<p> Early European travel literature was a prominent source from which information about the New World was presented to a general audience. Geographic regions situated within what is now referred to as Latin America were particularly visible in these accounts. Information regarding the religious customs and styles of dress associated with the indigenous peoples who inhabited these lands were especially curious points of interest to the European readers who were attempting to understand the lifestyles of these so-called &ldquo;savages.&rdquo; These reports, no matter their sources, always claimed to be true and accurate descriptions of what they were documenting. Despite these claims, it is clear that the dominant Western/Christian perspective from which these sources were derived established an extremely visible veil of bias. As a result, the texts and images documenting these accounts display highly flawed and misinformed representations of indigenous Latin American culture. Although it is now understood that these sources were often greatly exaggerated, the texts and images within them are still widely circulated in present-day museum exhibitions. When positioned in this framework, they are meant to be educational references for the audiences that view them. However, museums often condense the amount of information they provide, causing significant details of historical context to be excluded. </p><p> With such considerable omission being common in museum exhibitions, it causes one to question if this practice might be perpetuating the distribution of misleading information. Drawing on this question, I seek, with this research, to investigate how early European representations of Latin American culture in travel literature may be linked to current issues of misrepresentation. Particularly, my research is concerned with finding connections that may be present with these texts and images and the negative aspects of cultural appropriation. Looking specifically at representations of Aztec culture, I consult three texts and their accompanying illustrations from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries to analyze their misrepresentational qualities, and how they differed between time periods and regions. Finally, I use this information to analyze museum exhibition practices and how they could be improved when displaying complex historical frameworks like those of indigenous Latin American cultures.</p><p>

<p> Since the mid-1970s, the indigenous ritual dance known as Danza has had a profound impact on the self-identification and concept of space in Xicana communities, but how is this practice received in the powwow space? My project broadly explores how studentorganized powwows at UC Davis, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego (UCSD), are decolonizing spaces for teaching and learning about Native American identities. Drawing on Beverly Diamond&rsquo;s alliance studies approach (2007), which illuminates the importance of social relationships across space and time, as well as my engagement in these powwows, I trace real and imagined connections between Danza and powwow cultures. Today, powwows are intertribal social events organized by committees and coordinated with their local native communities. Powwows not only have restorative abilities to create community for those who perform, attend, and coordinate them, but they are only a small glimpse of the broader socio-political networks that take place throughout the powwow circuit. By inviting and opening the powwow space to indigeneity across borders, the University of California not only accurately reflects its own native student body who put on the event, but speak to the growing understanding of "Native American" both north and south of the United States border. Ultimately, I argue an alliance studies approach to historical ethnography and community-based methodologies in music research are crucial, especially in the case of indigenous communities, who are committed to the survival and production of cultural knowledge embedded in music and dance practices.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation summarizes 22 months of field research beginning February 2015 and ending October 2016 among Nashville's undocumented Hispanic community. The goal of this project was to understand and identify the barriers this population encounters in utilizing the U.S. legal system using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Initial research consisted of formal, recorded individual and group interviews of 26 undocumented Hispanics and 15 key informants who work closely with Nashville's undocumented community. In addition, hundreds of other undocumented immigrants were observed and informally interviewed during this time. Once saturation was reached in the interviews, the qualitative prong of the research ended. All recorded interviews were transcribed and coded and various themes were identified. The qualitative data revealed eight common themes barring the undocumented community's utilization of the legal system. These were: 1) fear of deportation, 2) structural barriers, 3) cultural barriers, 4) real and perceived discrimination, 5) unawareness of legal rights, 6) unawareness of legal processes and structure, 7) lack of community empowerment, and 8) lack of specific legal self-efficacy. </p><p> To confirm the qualitative findings, a 69-item survey instrument was prepared and administered to a non-randomized sample of 350 undocumented Hispanic immigrants living in the Nashville area. The survey's quantitative data confirmed the existence of these eight barriers in varying degrees among the respondents. The survey data indicated the isolated effect of each identified barrier varied amongst individuals based on such factors as life experience, current political climate, and demographics. This research indicated that there is no lone barrier keeping the undocumented community from utilizing the U.S. legal system. Rather, it is the intersectionality of these barriers working in unison, which bars Nashville's undocumented community from utilizing the legal system.</p><p>

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The 1990s were a period of intense socio-economic upheaval in Ecuador, in part due to the numerous protests that would come to be known as the Levantamiento Indígena. Notoriously disenfranchised since the bloody conquest of the Americas, peoples of various Indigenous nationalities that reside within Ecuador fought for the constitutional recognition of the nation as both plurinational and multicultural, in order to secure intercultural public policies that would affect patterns of agrarian distribution, indigenous education, health, and overall representation. The prominence of the Indigenous movement and the revalorization of the Indigenous identity throughout Ecuador became an attractive vehicle for which to leverage for rights with the state by coastal communities that were long considered to be mestizo as opposed to Indigenous. Communities in coastal Ecuador engaged in strategic identity construction in order to capitalize on the prominence of the Indigenous identity. By adopting external markers of indigeneity, mestiza women and men engaged in a process of reindigenization as a deliberate political strategy in order to be able to demand rights from the Ecuadorian state.

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The United States often acted in Latin America as an empire. Nevertheless, there has been an obvious dissimilarity between US actions in South America and US actions in the rest of Latin America, which is illustrated by the fact that the United States never sent troops to invade a South American country. While geographic distance and strategic considerations may have played a role, they provide at best incomplete explanations for US relative absence south of Panama. The fact that the United States has had a distinct pattern of interactions with South America is thus not captured by the typical concept of Latin America. By recuperating the virtually neglected literature on regional subsystems, this dissertation maintains that researchers of inter-American relations would greatly benefit from a characterization that reflected more regional realities than entrenched preconceptions. Such a characterization would mean subdividing the Western Hemisphere in two regional subsystems: North and South America. This subdivision allows for uncovering regional dynamics that can help explain US relative absence from South America when contrasted to the remainder of Latin America. This dissertation argues that the role of Brazil as a status quo regional power in South America is the key to understanding this phenomenon. Through a historical analysis focusing on specific cases spanning three centuries, this research demonstrates that Brazil has deliberately affected the calculations of costs and benefits of a more significant US involvement in South America. While in the past Brazil has taken actions that resulted in increasing the benefits of US limited involvement in South American affairs, in more recent times it has sought to increase the costs of a more significant US presence. The concluding session considers some of the theoretical and political implications of the framework laid out by this research.

<p> The purpose of this thesis was to develop a grant proposal to fund a program at MOMS Orange County that aims to increase maternal fetal bonding during pregnancy among Latina women. A literature review was done in order to examine factors that may hinder the maternal fetal bonding during pregnancy among Latinas. The factors identified were considered in the development of the proposed program. The program would offer pregnant women living in Orange County the opportunity to learn about maternal-fetal bonding, attachment, depression, social support, and techniques for bonding with their fetus. The overall goal of the program is to educate women about factors that serve as barriers to their ability to bond with their fetus along with techniques for increasing their attachment to their fetus. Implications for social work practice and policy are discussed. Submission and/or funding of this grant were not required for the successful completion of thesis project.</p>

<p> Over the last several decades, Mexican origin immigrants have dispersed across the United States (Massey, Durand and Malone 2002). One community that has experienced particular growth in its Mexican origin population is Sunnyside, an agricultural city in the Yakima Valley. In this new destination community, Mexican origin families confront problems of gangs, violence, concentrated poverty and drug abuse, along with the challenges of surviving in a community that offers few pathways for mobility to Latinos. </p><p> In this study, I draw on 43 qualitative interviews and participant observer data to consider how Mexican origin parents, in two parent homes, go about the act of parenting in the context of Sunnyside. I query couples' parenting styles, with attention to how they develop aspirations for their children and to what models they use to inform their parenting. I look at how the structure of the community helps to perpetuate gendered parenting practices. Finally, I explore how these parenting approaches operate in the school system. </p><p> I argue that while much of the parenting that I observed deviates from that advocated by child development specialists (e.g. Baumrind 1968; 2012), the parenting was well designed to protect children from the particular forms of risk that were prominent in Sunnyside. The parenting was typically authoritarian and drew on models that families brought with them from Mexico. Other research on immigrant acculturation suggests this was probably an effective way to keep children safe by promoting selective acculturation (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Zhou 1997). The parenting, however, was ill-designed to help the children to succeed educationally. Although parents wanted their children to get an education, they could offer little direct help to their children around educational tasks. Instead, they used discipline and engaged their children in physical labor to encourage the children to want to do well in school. This descriptive study helps to demonstrate how the characteristics of one particular new immigrant destination shape family life, parenting styles and children's life chances. </p>