha Corpi's Cactus Blood, Rolando Hinojosa's Partners in Crime, Michael Nava's Rag and Bone and Manuel Ramos' The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. Chicano detective fiction draws from Anglo-American and British detective genre formulas and can be distinguished from the Anglo-American and British detective fiction genres because of the nature of its departures from detective genre formulas. In addition to the detective genre, Chicano authors refer to various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic literatures. Chicano detective fiction is aware of popular interests in the United States: an interest in ethnic literatures, a popular interest in origin, and the popularity of the crime story or detective story in non-fiction news and fictional narratives of television and film. The five novelists utilize these contemporary popular trends in the United States in order to reach a larger readership than would otherwise be possible if any one of the three were ignored. Anglo-American and British detective fiction assumes a homogeneous readership: national and/or ethnic-racial. Chicano detective fiction does not assume that its readers are Chicano and for this reason elaborates on the origin and the community of the detective in order to facilitate the reader's identification with the investigator. Chicano detective novels integrate, under the guise of detective fiction, the stories of an ethnic experience and the origin of an ethnicity. The quest of Chicano detectives is to establish a stable environment and a stable identity, but the dialectic that ensues between the detective and his environment cannot be resolved conclusively. Their visions of stability originate from various sources that range from a homogeneous North-American ideology to a Chicano alter-ideology. Each individual novel suggests a space where the detective, his community and the nation state can entertain the romantic illusion of productive cooperation beneficial to the Chicano community.

This project explores the intersecting discourses of the "Woman Question" and the "Indian Problem" from the market revolution of Jacksonian America through the early twentieth century. It examines how Indianness was legally and culturally constructed in the nineteenth century, from Jacksonian removal policy to the strategies of allotment and assimilation in later decades, identifying both legal and figurative parallels to the status of white women. As Native peoples were effectively erased under Anglo-American law, married women were likewise dispossessed by the laws of coverture, under which the identity of the wife was absorbed into that of her husband. Both white women and Native peoples experienced a form of "civil death"--or legal nonexistence--and both were deprived of personhood under the guise of protection. For women writers, then, Indian policy provided an opportunity to contemplate fundamental questions of citizenship, of personhood and property, of national and individual identity. Incorporating a wide range of texts, from the early nineteenth-century fiction of Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick to the later nineteenth-century writings of suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage and anthropologist Alice Fletcher, this study explores the various tensions--between individual sovereignty and maternal moral authority, between the language of rights and the language of sentiment--that defined the relationship between nineteenth-century white women and their Indian others, and considers how the Anglo-American tradition of possessive individualism often prevented these women from making sense of their experience with Native cultures. This study concludes with an examination of how Native women writers responded to and made use of white women's constructions of the Indian Problem. S. Alice Callahan, author of the first known novel by a Native woman, and writer-activist Zitkala-Sa carefully constructed their stories in the terms set out by women's rights discourse, inviting a readership of white women to engage with the Indian cause as an extension of their own agenda. Ultimately, even as white women's rights activists sought to subordinate the Indian Problem or to appropriate the Indian, these Native writers found in the Woman Question a way of speaking for themselves.

The Cross-Heart People': Indigenous Narratives, Cinema, and the Western examines cycles of cinematic and literary production, public interest, and Federal Indian policy; redirects critical considerations of the "frontier myth" in the Western; and calls attention to indigenous participation and activism in the genre from the silent era onward. To this end, my study maps changing configurations of Native American and cross-racial homes in the "Indian drama" and other visual and textual forms. Such reciprocal generic influences have lent fictional narratives the authority of documentary "truth" while infusing ethnographic image-making with the conventions of frontier melodramas. I argue that indigenous filmmaking began more than half a century before most film histories acknowledge, and that intertextual relationships between early films by native directors and genres such as the ethnographic documentary and the Western were central to the development of contemporary indigenous media. Stories of cross-racial romance intersect with policies of institutional intervention in native families throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and frequently address the societal consequences of adoption, boarding school, military service, and incarceration. Individual chapters of the dissertation focus on the cinematic re-visions of James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans between 1909 and 1992; the influence of Edwin Milton Royle's 1906 stage play The Squaw Man on the silent Westerns of James Young Deer, D. W. Griffith, and Cecil B. De Mille; the invention of the "pro-Indian" Hollywood film in the context of indigenous experiences in WWII and shifting Federal Indian policies; and, in the last two chapters, the development of indigenous media through the filmmaking practices of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Victor Masayesva, and Zacharias Kunuk in the context of revisionist representations by non-native directors, from Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes (1914) to Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack (1973). The reflexive gestures in recent native-directed films--their reclaiming of tradition and their focus on the historical associations between social disruption and the manipulation of indigenous images through photographs, documentaries, and Hollywood films--critically assess and re-appropriate the colonizing logic of preservation and the primitivist tropes of the "Indian drama."

This study examines the role of social capital in the political life of Latinos in the United States. I consider the likelihood that Latinos accumulate and utilize social capital differently than the dominant political science literature has suggested. Most social capital research has examined the majority population and the participatory outcomes of their network resources. For Latinos, social capital is complicated by ethnicity. Latino social networks and political participation can occur in two different ethnic contexts: one which is exclusively Latino and one which is dominated by the majority, Anglo population. Using Robert Putnam's definition and classification of social capital, I examine how the three largest Latino national origin groups accumulate social capital and participate in the American political system. Ultimately I examine not only how much social capital exists among Latinos, but also how it functions for them. This dissertation engages in testing and building upon social capital theory by examining its five components and its bifurcated nature. This dissertation offers a full analysis of social capital presence and performance among Latinos. First I examine social capital accumulation among Latinos. Then I explore how social capital operates in the context of political participation. I find clear evidence of two types of social capital: bridge and bond. I find that Latinos are accumulating both bond and bridge social capital, and levels of political activity are highly affected by these resources. National origin, nativity, gender and language largely influence how Latinos accumulate and employ their social capital resources. Foreign born, female and Spanish dominant Latinos have their social capital more densely concentrated among co-ethnics. The implications of the differing levels of bond and bridge social capital resources in the political setting are varied. My analysis indicates that bridge social capital has consistently strong and positive effects on Latino political participation in any ethnic political context. Bond social capital generally has a positive impact on Latino participation as well, though not as consistent as bridge capital. Social capital theory does indeed help explain some of the uniqueness found in Latino political behavior.

Stalking is a complex social problem that pervades all levels of American society. Statistics established by the National Violence Against Women Survey show that Native American women are stalked at a rate at least twice that of any other racial group. A widely held belief exists that prior to colonization, stalking and domestic violence were uncommon in Native cultures. Regardless of the rates of incidence, tribal nations and families once successfully regulated issues of intimate violence in culturally specific ways. The imposition of hierarchical legal and social structures ties the hands of tribes to do what is right for their people. An approach to this problem is the empowerment of tribal entities to create and enforce culturally appropriate modes of resolution. Once tribes set about creatively utilizing the Violence Against Women Act there will be a multitude of tactics will address stalking crimes on the reservation and further tribal sovereignty.

The last in a long line of Mesoamerican cultures, the Aztecs massed in the metropolis of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco and neighboring cities in the Valley of Mexico, with bureaucracies and royal houses as cosmopolitan as those of their eventual conquerors, the Spaniards. In North America, however, tribal cultures developed organizations based not on the state, but on kin and family relations. The basis of this paper is a comparison of the values fostered by tribalism and those propounded by bureaucracy, whether Mexican or European or even Ming Chinese. The method employed is that of a series of six short pieces of original fiction (one for each of the cardinal points, one for Father Sky, and one for Mother Earth), based on research into the world-views of North American Indian cultures and tribal experiences, and which may be construed as a critique of the notion of the universality of human values.

The Makah whale hunt was one of the most heavily covered mainstream media events involving Native Americans in the 1990s. This event was characterized by active protests from environmental and animal rights organizations. The Seattle Times coverage presented the issues, conflicts, and controversies in a manner that supported the Makah tribe's efforts. Given the often-deplorable history of Native Americans and the mainstream news media, this may seem to suggest a positive development for Native American tribes. However, it is necessary to ask what factors influenced the Seattle Times decision to portray the event from a pro-Makah angle. Analyzing this coverage provides an understanding of how ideological and commercial considerations influence the news media. This thesis examines how the presentation of the legal and technical issues as well as the character and personalities of the participants was influenced by the new media's commercial and ideological priorities.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether self-esteem increases when youth are given the opportunity to learn more about themselves through increased awareness of their ethnic identity. The study investigated the impact of the Anytown program on ethnic identity and self-esteem among adolescents who participated in the Anytown program. Two instruments were used for the study: the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (1992) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965). The first hypothesis, that ethnic identity will increase when youth are given the opportunity to learn more about themselves through increased awareness of their ethnic identity was supported by the results. Statistical significance at the .01 level was determined for the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure; the ethnic identity scale; and the sub-scales of affirmation and belonging, ethnic identity achievement, and other-group orientation. The second hypothesis, that self-esteem would increase as ethnic identity increased, was not supported.

This study examines in terms of Adlerian Life Style as revealed through Early Recollections, actual and perceived Birth Order, and Family Atmosphere the personality characteristics of Korean adults adopted as infants in the United States of America. Eight Korean subjects participated in a structured, tape recorded interview. Each subject reported four early recollections and/or dreams. Transcripts of these interviews were given to a panel of expert Adlerian judges who collectively analyzed and interpreted the gathered information. A composite life style summary could be formulated by combining common themes and personality characteristics. Results indicate several common life style themes and personality characteristics. The most commonly shared attributes were expecting to be hurt, wanting to be accepted and important, and viewing others in a negative sense.

<p> Traditional policies dictate that Black-White multiracial people conform to monoracial minority status arising from Hypodescent (the "One-Drop Rule") and White privilege. Despite some social recognition of Black-White persons as multiracial, racial microaggressions persist in daily life. Subtle racist acts (Sue, Capodilupo, Torino, Bucceri, Holder, Nadal, &amp; Esquilin, 2007b) negatively impact multiracial identity development. Since 2007, studies have increasingly focused on the impact of racial microaggressions on particular monoracial ethnic groups. Johnston and Nadal (2010) delineated general racial microaggressions for multiracial people. This project examines the effects of racial microaggressions on the multiracial identity development of 11 part-Black multiracial university students, including the concerns and challenges they face in familial, academic, and social racial identity formation. Data were analyzed through a typological analysis and Racial and Multiracial Microaggressions typologies (Johnston &amp; Nadal, 2010; Sue et al., 2007b). Three themes arose: (a) the external societal pressure for the multiracial person to identify monoracially; (b) the internalized struggle within the mixed-race person to create a cohesive self-identity; and (c) the assertion of a multiracial identity. Participants experienced Racial Microaggressions (Sue, 2010a; Sue et al., 2007b), Multiracial Microaggressions (Johnston &amp; Nadal, 2010), and Monoracial Stereotypes (Nadal, Wong, Griffin, Sriken, Vargas, Wideman, &amp; Kolawole, 2011). Implications included encouraging a multiracial identity, educating the school community, and eliminating racial microaggressions and stereotypes. </p>