Envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) represented a bold attempt to revitalize the black freedom struggle as a movement explicitly based on class, not race. Incorporating African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and poor whites, the PPC sought a broad coalition to travel to Washington, D.C., and pressure the government to fulfill the promise of the War on Poverty. Because of King's death and the campaign's subsequent premature end amid rain-driven, ankle-deep mud and just a few, isolated policy achievements, observers then and scholars since have dismissed the campaign as not only a colossal failure, but also the death knell of the modern freedom struggle. Using a wide range of sources - from little-used archives and Federal Bureau of Investigation files to periodicals and oral histories - this project recovers the broader significance of the campaign. Rejecting the paradigm of success and failure and placing the PPC in the broader context of the era's other social movements, my analysis opens the door to the larger complexity of this pivotal moment of the 1960s. By highlighting the often daunting obstacles to building an alliance of the poor, particularly among blacks and ethnic Mexicans, this study prompts new questions. How do poor people emancipate themselves? And why do we as scholars routinely expect poor people to have solidarity across racial and ethnic lines? In fact, the campaign did spark a tentative but serious conversation on how to organize effectively across these barriers. But the PPC also assisted other burgeoning social movements, such as the Chicano movement, find their own voices on the national scene, build activist networks, and deepen the sophistication of their own power analyses, especially after returning home. Not only does this project challenge the continued dominance of a black-white racial framework in historical scholarship, it also undermines the civil rights master narrative by exploring activism after 1968. In addition, it recognizes the often-competing, ethnic-driven social constructions of poverty, and situates this discussion at the intersection of the local and the national. / Dissertation

This ethnography of spirituality explores the production of cultural practices and beliefs among a group of Texas Mexican women (Tejanas) of the post-World War II generation. These women have been involved with various social justice initiatives since the 1960s and 1970s in Texas, such as the Chicana feminist and Chicano civil rights movements. This study explains how race, ethnicity, and gender intersect and interact in these women’s geographic and spiritual borderlands to produce a pattern of change in the ways they choose to engage with religion, particularly Catholicism. While the Tejana spiritual productions examined here are in many ways distinct from the religious practices of these women’s Catholic upbringings, they also recall religious rituals and traditions from their imagined, constructed, and engaged pasts. Some women have left Catholicism for other forms of spiritual fulfillment, including earth-based, indigenous, and/or Eastern religious practices, while others have remained Catholic-identified, yet altered how they practice Catholicism. A common theme in the narratives is that of spiritual agency – the conscious decision women make to reconfigure their spiritual practices and beliefs. I explore the meaning of such acts and what they indicate about the construction of spiritual and religious identities in the borderlands. I argue that because gender structures Tejana religious experiences to such a wide extent, a critical gender analysis of religious and spiritual practices will provide deeper insight into the making of Texas Mexican culture and social relations. I examine the women’s life experiences through a methodological framework I call mujerista ethnography, which draws on oral history and research methods employed by feminist, indigenous, and Chicana/o Studies scholars. In order to further illustrate how the women’s material and spiritual needs have changed so as to require new forms of spiritual engagement, I engage in a critical self-reflection of my own spiritual journey as a Tejana raised in the Catholic faith through the use of autoethnographic research methods and testimonio. I argue that these Tejanas have extended the political, feminist, and historical consciousnesses that they cultivated in Mexican American social causes into the religious and spiritual realms. For instance, these women transferred their critique of gender politics and hierarchies of power into the social setting of organized Catholicism with new spiritual practices and understandings, effectively remaking religion and subsequently engaging in processes of self-making by changing the ways they interact with Catholicism and are affected by it. Religion, as a site of social struggle for women, is political, that is, these Tejanas transformed the spiritual into a site of resistance, resolution, and reconciliation where they disrupt and challenge hierarchies of power and create strategies for healing themselves, their communities, and the earth. / text

Den här interaktionsdesign uppsatsen bidrar till en omgående diskussion på Avkoloniserande design. Särskild genom att utforska identiteter i diaspora med latinamerikanska migranter. Mellan anpassning och total assimilation flera frågor dyker upp, om värderingar, egenskaper och vanor, och de materiella uttryck av dessa aspekter såsom de utmaningarna för interaktionsdesign och deras metoder. Resultatet är en kollektiv territorium uttryckt som en interaktiv karta som kontinuerligt vävas genom en smartphone app. Kartan fylls med minnen, låtar, matrecept och drömmar som förverkliga de identiteterna i diaspora (diasporic situatedness). Kartan är en kritisk fabulering om vad kartorna är och kan bli. Kartan vädjar till uppfattningen av den Pluriversum för att avkolonisera begreppen som hybriditet, identitet och territorium. Forskningen avgår från Chicano- och transnationella feminism, postkoloniala och avkoloniala teorier, epistemologier från Södern och kritisk design. I processens hjärta ligger den kollektiva spekulation, genom codesign metoder för att uppmuntra delade funderingar och diskussioner, med visuella och verbala resurser. En ny metod undersöker de berättande egenskaper av linjer för att väva och vandra den interaktiva kartan. / This interaction design thesis contributes to the discussion in Decolonial design, and in particular it explores diasporic identities of Latin American migrants. Between adaptation and assimilation, several questions arise: About traces, values, practices and the materialities of these aspects, as well as the challenges for Interaction design and its methods to address them.The design outcome is the concept of a collective identity territory expressed in an interactive map, that is continuously woven digitally through an app interface. The map is populated with memories, songs, recipes and dreams that materialise the diasporic situatedness. I consider it a critical fabulation on what maps can be. The contribution of the outcome appeals to the notion of the Pluriverse to decolonise the notions of hybridity, identity and territory.The research departs from the notions of Chicano and transnational feminism, postcolonial and decolonial theories, epistemologies of the South and critical design. In the center of the design process is the collective speculation, using codesign methods to encourage shared reflections through visual and verbal resources. A new method explores the narrative qualities of lines to weave and wander the interactive map.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between acculturation and aspects of family functioning (cohesion and adaptability) and family leisure involvement from Mexican-American parent, youth, and family perspectives. Acculturation of parents, youth, and families was measured using the Bidimensional Acculturation Scale for Hispanics (BAS). Family leisure involvement was measured using the Family Leisure Activity Profile (FLAP). Aspects of family functioning were measured using the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales (FACES II). Sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, generation, family size, income, and education were also used to help predict levels of acculturation for family perspectives. The sample was obtained from communities in Texas and Utah and consisted of 74 Mexican-American families, including a parent and child from each family. Differences were found in measures of family leisure involvement and family functioning between Mexican-Americans and normative samples of Anglo-Americans. Findings suggest that family leisure involvement, aspects of family functioning, and sociodemographic variables helped to predict parent, youth, and family perspectives of acculturation. The independent and sociodemographic variables also helped to discriminate levels of acculturation for parents, youth, and families. Recommendations are given for commercial and community recreation programs targeting Mexican-American families, in addition to implication for further research.

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This dissertation argues that spiritual and religious worldviews (i.e. Mexican Catholicism, indigenous spiritualities, and popular religion) have historically intersected with social and political realities in the development of Mexican origin communities of the United States. More specifically, as creative writers from these communities have endeavored to express and represent Mexican American experience, they have consistently engaged these intersections of the spiritual and the material. While Chicano/a criticism has often overlooked, and in some ways dismissed, the significant role which spiritual and religious discourses have played in the political development of Mexican American communities, I examine how the works of creative writers pose important questions about the role of religious faith and spirituality in healing the wounds of social violence. By placing literary texts in conversation with scholarship from multiple disciplines, this project links literary narratives to their historical, social, and political frameworks, and ultimately endeavors to situate literary production as an expressive cultural product. Historical and regional in approach, the dissertation examines diverse literary narratives penned by writers of Mexican descent between the 1930s and the current decade. Selected textual pairings recall pivotal moments and relations in the history of Mexico, America, and their shared geographical borderlands. Through the lens of religion and spirituality, a broad array of social discourses emerges, including: gender and sexuality, landscape and memory, nation-formation, race and ethnicity, popular traditions, and material culture. / text

In order to establish a working understanding of borders, the critical conversation must be conscious of how the border is being used politically, theoretically, and socially. This thesis focuses on the border as forcibly ensuring the performance of identity as individuals, within the context of borderlands, become embodiments of the border, and their performance of identity is created by the influence of external borders that become internalized. The internalized border can be read both as infection, a problematic divide needing to be removed, as well as an opportunity for bridging, crossing that divide. I bring together Charles Bowden (Blue Desert), Monique Mojica (Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead), and Guillermo Verdecchia (Fronteras Americanas) in order to develop a comprehensive analysis of the border and border identity development. In these texts, individuals are forced to negotiate their sense of self according to pre-existing cultural and social expectations on either side of the border, performing identity according to how they want to be socially perceived. The result can often be read as a fragmentation of identity, a discrepancy between how the individual feels and how they are read. I examine how identity performance occurs within the context of the border, brought on by violence and exemplified through the division between the spirit world and the material world, the manipulation of costuming and uniforms, and the body. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Master’s Award).

This dissertation privileges Chican@ rhetorics in order to challenge a single History of Rhetoric, as well as to challenge Chican@s to formulate our rhetorical practices through our own epistemologies. Chapter One works in three ways: (1) it points to how a single History of Rhetoric is implemented, (2) it begins to answer Victor Villanueva's call to "Break precedent!" from a singly History, and (3) it lays groundwork for the three-prong heuristic of "embodied storying," which acts as a lens for Chican@ rhetorics. Chapter Two uses embodied storying to look at how Chican@s are produced through History and how Chican@s produce histories. By analyzing how Spanish colonizers, contemporary scholars/publishers, and Chican@s often disembody indigenous codices, this chapter calls for rethinking how we practice codices. In order to do so, this chapter retells various stories about Malinche to show how Chican@s already privilege bodies in Chican@ stories in and beyond codices. Chapter Three looks at cartographic practices in the construction, un-construction, and deconstruction of bodies, places, and spaces in the Americas. Because indigenous peoples practice mapping by privileging bodies who inhabit/practice spaces, this chapter shows how colonial maps rely on place-based conceptions of land in order to create imperial borders and rely on space-based conceptions in order to ignore and remove indigenous peoples from their lands. Chapter Four looks at foodways as a practice of rhetoric, identity, community, and space. Using personal, familial, and community knowledge to discuss Mexican American food practices, this chapter argues that foodways are rhetorical in that they affect and are affected by Chican@ identities. In this way, food practices can challenge the conception of rhetoric as being solely attached to text and privilege the body. Finally, Chapter Five looks at how Chican@ rhetorics and embodied storying can affect the field(s) of rhetoric and writing. I ask three specific questions: (1) How can we use embodied storying in histories of rhetoric? (2) How can we use embodied storying in Chican@ rhetorics? (3) How can we use embodied storying in our pedagogy?