Thesis advisor: Bernard O'Brien / This study investigated factors which influenced stable marriages among twelve Mexican American, working class, Catholic couples from central Texas who had been married at least twenty years, spoke English, and whose youngest child was a minimum of 18 years of age. Each participant was interviewed separately in a retrospective, semi-structured interview that covered selected factors from three different marital stages: 1) initial attraction, early marriage and birth of first child, 2) child-rearing years, and 3) post child-rearing years. The influences of culture, religion, values, finances, and the family of origin were explored to determine their impact on marital stability. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1994. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Education.

My dissertation is about forms of locally-based piety, especially religious devotion within the population of eighteenth-century Spanish descendants in Monterrey, Mexico. This study takes the reader through the structure of the colonial last will and testament, identifying its principle parts, analyzing its formulaic language, and discerning ways to hear the voice of its testator. Reineros, or colonial residents of Monterrey, entrusted scribes to write their wills in order to care for their souls in the afterlife and bequeath their possessions to family members, friends, and the church. Testators demonstrate their piety by issuing directives concerning their burials and funerals and making pious bequests to benefit church adornment, chapels, charities, and devotions to images. I identify trends in piety over time and offer a proposal for understanding the context of these variations. I propose that Monterrey’s distance from other urban centers made it a distinctive frontier town in northeast Mexico, where a baroque-infused piety dominated local religious practices even after the creation of the diocese in 1777. However, I demonstrate that late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century testators, although still concerned for their individual souls, requested fewer masses for the dead to benefit their souls and the souls of others, made fewer charitable gifts, and disregarded showy funerals for the sake of humility. What emerges, then, is a blend of baroque practices and pious reforms. “En el Nombre de Dios” is a case study about the staying power of traditions and the enduring flexibility of religion.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine hourly wage differences across different groups of Mexican-origin workers. First, I assess the cost of foreign-born status by comparing the hourly wages of Mexican immigrant workers with those of native-born Mexican American workers. Second, I assess the cost of non-citizenship status by comparing the hourly wages of non-citizens with those of Mexican-born U.S. naturalized citizens. I also seek to determine if these costs are greater in California than in Texas. The data are drawn from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) U.S. Census. The results from multiple linear regression analyses show that being an immigrant, particularly a non-citizen immigrant, is associated with lower hourly wages, especially in California. Thus, Mexicanorigin workers, especially those in California, bear dual costs for being foreign-born and not being naturalized citizens. Furthermore, I focus on length of U.S. residence to assess the social and economic impact of the different periods on the costs associated with foreign-born status. First, those who came to the United States before the IRCA of 1986 and a series of California propositions during the 1990s have higher hourly wages than those who arrived later, because of more stable labor market conditions and the effect of the duration of stay in the United States. Second, those who arrived during the last decade have much lower hourly wages because of their disadvantaged labor market contexts.

This study examined the contextual factors that led to the success of Mexican Americans who overcame extraordinary obstacles in obtaining post-secondary educations. Mexican Americans continue to experience great challenges to postsecondary success. An in-depth case study was performed on ten subjects who managed to not only survive, but also do well in school and life. The purpose of the study was to identify obstacles these men and women had to overcome, the means they used to overcome them, and the salience of their ethnicity to their experience. Utilizing a worldview construct and the concept of familism, findings are presented that demonstrate how these men and women were able to succeed educationally. First, their families placed a high value for and exposure to literacy, English and Spanish, in the participants’ homes. Contrary to the fact that these participants’ homes were characterized by low levels of parental education, they were exposed to high levels of literacy. A second important commonality among these high achievers was that all of them at some point in their schooling attended desegregated schools where they were exposed to Anglo peers with much greater social capital than themselves. Finally, and perhaps the most important, is the profound value for hard work that characterized almost all of these households and was channeled into dedication to studies and a strong belief that effort, perseverance, and courage were important in achieving academic goals. Rather than just focusing on the barriers, the problems common to low-income, first-generation college students as do most studies on student access and success, this study focuses on the creative solutions its subjects found and the kinds of support that made differences for them. The study records the perceptions of the successful graduates of the causes of their school success and tapped into their insights. The findings and recommendations of the study may enable educators to re-examine their own attitudes toward the schooling of Mexican origin students and its unanticipated negative consequences and help institutions of higher education identify policy changes that will facilitate the recruitment and retention of Hispanic and other minority students.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-196). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Mexican Sign Language, or El Lenguaje de Sefias Mexicanas (LSM), and the Deaf community of Mexico have not been extensively studied. This dissertation offers lexical analyses of LSM. Drawing from video data, I examine an elicited lexicon of LSM as articulated by six Deaf consultants from two cities: Aguascalientes and Mexico City. This dissertation focuses on signs that are articulated similarly among the consultants. Two or more sign forms are considered to be similarly-articulated when those forms share the same approximate meaning and when they share the same values on at least two of the three main parameters of handshape, movement, and place of articulation. By focusing on this set of signs, I investigate and document patterns in sign variation internal to LSM. Place of articulation is found to be relatively stable compared to the variation seen in the parameters of handshape and movement. Additionally, other patterns among the articulatory variants are found such as sets of handshapes, movements, and places that tend to vary among similarly-articulated signs. A second goal of the dissertation is to investigate whether the findings from the internal investigation of LSM are valid across other sign languages. Eduardo Huet, a deaf Frenchman, established the first school for the deaf in 1867 in Mexico City. Due to the educational influence from Huet, French Sign Language (LSF) is likely to have influenced the development of LSM. Thus, this dissertation includes a pair-wise comparison between LSM and LSF. A second pair-wise comparison included involves LSM and Spanish Sign Language (LSE) because of the shared ambient language and related ambient cultures; this comparison addresses the assumption that LSM and LSE would be similar because of linguistic and cultural similarities between Mexico and Spain. A third pair-wise comparison involves LSM and Japanese Sign Language (JSL) as a control comparison. LSM and JSL are known to have distinct historical developments and do not share an ambient language or culture. For each of the three pair-wise comparisons, I focus on the set of similarly-articulated signs. In addition to investigating articulatory patterns, I also investigate potential sources for similarly-articulated signs, i.e., whether these similarities are likely borrowings or shared icons. Not surprising, I found that the pair-wise comparison of LSM-LSF exhibited the most likely borrowings and LSM-JSL the least. Additionally, the analyses of the three pair-wise comparisons suggest a base level of similarly-articulated signs that are likely due to shared icons. The findings from the pair-wise analysis further suggest that patterns documented in the internal analysis of LSM also hold for the cross-linguistic analyses. The parameter variations among the set of similarly-articulated signs suggest a potential trend that might be valid internally and cross-linguistically for sign languages in general. / text

This thesis examines constructions of Chicano (or Mexican American) identity in literature and film. I explore how writers and filmmakers negotiate the dominance of Hollywood models over the culture. In Chapter One, I argue that literature gives way to film in articulations of Chicano identity; Gonzales and Anzald6a use cinematic imagery and Castillo's short story adopts the characteristics of film. Chicano documentaries were made to correct Hollywood's negative images of the culture. In Chapter Two I study Luis Valdez's Zoo! Suit (1981), a film that celebrates the Chicano icon of the pachuco by subverting the Hollywood musical genre. Chapter Three considers two films by Lourdes Portillo in which Chicano culture is scrutinised through the frames of ethnography and film noir. In Chapter Four I examine John Sayles' revisionist Western, Lone Star and the extent to which history dominates the present in Texas. Robert Rodriguez's Mexican action heroes and his ethnic humour are the subject of Chapter Five. Chapter Six examines two films by Allison Anders in the light of her self-confessed obsession with Chicano culture. In conclusion I argue that Anders' autobiographical character in Gas, Food, Lodgi»g (1991), articulates Anglo anxieties about identity, bringing the trajectory around full circle.

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