Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Who Is An American? The Construction Of American Identity In The Utah Minuteman Project, Michele Elizabeth Bendall

Theses and Dissertations

The Minuteman Project is a national civilian border patrol group, founded in 2005 to defend the U.S.-Mexico border from "invasion" by illegal immigrants and protest the "blatant disregard of the rule of law" exhibited by government and politicians. This study explores one state chapter of this organization: the Utah Minuteman Project (UMP). The research questions I seek to address are: Who are the Minutemen? What motivates them? How do the Minutemen define what it means to be an American? Using a grounded theory approach, I explore the construction of American identity among the members of the UMP using a range …

"Proving Yourself" In The Canadian Medical Profession: Gender And The Experiences Of Foreign-Trained Doctors In Medical Practices, Vanessa Noelle Dolishny

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years the medical profession has become feminized. Additionally, there has been an increased representation of foreign-trained professionals in the Canadian medical profession; many of which are women. Thus, there is a significant number of female medical practitioners who are foreign-born and foreign-trained. This demographic faces many barriers, which are often characterized as a “double disadvantage”. This paper investigates the experiences of foreign-trained medical professionals once they have gained access to the profession and whether the feminization of medicine has impacted the experiences of these individuals. Immigrant status was found to be highly significant to one’s experiences in the …

Narrative Identity Within A Workers' Rights Organization, Emily Ann Hallgren

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research includes in-depth interviews and participant observation to examine the construction of narrative identity by the staff members and worker-members of a workers' rights organization in Northwest Arkansas. I seek to understand how the organization negotiates the broader cultural and institutional narrative identities with the personal narrative identities of the worker-members in a cultural context hostile toward undocumented immigrants. Further, I examine how the worker-members themselves both internalize and challenge the organizational, institutional, and cultural narratives about undocumented immigrant workers. Findings reveal that the staff members and the worker-members create different narratives for different purposes, though both are concerned …

Marginalized Within The Borderlands: The Undocumented Citizen Students Of The University Of Texas-Pan American, Christian V. Ramirez

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

The Rio Grande Valley, geographically located on the southernmost tip of Texas and north of the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, is far removed from the social and cultural centers of both the United States and Mexico. Within this geographically and socially marginalized space lives a group of citizen students who lack legal documentation to reside in the U.S. This ethnographic study will seek to convey the perceptions of undocumented citizen students, their families, and the background assumptions through which they understand their current and future state of social place. The University of Texas-Pan American is home to over 19, 000 …

"Nudge A Mexican And She Or He Will Break Out With A Story": Complicating Mexican Immigrant Masculinities Through Counternarrative Storytelling, Berenice Villela

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I explore Latino masculinities and contest their uniformity through transforming an oral history conducted with my father into a collection of short stories. Following storytelling traditions of Latino/Mexican culture, I converted an oral history interviews with my dad into a collection of short stories. From these short stories I extracted themes relating to the micro and macro manifestations of gender policing. Drawing from Judith Butler's Theory of performativity and Gloria Anzaldua's theory of Borderland identities, I rethink masculinity and offer Jose Esteban Munoz's theory of disidentification. With these theories in conversation, I analyze the themes of the …

Readiness For College: A Case Study Of Three Hispanic Immigrant Students Who Overcame The Odds, Holly Fields

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This study is about Hispanic, immigrant, low-income students who have graduated from high school college ready and the contexts from which they achieved such success. Few studies exist relative to immigrant, Hispanic student college readiness. This research hopes to provide insight into how institutional, peer and family culture helped to produce the success of the three students in this study.

The purpose of the study is to provide a deeper understanding of the ways in which immigrant, low-income, Hispanic students and the modern contexts of schools interact to produce distinct life experiences for the participating graduates. This study aims to …

The Effect Of Race, Religion, Skin Color, And National Origin On The Duration Of Processing For Permanent Resident Visas?, Lindsey S. Bares

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A great deal of attention has recently been focused on America’s undocumented immigrants, a population estimated at around 10 million people (Passel, Capps, and Fix 2004). Much less attention has been paid (in both scholarly and academic circles) to legal immigrants, although in 2010 (the most recent year for which complete data are available), the Department of Homeland Security granted 1,042,625 permanent resident visas. Indeed, since 1994 when the government began to publish the Annual Flow Report, we have granted between 700,000 to around 1,300,000 new legal immigrant visas annually. Legal immigration into the US involves a process of varying …

New Destinations In Context : Explaining The Changing Geography Of Immigrant Settlement, Chris Galvan

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The main objective of this dissertation is to determine what factors predict the growth or decline in foreign-born populations over the last three decades. In order to present a comprehensive analysis, this project also examines racial and ethnic differences within foreign-born population growth and the role that the unit of analysis has in affecting results in such analyses. These objectives are motivated by a number of gaps in the current literature on foreign-born population growth, especially the research on population growth in new destinations of immigrant settlement. Specifically, the primary contributions of my dissertation are that it addresses the following …

Beyond The Backlash: Muslim And Middle Eastern Immigrants' Experiences In America, Ten Years Post-9/11, Gregory J. Mills

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I explore the perceived character of Islamophobia in American society, and how Islamophobia is embedded in the everyday lived experiences and identity negotiations of a sample of Middle Eastern immigrants, ten years post-9/11. Data consist of 13 qualitative interviews with first-generation Middle Eastern immigrants, including Muslims, Christians, and those who claim no religion. Findings suggest that perceived discrimination and cultural hostility vary across both gender and religion. Women who cover with the hijab perceive far more discrimination and humiliating experiences than men or women who do not cover in the sample. Iranians also receive extremely poor treatment, …