American Studies Commons^™

Unsettling Indian Health Services: Secularism, Modern Medicine, & The Reproduction Of The U.S. Settler State Through The 1954 Transfer Act, Jillian Elizabeth Grisel

American Studies ETDs

This thesis takes up the role of secularism in modern medicine as a political doctrine that works in service of settler colonialism. I argue the Declaration of Human Rights and the World Health Organization (WHO) globally institutionalized secular ideologies in the post-World War II environment. This thesis links how this global reordering came to inform U.S. health policy by examining how government officials and medical experts drew from the WHO and framed infectious diseases as a security issue to impose a biomedical order in Indian country. By contextualizing modern medicine within a settler political economy and secular political doctrine, I …

More Than A Fiesta: Cinco De Mayo Celebrations And The Transboundary Link In Ambos Nogales, Kristen S. Valencia

American Studies ETDs

In a contemporary context, the United States-Mexico border raises concerns regarding undocumented migration, drug and human trafficking, and cartel or gang violence. While these are material realities that come, at times, with grave consequences and outcomes, they are not the only characteristics or facets of the border region. The intention of the border is to delineate and separate, however, this ignores the stationary communities along the territorial demarcation which interact with and demonstrate the fluidity of life at the line. Transboundariness, as defined by Lawrence A. Herzog, provides the framework with which to examine cross-boundary connections that result from economic …

Cartographies Of Precarity: The Cultural Politics Of Filipina And Mexican Migrant Domestic Workers, Maria Eugenia Lopez-Garcia

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the cultural politics of migrant domestic work in the 2000s within popular culture, mass media, contemporary art, and grassroots national organizing. While scholars and activists have identified that migrant domestic workers are the hidden backbone of the U.S. economy, dominant cultural and social narratives reinforce the racialized and gendered logics of capitalism that work to devalue domestic work as informal, disposable and precarious. It was not until after the struggle of domestic workers achieved recognition through the ratification of the International Labor Office of Convention 189 in July 2011 that this labor sector gained more intense media …

Immigration/Migration And Settler Colonialism: Doing Critical Ethnic Studies On The U.S. - Mexico Border, Raquel A. Madrigal

American Studies ETDs

My dissertation argues that the U.S.-Mexico border, and the militarized operations of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security via Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement along the border, including state and federal anti-immigration law, are historically ongoing settler colonial structures of U.S. imperialism, and empire, which are asserted upon, and over Indigenous people and their land. I claim that these anti-immigrant, and anti-migrant structures and operations perpetuate Native dispossession, and removal, as well as deny Native presence and sovereignty. I also contend that undocumented immigrant and migrant justice must be accountable and responsible to Indigenous peoples, their land, and …

Living The Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, And Culture, Trisha Venisa Martinez

American Studies ETDs

Living the Manito Trail: Maintaining Self, Community, and Culture is an ethnographic interdisciplinary study that draws upon the voices of Manitos, or Hispanic New Mexicans, and experiences of migration from Northern New Mexico into Wyoming from late 19th century to the present. This project exemplifies how consciousness or a heightened sense of awareness derives from the value system of querencia or how one establishes a sense of self and community through place. I argue the cultural landscape of a person’s place of origin injects a set of values and distinct qualities that create a strong sense of identity, enable community, …

(Re)Insurgent Ecologies: Dwelling Together Between Queasy Worlds, Kirsten E. Mundt

American Studies ETDs

Discourses that construct the “self” as something to be fixed, or made whole, chart a retreat from relational ecosystems back to the individual, reinforcing colonial politics rooted in bounded individualism. This project animates an ontological, relational framework that, in detaching from liberal humanist discourses of healing and “self,” makes affective links from autopoietic frameworks for healing and survival to de-colonial, sympoieitic concerns for expanded kinship. New meanings and attachments are forged within queasy border zones of incommensurability, toggling between the particular and the universal, between desires for solidarity and recognition that colonial violences continue to be unequally distributed and borne. …

Exploration, Disruption, Diaspora: Movement Of Nuevomexicanos To Utah, 1776-1850, Linda C. Eleshuk Roybal

American Studies ETDs

ABSTRACT

Nuevomexicano villages of northern New Mexico have experienced disruptions throughout their existence. This dissertation is a study of what occurred in early disruptions leading to the great departure of the 1940s, during World War II and immediately following, known as the New Mexico diaspora, where a number of villagers moved out of New Mexico to other states, including Utah, most expecting to settle for a time with hopes of return to their home villages. The study asks what happened especially during the great disruption, discourses of disruption and movement, what Nuevomexicanos carried with them in movement, whether they returned …

Gifts Of Sovereignty: Settler Colonial Capitalism And The Kanaka ʻŌiwi Politics Of Ea, David UahikeaikaleiʻOhu Maile

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines Hawaiian sovereignty in history, law, and activism. The project tracks Indigenous claims, negotiations, and articulations of sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Using a critically Indigenous approach to Hawaiian studies, I advance two main theses. First, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) are discussed as a community divided on Hawaiian sovereignty. However, I contend that Kānaka Maoli exercise a diversity of strategies and tactics for Hawaiian sovereignty. I show how Kānaka Maoli practice multiple modalities of sovereignty that cumulatively produce the Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Indigenous Hawaiian) politics of ea (life and sovereignty). Second, the historical development of settler colonial capitalism operationalized the US …