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The pachuco culture is a rich contemporary tradition born in the southwestern United States in the early 20th century. The innovative youth culture emerged in U.S.-Mexico border towns, but contemporary, urban-hip cholo forms are now found in cities in both countries, many distant from the border. Among working-class and informal sector youth partial to a particular dress style, (the zootsuit is best known), and a cryptic, hybrid language, being pachuco is a form of life with demonstrable continuity over sixty years, in social organization, language, and style. This research is the first ethnography with older men and women of the earliest Southwest generations associated with the culture. Their life history and linguistic narratives speak of the formative moments of being pachuco in Tucson, Arizona. The interpretive frameworks used by consultants are explored as they discuss history, culture, language and identity. To do this, I use recently developed theoretical tools in linguistic anthropology, especially the concepts of metapragmatics and indexicality (Silverstein 1985, 1979) and dialogicality (Bakhtin 1984, 1929). Uniquely among ethnographies of pachucos, I attend to the language use of women, their experiences and perspectives. The major findings are: (1) The youth culture was present in Tucson and the Southwest in at least 1929, if not earlier; (2) research on the regional Indian roots of the culture has been neglected; (3) females have participated in the youth culture from early on; (4) stigmatization and criminalization of the culture continues today in forms resembling the dynamics surrounding the so-called "Zootsuit Riots" of 1943; and (5) in linguistic theory, formulations relating to the transmission of indexical information may need reformulation to account for languages like Pachuco where the interplay of a number of systems creates a high degree of symbolic ambiguity.

This dissertation explores the educational history of Mexican Americans in Arizona. It focuses on the post World War II activism of Tucson Mexican Americans who challenged educational policies, practices, and programs such as segregation, Americanization, and language restriction. These practices shaped Mexican American education for much of the twentieth century. Beginning in 1950, Mexican American men and women engaged in grassroots activism by participating in multiethnic, multifaceted coalitions to challenge educational inequalities and promote meaningful educational reform between 1950 and 1990. Their efforts led to the passage of local, state, and national educational reforms, including the repeal of school segregation state laws, the implementation of Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers and bilingual-bicultural education programs, and the enactment of the federal Bilingual Education Act of 1968. In 1974, Mexican American parents filed a joint lawsuit with Black parents against Tucson School District No. 1, the largest district in the state, charging the district with de jure segregation of Mexican American and Black students. I assert that Mexican Americans promoted institutional reforms from the bottom up that would not only provide Mexican-origin children with equal educational opportunity, but would also meet the community's needs based on their own definition of equity. In doing so, Mexican Americans not only contested their subordinate status in the dominant society by directly challenging the traditional stronghold that Anglo Americans had on the public education system, but they also helped to advance the quest for educational equality and civil rights.

For the past 35 years, borderland industry has opened employment opportunities for women in the community of Nogales, Arizona. However, the expansion of free trade with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has aggravated economic instability by promoting the flexible use of labor, a practice that women have increasingly accommodated. Case studies of women engaged in the retail and maquiladora industries illustrate the interplay between flexible employment, reproduction, and education. These cases suggest that a strong connection between flexible employment and reproduction is sustained by ideologies that see these as mutually complimentary. At the same time, the connections between education and employment and reproduction activities are notably absent or weak. We argue that investing in the education of women, which could lead to more predictable employment, is in this way subverted by regional economic instability. The alienation of education from the other two realms of women’s activities works to the advantage of flexible employment practices and advances the underdevelopment of human capital on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-148). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 139-148). Also available on the Internet.

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