abstract: ABSTRACT Students who drop out of high school experience lower incomes and greater unemployment and are at higher risk of becoming part of the adult corrections system and of needing public assistance. Historically, Latino/a youth, particularly Mexican American youth, have been at particularly high risk for underachievement and dropping out of high school. Because Latino/as are the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, their struggle in education means a larger, undereducated work force. In spite of demographic factors such as poverty, language barriers, and discrimination that potentially can adversely impact the success of the children of Mexican immigrant parents, some of these parents are taking steps to help their children succeed in high school and to enter college. While parental involvement has been generally linked to improving students' outcomes and attitudes toward school, few studies have focused on minority parents, particularly Latino/as. Even fewer have conducted qualitative studies to develop a deeper understanding of parents' beliefs, values, and actions taken to help their children. Through semi-structured interviews and grounded theory analysis, this qualitative study investigated how and why Mexican immigrant parents help their children succeed in school. Six themes emerged from the data: 1) parents' motivations stem from childhood adversity, the belief that there are opportunities in the U.S. for people who succeed academically, and unrealized dreams to pursue their own education; 2) parents' actions primarily included behaviors at home; 3) the influence of "La Familia" (the protective force of the family); 4) the influence of discipline; 5) the influence of teachers and principals who recognized and supported their children's academic success; and 6) the influence of the children themselves. Despite variations in educational attainment and income levels, the parents' values, beliefs, and actions were similar to each other and reflect their Mexican cultural upbringing. By developing a deeper understanding of the parents' beliefs, values, and actions, more culturally informed and strength-based, parent-involvement approaches can be developed for similar Mexican immigrant parents. Implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are explored. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.C. Counseling Psychology 2014

The maintenance, performance, and practice of Mexican music formed part of a resistance effort against cultural, political, economic, gendered, and geographic marginalization throughout the course of the twentieth century in Tucson, Arizona. This project defines iconic, popular Mexican music as música cósmica, a term inspired by José Velasco’s raza cósmica, and which refers to the music’s role as a unifying cultural expression for individuals of Mexican descent in Tucson and other diaspora communities. This project draws from new and archived interviews, newspapers, recorded performances, radio programs, and other ephemera of Tucson’s musical past to outline how la música cósmica formed part of an organic cultural expression of the people of the U.S. southwest, one that informed and was informed by the corpus being developed and promoted out of Mexico City. The process of maintaining la música cósmica in Tucson as a source of collective identity and resistance involved a deep commitment to maintaining musical places, spaces, and talents in the face of political, social, and geographic marginalization, including the physical destruction of Mexican homes and businesses in the name of urban renewal. Community leaders and music teachers viewed the teaching of música cósmica to Tucson youth as part of a social justice educational revolution, yet to teach the music they first had to overcome the internalization of anti-Mexican sentiment that viewed Mexican cultural expressions as inferior and overtly feminine. They reclaimed pride in this marginalized identity, the feminized fatherland or madre patria, through reframing the interpretation of the music as a cultural expression requiring precision, excellence, and that held monetary value. Music teachers employed a commitment to excellence and an insistence on paid performances to transform the perception of the music from that of an expression of inferior culture to one worthy of pride, respect, and admiration. Tucsonans approached the teaching and performing of la música cósmica with a profound sense of duty, one that inspired heroic acts of dedication and united Tucsonans of Mexican descent in spite of otherwise deep and painful divisions over political ideologies, popular tastes, skin color, personal experience, and the process of social change. The deep scar left by urban renewal, neighborhood demolition, and family relocation left many bitter divisions among members of Tucson’s community of Mexican descent. Nonetheless, la música cósmica continued to play a unifying role, and Tucsonans came together across these differences to ensure its survival, and to ensure their own cultural survival in the city´s public narrative as a result. By the 1980s, Tucson boasted numerous youth mariachi programs and hosted the first annual International Mariachi Conference, converting a city that continued to struggle with its collective identity into a global center for the teaching and performing of Mexican music.

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the problem with which this investigation deals is that of internal migration among Mexican-Americans living in the Southwest. Four factors, life cycle, family status, socioeconomic status, and housing and their effects on migration are considered.

The traditional Bildungsroman that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th Century embodied the concept of progress and the belief in the Enlightenment ideals of universality, knowledge and the search for truth. In the classic model of the genre the values of the society represented, those of modernity, are ultimately legitimized. In this dissertation, I argue that the female Bildungsroman of Ángeles Mastretta and Carmen Boullosa respond to a fundamentally postmodern aesthetics and ideological framework. In their novels, “Arráncame la vida” (1985), “Antes” (1989), “Mal de amores” (1995) and “Treinta años” (1999), the Mexican writers challenge the legitimacy of the modern ideals of progress and individual maturity that characterized the traditional, European, male Bildungsroman. These texts reject the essentialist and utopian representation of progressive personal growth and achievement that would invariably lead to a fixed state of maturity. My study of Mastretta’s and Boullosa’s representations of the Bildung process draws on postmodern theories such as those proposed by Jean-François Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon and Zygmunt Bauman, among others. Their protagonists’ subversive and contestatory attitudes toward many of modernity’s most disseminated master narratives –the traditional concept of maturity, of a coherent sense of self and of childhood and adolescence as steps toward a definitive personal identity, suggest a revision of the traditional principles of the genre. In the context of contemporary Mexican society, these texts ultimately suggest the inadequacy of the conventional form of the coming of age novel to represent the process of individual development. In postmodern Mexico, as this study demonstrates, the referents of modernity have lost their hegemonic value and therefore, the conventional model of the coming of age novel must be reinvented. The implications of the novelists’ reconceptualization of the genre are twofold; on the one hand, it suggests an emancipatory defiance of the modern concepts of individual progress and perfectibility, while on the other, it demands a high degree of tolerance toward the ambiguous and plural nature of postmodern representations of women’s formative journeys.

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Drawing on historical case study methodology informed by critical perspectives of education, this study examines the decision by Tucson United School District (TUSD) to ban its nationally recognized Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in 2012. Framing public education as a site of contestation for equality and democratization, the ban is examined within a five-phase historical context of the struggles of Chicanos for equity in the USA. The research questions address the dismantling of the program in terms of the ongoing historical disparities between the education of Chicanos and Anglo Americans in Tucson, diverse stakeholders’ perspectives on equality and inequality in the decision making, and the response of stakeholders who supported the program to the attempts to dismantle it. The theoretical framework of this study intersects Critical Race Theory and its corollary Latino Critical Theory, Critical Multicultural Pedagogy that centers Critical Pedagogy and Historical Discourse Analysis that focuses attention to the use of power in educational decision making. The interview data from nine study participants who were closely affiliated with the MAS program and selected historical documents and archival data were analyzed to uncover Anglo and Chicano perspectives on education for Mexican Americans in Tucson. The analysis revealed that the differences between Chicano and Anglo perspectives on equity and the role of education in facilitating equality for Chicanos laid the groundwork for the conceptualization of the MAS program by its supporters, and the rationale for its banning by its opponents. The interview data revealed that all participants contextualized their work in the MAS within the history of struggle for Chicano education, they represented a cohesive “Dream Team” committed to implementing a program grounded in critical and culturally relevant pedagogies, and that initial marginalization provided them the space for unimpeded development of the program. Participants’ responses further revealed evidence of the deep psychological toll, intellectual energy demands, and civic engagement required of MAS supporters in the face of this particular episode in the ongoing history of the struggle for Chicano educational equity. The implications for critical multicultural education programs operating within culturally hegemonic policy and social contexts are examined. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2021. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The problem of this study is that of developing a program of study of Mexican literature at the graduate level at North Texas State University. The study of literature and culture is approached by probing into the influences on the thinking of the Mexican and by using an in-depth study, rather than an "anthology" approach to teaching. The findings of the study indicate a need for an upper level course in Mexican literature at North Texas State University. Therefore, the following recommendations seem appropriate: (1) that North Texas State University initiate a course in Mexican literature which may be utilized by both students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and students in the Bilingual/Bicultural Education program; (2) that the course be made available to both graduate and upper-level students; (3) that oral communication be emphasized in the course and that student participation in the target language be maximized.

"In an attempt to determine the effectiveness of the political leadership provided by members of an ethnic group, this thesis investigates the Mexican-American electorate in San Antonio and Laredo, Texas. Three variables were studied: the leaders, the followers, and the circumstances under which both operate...Data for this investigation were gathered through personal interviews and from voting records complied by the county clerks of Bexar and Webb Counties. "--leaf 1.