In this dissertation, I explore the political implications of racial and ethnic diversity. Unlike previous research, this study seeks to provide a more inclusive examination of race and ethnicity. More specifically, the analysis of this dissertation encompasses multiple racial and ethnic groups, including whites, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and Asian Americans. The focus of the examination centers on the impact of racial and ethnic diversity on individual-level attitudes and congressional election outcomes. The specific questions posed herein revolve around the issues of when and how racial and ethnic diversity impacts American politics. The findings produced in this study not only indicate that diversity is related to attitudes and electoral outcomes, but also suggests the nature of the relationship is complex. The analysis indicates that individual-level attitudes vary across racial and ethnic groups. Indeed, attitudes across minority groups are more similar than when compared to the majority. Additionally, the findings suggest that the impact of racial and ethnic diversity varies across racial and ethnic groups. When considered concurrently, this portion of the dissertation suggests that the impact of diversity on attitudes is complex. The second portion of the dissertation examines the electoral implications of racial and ethnic diversity. The analysis indicates as diversity increases electoral volatility increases. In fact, the findings suggest that increased diversity is associated with an increased risk of incumbent turnover and electoral competition. Further, the examination indicates the increased volatility associated with higher levels of diversity increases the likelihood that quality challengers will emerge to oppose the incumbent candidate. The findings presented in this dissertation offer valuable insight to the role of racial and ethnic groups in the American political system. This information serves not only as a stepping stone for future research, but is also suggestive of implications for individual-actors involved in the political system. Future research must extend previous work to provide a more inclusive and systematic analysis of the implications of racial and ethnic diversity. Finally, politicians may find the results useful in their attempts to represent constituents and seek election (and re-election).

This study examined the acculturation level of 88 Chinese-American students at UCLA, and whether there was any relationship between their acculturation level and academic performance of the same persons. The Cultural Life Style Inventory developed by Mendoza for Mexican-Americans was adapted as the primary measurement for this research. The difference of cultural shift score between the U.S. born group and the immigrant group was not significant. However, a repeated measures t test on the difference between cultural resistance and cultural shift in the U.S. born group showed significance. In addition, a t test on two sample independent groups showed the differences between cultural resistance and cultural shift were not the same in the U.S. born group and the immigrant group. No dominant cultural life style tendency was found in these subjects. The differences of acculturation level between being in the U.S. for 6-10 year group and 16-20 year group, between 11-15 year group and 16-20 year group were significant. This indicated that acculturation takes a considerable amount of time. There were no significant differences between acculturation level and college grade point average among these subjects. Nor did neighborhood or work environment affect their acculturation level. Since the versions of the Cultural Life Style Inventory are now available in English, Spanish, and Chinese, cross-cultural comparisons between the Hispanic and the Asian could be designed in a single study in the future.

This dissertation seeks to understand, from the ethnoarchaeological and historical archaeological perspectives, how material culture expresses ethnic identity in plural societies. It also identifies the changing patterns of ethnic boundaries over time. I focused my research on the behavior of food consumption and cooking utensils at household level among contemporary people and their predecessors in the past. My ethnographic investigation was conducted to observe the foodways of contemporary Chinese in Tucson. The observations were compared to archaeological evidence of early Chinese excavated from Tucson. In order to better understand the discoveries, historical documents were explored. I found that foodways are the sensitive component of a culture that expresses ethnicity. An entire assemblage of oriental-style utensils and food-consumption behaviors differentiate the Chinese from others. The Chinese, both in the past and present, have made every effort to retain their traditional foodways. However, such persistence in consumption patterns does not reflect an intention of the Chinese to separate themselves from the majority. It is a people's physical determinant--taste memory--that controls their behavior in maintaining traditional culinary practices. Foodways are not as much of an obstacle to cultural assimilation and ethnic integration as it might seem. Chinese immigrants have changed the public domain of their ancestral culture. Most of my subjects are regarded as well Americanized citizens, although they all consume Chinese-style food at home. Such balance--joining the majority while maintaining their taste preference--gives the Chinese psychological confidence and physical satisfaction in the course of ethnic interaction. Similar changes occurred with early Chinese, who were considered to be a culturally resistant group. It was the bias of document recorders and the misselection of research data by scholars that caused misconceptions about the Chinese. Similar to the experience of contemporary Chinese, the early immigrants might have been successful in "melting" into mainstream while retaining their ethnic foodways. I advocate a comprehensive analysis of the integrated data placed within a social and historical context. An archaeologist should approach the study of material culture from a historical perspective to filter up the kinds of information that convey meanings in interpreting ethnic relationships.

Western medicine was utilized as an instrument of empire in colonies established by conquest, occupation, and settlement and was practiced on American Indians between 1797 and 1871. This was medicine in the agents, knowledge and processes of western physicians, western medical "advances" and western medical practices that became part and parcel of the disease experiences of Native Americans and developing federal health care policies. Western medicine, in the form of imperial medicine, was political, economical, military and racial in nature and served to legitimize a federal presence in north American Indian communities. Physicians, missionaries, politicians, traders and the United States army employed western medicine to exacerbate expansion of the United States and the "civilization" of the American Indian. Practitioners of secular western medicine presumed that biomedicine was superior to all other forms of medicine as they attempted to eradicate Native American health care practices. Proponents of western medicine controlled access to western medical benefits, denigrated American Indian women, and misinterpreted American Indian responses to epidemic diseases. The diseases most often carried into Indian Country during western expansion were smallpox, cholera, syphilis and gonorrhea. Federal vaccination efforts, medical benefits treaties, traders' and the military's efforts to contend with these diseases played a central role in the development of the Imperial medical model. Native Americans accepted western medical practices when they were found effective or refused those considered untimely, or inappropriate as they cared for themselves and each other.

Recent detective novels (1985-2001) of five Chicano authors, Rudolfo Anaya, Lucha Corpi, Rolando Hinojosa, Michael Nava and Manuel Ramos are analyzed in relationship to Anglo-American and British detective genres, Chicano literature and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. The analysis focuses on Rudolfo Anaya's Shaman Winter, Lucha Corpi's Cactus Blood, Rolando Hinojosa's Partners in Crime, Michael Nava's Rag and Bone and Manuel Ramos' The Ballad of Rocky Ruiz. Chicano detective fiction draws from Anglo-American and British detective genre formulas and can be distinguished from the Anglo-American and British detective fiction genres because of the nature of its departures from detective genre formulas. In addition to the detective genre, Chicano authors refer to various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic literatures. Chicano detective fiction is aware of popular interests in the United States: an interest in ethnic literatures, a popular interest in origin, and the popularity of the crime story or detective story in non-fiction news and fictional narratives of television and film. The five novelists utilize these contemporary popular trends in the United States in order to reach a larger readership than would otherwise be possible if any one of the three were ignored. Anglo-American and British detective fiction assumes a homogeneous readership: national and/or ethnic-racial. Chicano detective fiction does not assume that its readers are Chicano and for this reason elaborates on the origin and the community of the detective in order to facilitate the reader's identification with the investigator. Chicano detective novels integrate, under the guise of detective fiction, the stories of an ethnic experience and the origin of an ethnicity. The quest of Chicano detectives is to establish a stable environment and a stable identity, but the dialectic that ensues between the detective and his environment cannot be resolved conclusively. Their visions of stability originate from various sources that range from a homogeneous North-American ideology to a Chicano alter-ideology. Each individual novel suggests a space where the detective, his community and the nation state can entertain the romantic illusion of productive cooperation beneficial to the Chicano community.

This project explores the intersecting discourses of the "Woman Question" and the "Indian Problem" from the market revolution of Jacksonian America through the early twentieth century. It examines how Indianness was legally and culturally constructed in the nineteenth century, from Jacksonian removal policy to the strategies of allotment and assimilation in later decades, identifying both legal and figurative parallels to the status of white women. As Native peoples were effectively erased under Anglo-American law, married women were likewise dispossessed by the laws of coverture, under which the identity of the wife was absorbed into that of her husband. Both white women and Native peoples experienced a form of "civil death"--or legal nonexistence--and both were deprived of personhood under the guise of protection. For women writers, then, Indian policy provided an opportunity to contemplate fundamental questions of citizenship, of personhood and property, of national and individual identity. Incorporating a wide range of texts, from the early nineteenth-century fiction of Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick to the later nineteenth-century writings of suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage and anthropologist Alice Fletcher, this study explores the various tensions--between individual sovereignty and maternal moral authority, between the language of rights and the language of sentiment--that defined the relationship between nineteenth-century white women and their Indian others, and considers how the Anglo-American tradition of possessive individualism often prevented these women from making sense of their experience with Native cultures. This study concludes with an examination of how Native women writers responded to and made use of white women's constructions of the Indian Problem. S. Alice Callahan, author of the first known novel by a Native woman, and writer-activist Zitkala-Sa carefully constructed their stories in the terms set out by women's rights discourse, inviting a readership of white women to engage with the Indian cause as an extension of their own agenda. Ultimately, even as white women's rights activists sought to subordinate the Indian Problem or to appropriate the Indian, these Native writers found in the Woman Question a way of speaking for themselves.

The Cross-Heart People': Indigenous Narratives, Cinema, and the Western examines cycles of cinematic and literary production, public interest, and Federal Indian policy; redirects critical considerations of the "frontier myth" in the Western; and calls attention to indigenous participation and activism in the genre from the silent era onward. To this end, my study maps changing configurations of Native American and cross-racial homes in the "Indian drama" and other visual and textual forms. Such reciprocal generic influences have lent fictional narratives the authority of documentary "truth" while infusing ethnographic image-making with the conventions of frontier melodramas. I argue that indigenous filmmaking began more than half a century before most film histories acknowledge, and that intertextual relationships between early films by native directors and genres such as the ethnographic documentary and the Western were central to the development of contemporary indigenous media. Stories of cross-racial romance intersect with policies of institutional intervention in native families throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and frequently address the societal consequences of adoption, boarding school, military service, and incarceration. Individual chapters of the dissertation focus on the cinematic re-visions of James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans between 1909 and 1992; the influence of Edwin Milton Royle's 1906 stage play The Squaw Man on the silent Westerns of James Young Deer, D. W. Griffith, and Cecil B. De Mille; the invention of the "pro-Indian" Hollywood film in the context of indigenous experiences in WWII and shifting Federal Indian policies; and, in the last two chapters, the development of indigenous media through the filmmaking practices of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Victor Masayesva, and Zacharias Kunuk in the context of revisionist representations by non-native directors, from Edward S. Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes (1914) to Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack (1973). The reflexive gestures in recent native-directed films--their reclaiming of tradition and their focus on the historical associations between social disruption and the manipulation of indigenous images through photographs, documentaries, and Hollywood films--critically assess and re-appropriate the colonizing logic of preservation and the primitivist tropes of the "Indian drama."

This study examines the role of social capital in the political life of Latinos in the United States. I consider the likelihood that Latinos accumulate and utilize social capital differently than the dominant political science literature has suggested. Most social capital research has examined the majority population and the participatory outcomes of their network resources. For Latinos, social capital is complicated by ethnicity. Latino social networks and political participation can occur in two different ethnic contexts: one which is exclusively Latino and one which is dominated by the majority, Anglo population. Using Robert Putnam's definition and classification of social capital, I examine how the three largest Latino national origin groups accumulate social capital and participate in the American political system. Ultimately I examine not only how much social capital exists among Latinos, but also how it functions for them. This dissertation engages in testing and building upon social capital theory by examining its five components and its bifurcated nature. This dissertation offers a full analysis of social capital presence and performance among Latinos. First I examine social capital accumulation among Latinos. Then I explore how social capital operates in the context of political participation. I find clear evidence of two types of social capital: bridge and bond. I find that Latinos are accumulating both bond and bridge social capital, and levels of political activity are highly affected by these resources. National origin, nativity, gender and language largely influence how Latinos accumulate and employ their social capital resources. Foreign born, female and Spanish dominant Latinos have their social capital more densely concentrated among co-ethnics. The implications of the differing levels of bond and bridge social capital resources in the political setting are varied. My analysis indicates that bridge social capital has consistently strong and positive effects on Latino political participation in any ethnic political context. Bond social capital generally has a positive impact on Latino participation as well, though not as consistent as bridge capital. Social capital theory does indeed help explain some of the uniqueness found in Latino political behavior.

Stalking is a complex social problem that pervades all levels of American society. Statistics established by the National Violence Against Women Survey show that Native American women are stalked at a rate at least twice that of any other racial group. A widely held belief exists that prior to colonization, stalking and domestic violence were uncommon in Native cultures. Regardless of the rates of incidence, tribal nations and families once successfully regulated issues of intimate violence in culturally specific ways. The imposition of hierarchical legal and social structures ties the hands of tribes to do what is right for their people. An approach to this problem is the empowerment of tribal entities to create and enforce culturally appropriate modes of resolution. Once tribes set about creatively utilizing the Violence Against Women Act there will be a multitude of tactics will address stalking crimes on the reservation and further tribal sovereignty.

The last in a long line of Mesoamerican cultures, the Aztecs massed in the metropolis of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco and neighboring cities in the Valley of Mexico, with bureaucracies and royal houses as cosmopolitan as those of their eventual conquerors, the Spaniards. In North America, however, tribal cultures developed organizations based not on the state, but on kin and family relations. The basis of this paper is a comparison of the values fostered by tribalism and those propounded by bureaucracy, whether Mexican or European or even Ming Chinese. The method employed is that of a series of six short pieces of original fiction (one for each of the cardinal points, one for Father Sky, and one for Mother Earth), based on research into the world-views of North American Indian cultures and tribal experiences, and which may be construed as a critique of the notion of the universality of human values.