American Studies Commons^™

Health And Revolution: Anarchist Biopolitics In The Borderlands, Benjamin H. Abbott

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines classical anarchist discourse on gender, race, and sexuality via the lenses of disability justice, reproductive justice, and queer Indigenous feminism. I argue that eugenics was key to how anarchists in the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and their comrades conceived of political collectivity. Popular notions of scarcity and survival of the fittest, imbued with scientific authority, structured thought at the time. Anarchists, like other anticapitalist radicals, advocated for their cause within this framework, frequently asserting how revolution would lead to a stronger society and denigrating those imagined as weak. I attend especially to the contrast between how PLM …

Imperial Myths, Abject Devotion: Mapping Affect In New Mexican Visual Culture And Discourse, N. C. Lira-Pérez

American Studies ETDs

New Mexican visual art and culture, as molded by state-sanctioned endeavors, is often casted in order to conceal the tension, conflict, and violence of settler colonialism and imperialism. Widely known myths of empire, such as the Tricultural myth, create a visualizing enterprise through which settler colonial logics transit and create political material reality. This thesis explores the following questions: How do New Mexican Hispanos and queer Chicanxs position themselves in relation to the logics of settler colonialism and empire? How are they positioned in relation to settler colonialism and empire? On the one hand, I argue that the state of …

Danzantes Aztecas Y Promotoras Tradicionales: The Ritual Performances And Identity Politics Of A Mexican American Danzantes Aztecas Y Promotoras Tradicionales: The Ritual Performances And Identity Politics Of A Mexican American Ceremonial Community, Dina K. Barajas

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation is an ethnographic study which examined the ritual performances of an interconnected Mexican American and Mexican immigrant danza Azteca and curanderismo ceremonial community located in central and northern New Mexico, and central México. This project also explored if and how these rituals recognize the practitioners’ indigeneity. As a Mexican American and Native scholar and ceremonial participant of this community, I provided an “insider’s” understanding of the epistemologies and ontologies that inform these ceremonies. My positionality and methodology acted as a lens to critically examine danzantes’ and promotoras tradicionales’ claims of indigeneity. Importantly, this work provides a fluid conceptualization …

“Pre-Packaged Sovereignty”: The Fallacy Of Indian Self-Determination In The Bureau Of Indian Affairs (Bia) Tribal Social Services Programs, April K. Chavez

American Studies ETDs

This thesis examines the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) tribal social services programs in New Mexico Native reservation communities. I rely on interviews with current/former BIA social workers and administrators to contextualize my analysis, while revealing the limits of existing social work scholarship and offering recommendations for future scholarship and community work. Using critical Indigenous studies and feminisms along with critical social work, I advance two primary arguments. The first is, despite the so-called self-determination era, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) functions as a settler colonial administration that diminishes tribal sovereignty and perpetuates racist and gendered violence. The capacity …

Nubians Of Plutonia: Black Women In Modern Post-Apocalyptic And Dystopian Graphic Literature, Marthia D. Fuller

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation explores the deployment of race and gender in comic books and graphic novels, paying close attention to how Black womanhood and girlhood operates in the speculative future. This project suggests that the framing of black womanhood and girlhood in post-apocalyptic/dystopian spaces provide a counter to the normative notions of both while simultaneously using normative tropes of Black womanhood and girlhood to produce new ways of understanding Black femininity in the future. Nubians of Plutonia use Black feminist cultural criticisms, Black popular culture, and visual culture to ask: does graphic literature present new, more dynamic understandings of race and …

Contesting Historical Enchantment: Militarized Settler Colonialism And Refugee Resettlement In New Mexico, Christina Juhasz-Wood

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary critical study of refugee resettlement to Albuquerque, New Mexico. I argue that refugee resettlement to the United States cannot be understood separately from the ongoing structure of settler colonialism. I analyze Albuquerque’s post-WWII militarized settlement as a settler colonial process of extraction and suburbanization that depended on Native labor and resources to fuel the growing nuclear weapons program. Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base played a role not only in displacing and thus producing refugees during the Vietnam War but also in marking Albuquerque as a distinctly militarized geography to which they were resettled. Thousands of …

(SīˈTĭng) Detroit: Vision And Dispossession In A Midwest Bordertown, Matthew J. Irwin

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the relationality of dispossession, racialization, and migration in Detroit, connecting the neoliberal rationality of (re)development to its foundations in Indigenous dispossession and racialized labor. “(Sīˈtĭng) Detroit” understands Detroit as a bordertown, where “the border” is the organizing structure and condition for the operation of settler colonialism in Detroit. From the international boundary to the county line, the border is the on-the-ground, everyday method for controlling space, disciplining populations, and limiting mobility for racialized subjects. To examine possession and belonging in a Black city on an international border, this dissertation introduces a “(sīˈtĭng)” — a methodology for locating …

No Longer Fenced Out: Outlaw Media Discourse And Resistance To Gentrification In Greenwich Village, Joseph Francis Gallegos

American Studies ETDs

Greenwich Village is a so-called “gayborhood” that accepts and welcomes LGBT people. However, Greenwich Village has been undergoing gentrification for the past few decades, and this process exists due to a police-created order of violence that subjugates and displaces queer people and people of color. This order seeks to create a space that is friendly to capital and wealth.

Resistance to these strategies requires tactics that do not necessarily hew to mainstream methods of getting a message out, such as using mainstream media to make a case against gentrification. These often fail, as they will fall on deaf ears of …

Pilgrimage To The Virgin Of Juquila: The Negotiation Of Catholic Institutional Power In Colonial Oaxaca, Paloma Barraza

Art & Art History ETDs

Despite the contemporary popularity of the pilgrimage site of the Sanctuary of Santa Catarina of Juquila, the statuette of Oaxaca’s Virgin of Juquila is often eclipsed by the more well-known tilma image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The limited art historical scholarship has failed to address the statuette of the Virgin of Juquila as an icon that signifies both Indigenous and Catholic power dating back to the seventeenth century. Dominican missionaries used the statuette as a mediator for religious conversion practices in the local Chatino community. Furthermore, the moment the Virgin of Juquila gained significant Indigenous popularity …

#Abolishice: An Anti-Capitalist And Anti-Colonial Approach To Black, Indigenous, And Migrant Solidarity Building, Cecilia Frescas-Ortiz

American Studies ETDs

This thesis project interrogates possible sites of alignment and solidarity building between the migrant justice movement, Black liberation and Indigenous decolonization. By first looking at the use of tear gas in Ferguson, Standing Rock and at the U.S.-Mexico border, I argue that a solidarity between Black, Indigenous and migrant communities rooted in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial desire is absolutely necessary. Moreover, by focusing primarily on the migrant justice movement, I argue that the current iterations centered on inclusion and recognition reinforce the State’s dominion over bodies of color and exacerbate Black death and Indigenous genocide. As such, this thesis proposes …

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …