This study fills a critical gap in research on the immediate postwar history of Japanese American community culture in Los Angeles and South Bay. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute research and literature of the immediate postwar period between the late 1940s resettlement period and the 1960s. During the early to mid-1940s, Americans witnessed World War II and the unlawful incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans. In the 1960s, the Sansei (third generation) started to reshape the character and cultural expressions of Japanese American communities, including their development of the Yellow Power Movement in the context of the Black and Brown Power Movements in California. The period between these bookends, however, requires further research and academic study, and it is to the literature of the immediate postwar period that this thesis contributes. Furthermore, this thesis contributes to the nearly absent literature of Japanese American community redevelopment in the transboundary Los Angeles/South Bay area. It is in this area that we find the largest and fastest growing postwar Japanese American population in the country. This community built lasting networks and relationships through the revival of cultural celebrations like Obon and Nisei Week, sport and recreation – namely baseball and bowling, and ethnic resources in the form of food and ethnic markets. These relationships laid the foundations for later social activism and the redefining of the Japanese American community. Far from a period of silence or inactivity, Japanese Americans actively shaped and reshaped their communities in ways that refused to allow the wartime incarceration experience, so fresh in their minds, to define them.

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.

Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) has traditionally been dismissed as a failed missive attempting to defend the controversial Salem Witch Trials. What is missing from this characterization is an analysis of the degree to which the text, written at a moment of crisis in Puritan culture, actually looks forward to the emergence of a democratic polity. By tracing the topical disarray and the instability of audience that Wonders presents, the beginnings of this shift--which culminate in the American Revolution eighty years later--becomes apparent. Wonders demonstrates the quiet emerging of a distinct American mindset amidst social and political upheaval in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although Cotton Mather's book did fail to unite his community in 1692, the flexible metaphors he borrowed, shaped, and refined in Wonders helped to define the nation of America. / Graduation date: 2012

Abstract Toni Morrison¡¦s Song of Solomon deals with the African Americans¡¦ history of fighting for self-independence, while exposing their difficulties in forming a viable cultural identity. Focusing on the politics of naming, the motif of flight, and the constitution of African American manhood, Toni Morrison in this novel aims to provide a different reading/writing of African American history whereupon her people can develop an alternative strategy of identification politics. In this thesis, I problematize the notion of democracy¡Vthe ordained rights of human beings to pursuit liberty, happiness and prosperity¡Vby articulating the idea of the American Dream with African Americans¡¦ experiences of self-realization in a so-called democratic society. The purpose is to discuss whether or not African Americans can reverse and utilize their marginalized position as a critical stance for self-articulation to undo the racists¡¦ misnaming on African American people. With a special emphasis on Milkman¡¦s improvisation of the meanings of his family name, Dead, I discuss how the African Americans¡¦ distinctive way of double-talk can facilitate them to negotiate the apparent dualism to inscribe their hybridized identity and how this kind of creativity can help them produce an alternative narrative of their traumatizing as well as truncated history. Also, I intend to analyze both the limitation and liability of conventional psychoanalytic paradigm which is blind to the specificity of African American manhood and the problems peculiar to African American family. Though it is an undeniable historical fact that the African Americans do suffer from the aftermath of plantation slavery, they should be able to empower themselves by re-imagining a collective ancestry as a strategy to formulate an applicable identification politics. While narrating an inspiring genealogy for her people, Toni Morrison wraps up this novel with an open ending. This arrangement suggests to her people that the significations of their cultural identities be opened to further contestation and re-definition.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : James Egan. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 237-268).

This dissertation investigates how Regional Mexican radio in the U.S. tracks and drives changes in Mexican-American identity by combining different musical genres to create composite portraits of its audiences. Regional Mexican radio, which plays a mixture of ranchera, norteño, banda, and other regional Mexican genres to target a largely working-class audience of recent immigrants, is currently the most popular Spanish-language format in the U.S. Programmers for these stations act as mediators, navigating the public relation between notions of Latino identity constructed by national Spanish-language media conglomerates and local demographics. By modifying the generic composition of their playlists to strike a compromise between the two, they both monitor and produce the sociomusical categories that distinguish their listenership. Ethnographic research at Regional Mexican radio stations in Austin and San Antonio demonstrate the role that institutional organization plays in creating programming. National conglomerates that increasingly own these stations determine the broad outline of the industry, but local programmers make most decisions about programming content. Based on a historical review of Tejano radio, I argue that the musical mixtures created by Spanish-language programmers have responded to both past and present social and economic challenges facing Mexican-American immigrants. Through detailed analysis programming at five Regional Mexican stations, I argue that each variety of music played signifies regional, generational and gendered variations of Mexican-American identity that stations combine in different proportions to reflect local listenership. I also explore the role of station-sponsored events in gathering information about listeners. Events encourage listeners to embody their status as part of the Regional Mexican audience, a concept ultimately constructed by the radio stations. Ultimately, this dissertation adds to existing literatures on Spanish-language media, radio and Mexican-American music. / text

Este trabalho explora três possíveis significados para o \"romance histórico\" Amphitryon, de Ignacio Padilla, e, a partir disso, estuda modos de interação entre história e ficção. O primeiro sentido analisa-o como um livro na história, uma obra marcante que se escreveu sob o contexto de um manifesto célebre por tentar reorganizar a tradição literária latinoamericana. O segundo sentido toma-o como um livro de história, um romance que não só se aproxima de um gênero literário afeito aos fatos historiográficos, mas que, sobretudo, articula conteúdos históricos, literários e culturais sob formas narrativas que também derivam do século passado. O terceiro sentido, finalmente, o lê como um livro da história, uma narrativa que, pela disposição de relatos e narradores, simula o próprio mecanismo do fazer histórico. Conduzindo essas argumentações estão os princípios da dialética formaabertura e da interação autor-obra-leitor, derivados de Umberto Eco, a noção de leitura e escritura como forma de conhecer, cara a Jorge Luis Borges, e o paradigma indiciário, de Carlo Ginzburg. A tentativa final é fazer de um exercício de crítica literária uma reflexão sobre a história. Para tanto, insiste-se na analogia entre verificação e interpretação de dados e as mediações livro-leitor-leituras, e adota-se a \"espiral de leituras\" historicizadas como modo operativo que aproxima discursos ficcionais e discursos históricos, esboçando-se, então, paralelos e limites nos percursos da produção historiográfica e da produção ficcional ao longo do século XX. / This work explores three possible meanings for the \"historical novel\" Amphitryon, of Ignacio Padilla, and, from this, it studies ways of interaction between history and fiction. The first meaning analyzes it as a book in history, a remarkable work that was written under the context of a manifest notable for trying to reorganize the Latin American literary tradition. The second meaning takes it as a history book, a novel that not only comes close to the historiographies facts, but, above all, it articulates historical, literary and cultural contents under narrative forms that are also drawn from the last century. The third meaning, finally, reads it as a book of history, a narrative that, for the disposal of stories and narrators, simulates the mechanism of history. As a guide line for these arguments, there are the principles of the dialectic form-opening and the interaction author-work-reader, derived from Umberto Eco, the notion of reading and writing as forms of knowledge, from Jorge Luis Borges, and the evidential paradigm, of Carlo Ginzburg. The final attempt is to make a reflection on history from a literary critical exercise. In such way, one must insist on the analogy between verification and interpretation of data and the relations bookreader- readings, and adopts the historic \"spiral of readings\" as an operative way that approaches fiction and historical speeches, and so, outlining parallels and limits in the course of the historiography and fictional production throughout the 20th century.

La presencia de dos o más lenguas en textos audiovisuales simboliza un encuentro intercultural entre realidades sociales y culturales distintas. Asimismo, en los productos audiovisuales, el multilingüismo se ha considerado como el fenómeno tanto lingüístico y social que constituye parte central en la narrativa de la trama por cuestiones identitarias o distintivas. En el contexto de la serie Gentefied (2020), el bilingüismo constituye un rasgo identitario representativo de la comunidad mexicoestadounidense asentada en Estados Unidos. Por ello, la presente investigación pretende analizar la traducción del bilingüismo inglés-español y su impacto en la representación de la identidad mexicoestadounidense en el doblaje al francés de la serie. La investigación es un estudio de caso, debido a que busca explicar y analizar el fenómeno lingüístico y de representación de identidad que se retrata en la serie. Para ello, se recurrirá a las técnicas de recolección de información como el análisis de contenido y el análisis textual contrastivo. La primera permitirá la identificación de las unidades de análisis del texto fuente en spanglish que evidencian rasgos representativos de los personajes; y la segunda, el contraste entre ellas y las unidades de análisis del texto meta en frañol. / The presence of two or more languages in audiovisual texts symbolizes an intercultural encounter between social and cultural realities. Likewise, in audiovisual products, multilingualism has been considered a linguistic and social phenomenon that constitutes a central part in the narrative of the plot due to identity or distinctive reasons. In the context of the series, bilingualism constitutes a representative identity trait of the Mexican-American community settled in the United States. Therefore, this research aims to analyze the translation of English-Spanish bilingualism and its impact on the representation of Mexican-American identity in the French dubbing of the series Gentefied (2020). The research is a case study as it seeks to explain and analyze the linguistic phenomenon and identity representation portrayed in the series. For this purpose, we will resort to data collection techniques such as content analysis and contrastive textual analysis. The former will allow the identification of the units of analysis of the source text in Spanglish that show representative traits of the characters; and the second, the contrast between them and the units of analysis of the target text in Frañol. / Trabajo de investigación

This thesis deals with the musical and dance style known as "Salsa" which roots can be traced to the Caribbean of Latin America. In this work, salsa is investigated as a global phenomenon in the local context of Prague and at the same time as a commercialized product. In terms of salsa as a global phenomenon, the work deals with the characteristics of salsa as a social dance in the local context and tries to trace its social functions. In addition to the effects of the commercialization and tropicalized ideas of salsa and Latin American cultures on its form, the thesis also touches on topics such as internal negotiation and external construction of Latin American identity (latinidad), which are related to salsa as a global phenomenon and its commercialization. The work is based on several months of ethnographic research and semi- structured interviews conducted mainly with salseros from Latin America, the Czech Republic and others, not only European countries. Key words: salsa, social dance, global phenomenon, commercialization, product, commodification of culture, Latin American identity, latinidad , tropicalization, imagination

Harlem is an emblematic neighborhood in New York City, historically perceived both as the center of African American culture and a black ghetto. This thesis explores the African American urban culture at its birth and analyzes it through the portrayals of Harlem in black literature, music, and visual art of the period. The era of the 1920s through the 1940s illustrates most distinctly the dual identity of Harlem as a cultural capital versus a ghetto as the 1920s marked a period of unprecedented cultural flowering embodied by the Harlem Renaissance, whereas the 1930s and 1940s were characterized by the Great Depression and its aftermath. During these years the living conditions in Harlem significantly deteriorated. The aim of this work is to critically analyze the period of African American cultural boom of the Harlem Renaissance years and discuss its relevance for the period in comparison to the artistic reactions to the experience of life in the ghetto. The proposed argument is that the way Harlem was depicted in African American culture and the artistic reflection of its duality characterized African American urban experience and culture in the period of 1920s through the 1940s, concentrating on the problem of urban reality in contrast with urban fantasy.