The purpose of this study is to examine the role and effect of higher education on Chicana's religious beliefs and practices. It has been noted by Chicana scholars Theresa Delgadillo (2003) and Jeanette Rodriguez (2004) that Chicana students negotiate their religious and cultural ways of knowing with the new environment and ideas of a University. This thesis examines how this negotiation occurs and how Chicana students understand and create their religious identity during their college years.Using short questionnaires and focus groups, twenty undergraduate Chicana women participated in this research. Major findings for this study indicate that Chicana students are attending church less (55%) and negotiating Catholicism to form and practice their own Mestiza spirituality. The women utilize a mestiza spirituality that incorporates prayer, as well as indigenous practices and beliefs to practice their faith.

Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies is a fictional depiction of three sisters who are lauded for their role in ending the supremacist, womanizing, and terror-inspiring reign of Trujillo. While, one character, Patria, seems to represent the traditional, and at times cloistered, life of a Dominican wife and mother (reflecting the Malinche and sufrida archetypes), the text also shows her transformation into one of the most vital figureheads of the revolution. I find that when she joins the revolution, she comes as a transformed Marian-figure. Unlike Ibez Gomez Vega and other feminist scholars who have categorized Patria as one torn between two ways and who chooses to replace the old ways with new ways, I argue that Patria finds a way to live pluralistically, as she inhabits the role of a revolutionized and evolved Madonna whom Gloria Anzaldua would refer to as a "new mestiza." This term changes its Aztec root "mestiza," meaning torn between ways into, a new mestiza who "copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, [who] operates in a pluralistic mode–nothing is thrust out…nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else". In doing so, she reconstructs a Marian identity by returning to the Marian and Indigenous Goddess figures whose sexuality and equality with God have been buried by centuries of patriarchal and colonial fathers. This thesis demonstrates that Patria does not have to face the rigidity of certain feminist and secular standards. As a new mestiza. Patria can live beyond the rigidity of borders, and create something new, something that is truly Patria, out of womanhood.

I investigate the ghosts in Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories, “Green Holly” and “The Happy Autumn Fields.” By blending psychoanalytic feminism and social feminism, I argue that these female ghosts are the incommensurable feminine—a feminine that exceeds the bounds of phallocentric logic and cannot be defined by her social or symbolic manifestations. An analysis of Bowen’s ghosts as actual ghosts is uncharted territory. Previous Bowen critics postulate that Bowen’s ghosts are imaginary figments or metaphors. These critics make Bowen’s stories “truthful” representations of the world, but, as such, Bowen’s ghosts become representations of the world’s phallocentric order. In contrast, I argue that these stories adopt a mestiza consciousness. Gloria Anzaldùa postulates that through a subaltern perspective developed outside of western logic, the mestiza reclaims the supernatural that exists outside of the masculine, symbolic order. The female ghosts are the feminine that Luce Irigaray explains, “remain[s] elsewhere” (76) as they live incommensurably in an alternate supernatural realm, disrupting phallic logic.

The number of Chicanx and Latinx students in U.S. public school settings increased significantly at the close of the last century and continues to increase well into the 21st century. The numbers of Chicanx and Latinx, and more specifically Chicana and Latina, high school principals, however, have remained disproportionately low. Studies that focus on leadership identities of Chicana/Latina school leaders are few. Testimonios in this study shine a light on voices of six Chicana/Latina high school principals; these leaders described their background and schooling, their career journeys, and their leadership paths. This study is informed by two theoretical frameworks: Chicana feminist epistemology (Delgado Bernal, 1998) and applied critical leadership (Cordova, 2018), which insist Chicana/Latina voices are centered and valued. In-depth, semistructured interviews encouraging reflection became the basis for six testimonios that focused on telling participants’ leadership story as authentically as possible using long, unedited quotes to preserve their unique voices. Cordova’s (2018) Mestiza Consciousness Framework provided structure to analyze and uncover themes of duality participants experienced: family as strength/challenge, leading as an insider/outsider, and trauma/resilience. Applied critical leadership principles were used to uncover common transformational leadership traits: leading with a social justice lens, high levels of reflection and self-awareness, and a focus on team-oriented servant leadership.

This study is dedicated to examine the concept of borders, geographical and otherwise, as instruments that are socially produced. It utilizes Gloria Anzaldua's theoretical framework of Borderlands theory as a set of processes that seek to attain the de-colonization of the inner self. The historical and spatial dynamics of the geographical border between Mexico and United States, largely shaped by the U.S. expansionist agenda, resulted in the Mexican lost of more than half of its territory and the subsequent stigmatization of Mexican-Americans/Chicanos as "foreign others," since they did not share with predominant Anglo-Saxons the same values, culture, religion, traditions and skin color. I argue that the later exploitation, exclusion, marginalization, and racism against Mexican-Americans/Chicanos informed Anzaldua's development of her Borderlands theory that seeks to attain liberation for any colonized identity. However, it is also my argument that the borderlands theory fails to account for meaningful political freedom since the processes that compose the theory are principally worked at the inner level, restricting the possibilities for a direct confrontation in the public sphere. / Master of Arts

While a university education is sold to students as something anyone can achieve, their particular social location influences who enters this space. Mexican American women, by virtue of their intersecting identities as racialized women in the US, have to adopt a particular identity if they are to succeed through the educational pipeline and into college. In this thesis, I explore the mechanics behind the construction of this identity at The University of Texas at Austin. To understand how this happens, I read the experiences of six Mexican American, female students through a Chicana feminist lens, particularly Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness. I discovered that if Mexicana/Chicana students are to “make it,” they have to adopt a “good student, nice Mexican woman” identity. In other words, to be considered good students, Mexican American women must also adopt a code of conduct that is acceptable to the white-centric and middle-class norms that dominate education, both at a K-12 level and at the university level. This behavior is uniquely tied to the social construction of Mexican American women as a threat to the United States because of their alleged hypersexuality and hyperfertility. Their ability to reproduce, biologically and culturally, means that young Mexican women must be able to show to white epistemic authorities that they have their sexuality and gender performance “under control.” However, even if they adopt this identity, their presence at the university is policed and regulated. As brown women, they are trespassers of a space that has historically been constructed as white and male. This results in students and faculty engaging in microaggressions that serve to Other the Mexican American women and erect new symbolic boundaries that maintain a racial and gender hierarchy in the university. While the students do not just accept these rules, adopting the identity of “good student, nice Mexican woman” limits how the students can defend themselves from microaggressions or challenge the racial and gender structure. Nevertheless, throughout this thesis I demonstrate that even within the constraints of the limited identity available to the students, they still resist dominant discourses and exercise agency to change their social situation. / text

Submitted by Giovanna Brasil (1154060@mackenzie.br) on 2017-09-27T20:53:03Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Carlos Vinícius da Silva Figueiredo.pdf: 3856031 bytes, checksum: 672d6da6ece85a2b6a650597d91b6c9f (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Paola Damato (repositorio@mackenzie.br) on 2017-10-03T14:23:10Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 Carlos Vinícius da Silva Figueiredo.pdf: 3856031 bytes, checksum: 672d6da6ece85a2b6a650597d91b6c9f (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-10-03T14:23:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Carlos Vinícius da Silva Figueiredo.pdf: 3856031 bytes, checksum: 672d6da6ece85a2b6a650597d91b6c9f (MD5) license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-08-04 / Nowadays the cultural-historical and literary context of great productivity in the U.S. has intensively promoted immigrant literatures, identities in transit, which led to the creation of a work like Borderlands/La Frontera: the new mestiza (1987), by Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa. Anzaldúa speaks about a label in particular, the Chicano literature, resulting from the cultural life of the border of Mexico - United States. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to analyze Borderlands/La Frontera in its 4th edition, celebrating its 25th anniversary, in the aspects of artistic creativity, sociocultural context and the representation of the subaltern in her narrative, as well as the design of the concept of "autohistoria" as representative of her life story, surpassing the limits of the biography, becoming the history of her own people. Complements the analysis of the corpus, the files from the collection “The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers (1942-2004)”, deposited in Nettie Lee Benson Latin American library at the University of Texas in Austin, United States. Therefore, the methodology that supports this work involves theoretical reflections and critical studies about post-colonial studies, especially concerning the works of Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin (2003), Spivak (1988), Beverley (2004) Santiago (2004), Bhabha (2000), Mignolo (2003, 2007), Hall (2008), Hawley (2001) and works of literary criticism about Anzaldúa, as Keating (2009), Cantú (2012), Fernandes (2011), Malvezzi (2010), Bowen (2010) and Torres (2001). In this way, the structure of this work involves the contextualization of the analysis of Borderlands/La Frontera, then, the relations between text vs. context, manuscripts vs. editing and publication of the work, deepening the mutual comparison of the anzalduan file and repertoire as a fundamental component for understanding the narrative Borderlands/La Frontera. Indeed, the work particularly contributes to the expansion of Anzaldúa’s reading in Brazil, covering aspects of Latin American theoretical discourse and critical analysis. / Na contemporaneidade, o contexto histórico-cultural e literário de grande produtividade nos Estados Unidos tem fomentado intensivamente as literaturas imigrantes, de identidades em trânsito, que proporcionou a criação de uma obra como Borderlands/La Frontera: the new mestiza (1987), de Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, envolvendo o surgimento de um rótulo em particular, como o de literatura chicana, resultante do solo cultural da fronteira México – Estados Unidos. Por conseguinte, o objetivo principal deste trabalho é analisar Borderlands/La Frontera em sua 4ª edição, comemorativa aos vinte e cinco anos de sua publicação, nos aspectos de criatividade artística, do contexto sociocultural e da representação tematizados em sua narrativa, bem como a concepção de “auto-história” enquanto representativo para a história de vida da escritora, ultrapassando os limites de sua biografia, tornando-se a história de seu próprio povo. Complementam o corpus de análise os arquivos da coleção The Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers (1942-2004), depositados na biblioteca Nettie Lee Benson da Universidade do Texas, em Austin, Estados Unidos. Para tanto, a metodologia que subsidia esta tese volta-se para as reflexões teórico-críticas acerca dos estudos pós-colonialistas, sobretudo as obras de Ashcroft & Griffiths & Tiffin (2003), Spivak (1988), Beverley (2004), Santiago (2004), Bhabha (2000), Mignolo (2003, 2007), Hall (2008), Hawley (2001) e ainda obras de exegese e fortuna crítica sobre Anzaldúa, como, Keating (2009), Cantú (2012), Fernandes (2011), Malvezzi (2010), Bowen (2010) e Torres (2001). Dessa forma, a operacionalização do trabalho contempla a contextualização da análise de Borderlands/La Frontera, seguida das relações de implicação entre texto vs. contexto, manuscritos vs. edição e publicação da obra, aprofundando no cotejamento do arquivo e repertório anzalduano como componente fundamental para compreensão da narrativa de Borderlands/La Frontera. Com efeito, o trabalho contribui particularmente para a ampliação da leitura de Anzaldúa no Brasil, contemplando aspectos de análise teórico-críticos do discurso latino-americano.

El propósito de la tesina presente es analizar la manera de expresar las dificultades de una identidad híbrida en dos poemas contemporáneos de dos escritoras de origen latinoamericano, Gloria Anzaldúa y Julia Alvarez. Se han analizado los dos poemas elegidos teniendo en cuenta la perspectiva de una identidad híbrida y los problemas que ello conlleva en una sociedad llena de normas y fronteras entre grupos étnicos, culturales y sexuales. Después del análisis de los poemas sigue una comparación entre los resultados de la investigación y finalmente presentamos nuestras conclusiones. El estudio muestra que a pesar de que los poemas parezcan muy diferentes se han encontrado puntos de relación, como por ejemplo la similitud de los mensajes principales de los poemas; que necesitamos aceptar las mezclas de culturas, etnias y sexos. / The purpose of this study is to analyse the expression of the difficulties with a hybrid identity in two contemporary poems written by two authors from Latin America, Gloria Anzaldúa and Julia Alvarez. The analysis of the two poems take into account the perspective of a hybrid identity and the problems that this entails in a society filled with rules, standards and boundaries between different ethnic, cultural and sexual groups.  The analysis of the two poems is followed by a comparison of the results of the investigation and ultimately is presented the conclusions. The study shows that the poems share several respects, despite that they at first seems very different. An example is the similarities of the main messages that the poems convey, that we need to accept the mix of cultures, ethnics and sexualities.

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