American Studies Commons^™

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

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 …

Albuquerque Journal Interviews Maryam Ahranjani, Many Want Police Out Of Schools Across Nm, Maryam Ahranjani, Shelby Perea

Faculty Scholarship

In Albuquerque, University of New Mexico School of Law associate professor Maryam Ahranjani and Hope Pendleton, a board member of the Black Law Student Association at UNM, are saying now is the time to remove officers from schools.

“There’s a lot of unfortunate downstream negative repercussions for children from having police officers in schools,” Ahranjani said.

Pendleton and Ahranjani helped write a letter to APS Superintendent Raquel Reedy and her leadership team that says funds earmarked for the APS Police Department would be better spent addressing this counselor-to-student ratio and investing in other personnel.

“Reallocating funds away from law enforcement …

(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 …

Aaron Burr Jr. And John Pierre Burr: A Founding Father And His Abolitionist Son, Sherri Burr

Faculty Scholarship

Aaron Burr Jr. (Class of 1772), the third Vice President of the United States, fathered two children by a woman of color from Calcutta, India. Their son, John Pierre Burr (1792-1864), would become an activist, abolitionist, and conductor on the Underground Railroad.

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 …

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

#Abolishice: An Anti-Capitalist And Anti-Colonial Approach To Black, Indigenous, And Migrant Solidarity Building, Cecilia I. 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 …

Undocumented Youth Challenging Borders: Detentions, Deportations, And Family Separations In The 21st Century, Rafael A. Martínez

American Studies ETDs

My dissertation project explores the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the U.S. in the early 21st century. Undocumented youth have increasingly drawn on their own social capital to produce forms of activism that highlight and critique increasingly repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained and imagined as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal’. I argue that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and rigid nationalist formations.

Civil Rights In Living Color, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

This Article will examine how American civil rights law has treated “color” discrimination and differentiated it from “race” discrimination. It is a comprehensive analysis of the changing legal meaning of “color” discrimination throughout American history. The Article will cover views of “color” in the antebellum era, Reconstruction laws, early equal protection cases, the U.S. Census, modern civil rights statutes, and in People v. Bridgeforth—a landmark 2016 ruling by the New York Court of Appeals. First, the Article will lay out the complex relationship between race and color and discuss the phenomenon of colorism—oppression based on skin color—as differentiated from …

Neutrosophic In Latin America, Advances And Perspectives (Neutrosofía En Latinoamérica, Avances Y Perspectivas), Maykel Leyva-Vazquez, Jesus Estupinan, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Neutrosophy has given way to its own research method by constituting a unified field of logic for a transdisciplinary study that crosses the borders between the sciences. This paper analyzes the impact of neutrosophic theory in Latin America, its main drivers and the state of the research. The increase in publications since the creation of the Latin American Association of Neutrosophic Sciences is noteworthy. The most approached areas are found in the interrelation of the social sciences and neutrosophy, presenting outstanding results in these areas of research. The most outstanding university and institutions are the Autonomous Regional University of the …

Kamala Harris And The Complexity Of Racial Identity Politics, Vinay Harpalani

Faculty Scholarship

Vinay Harpalani reviews Kamala Harris' run as Democratic nominee for President, contrasting her challenges with Barak Obama's campaign to show how racial identity politics are complicated and constantly evolving as well as the intersectional, or multifaceted, issues Kamala faced during her candidacy.

“Where Are You From?”: Using Critical Race Theory To Analyze Graphic Novel Counter-Stories Of The Racial Microaggressions Experienced By Two Angry Asian Girls, Talitha Angelica Acaylar Trazo, Woohee Kim

Intersections: Critical Issues in Education

This article uses critical race theory (CRT) to analyze two stories about racial microaggressions from Where Are You From?: Short stories about being Asian in America, the graphic novel written and illustrated by Talitha Angelica Acaylar Trazo in fulfillment of her undergraduate honors thesis. Where Are You From? visually historicizes the counter-stories of 48 Asian and Asian American students at a predominantly-white undergraduate institution. In this article, we examine these microaggressions in relation to institutional and structural racism and the intersections of race, gender, and power dynamics between white faculty and Asian female students. Furthermore, we propose …

Let's Talk Protecting Endangered Species, Clifford J. Villa, Ty Bannerman, Will Cavin, Taylor Jones, Ari Biernoff

Faculty Scholarship

The Trump Administration recently changed Endangered Species Act regulations affecting how species are removed from endangered status and streamlining permits for the oil and gas and ranching industries. Environmentalists say the rules weaken protections. How could the new rules change industry and conservation in New Mexico?

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 López-García

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 Andrea 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-Alicia Martínez

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 Elizabeth 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 Catherine 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 …

Dissonances Of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism And Slavery In The Expansion Of Capitalism, W. Oliver Baker

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project studies how ethnic American literature of the long nineteenth century represents the relationship between the dispossession of lands and lives—the histories of settler colonialism and slavery—and the making of democracy and capitalism in the United States. We often think of this relationship in terms of temporally distinct stages in which the formal equality of democracy and the marketplace overcome and thus leave behind the direct domination of colonization and enslavement. However, I focus on how the early novels of Indigenous, African, and Mexican American writers from the period of manifest destiny to the New Deal era represent the …

Engaging Sacred Space And Experiencing God In The Mountains: A Study Of The Non-Traditional Worship Environment Of Mountain Cathedrals, An Ecumenical Meetup Group Based In Albuquerque, New Mexico, Brendan Isaiah Nixon

Geography ETDs

This paper focuses on the non-traditional Christian worship site of Mountain Cathedrals in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I argue that affectual and emotional responses are elicited from the congregants of Mountain Cathedrals through the process of sacralization. It is shown that Christian worship in a non-traditional outdoor setting affects the ways in which the congregants engage with, participate in, and create sacred space. I survey current literatures of sacred space, the contemporary Christian church, and non-traditional worships spaces. Using the literature as a backdrop, I utilize Mountain Cathedrals as a case study for understanding the ways in which sacred space is …

Recipe For Disaster, Zac Travis

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

Today’s rapid advances in algorithmic processes are creating and generating predictions through common applications, including speech recognition, natural language (text) generation, search engine prediction, social media personalization, and product recommendations. These algorithmic processes rapidly sort through streams of computational calculations and personal digital footprints to predict, make decisions, translate, and attempt to mimic human cognitive function as closely as possible. This is known as machine learning.

The project Recipe for Disaster was developed by exploring automation in technology, specifically through the use of machine learning and recurrent neural networks. These algorithmic models feed on large amounts of data as a …

The Index Of The Quotidian: Folk Music And Language Poetry, Gus Tafoya

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Healing Familial And Historical Trauma Through The Lens Of Generational Femininity And Motherhood: Beyoncé'S Lemonade, Amanda R. Garcia

2020 Award Winners

No abstract provided.

Nefarious Neighbors: How Living Near Payday Loan Stores Affects Loan Use, Nathalie Martin, Younghee Lim, Aimee Moles, Trey Bickham

Faculty Scholarship

Few of us give much thought to local laws, yet local laws, such as zoning and other land use regulations, have an abiding influence on our lives. Think for a few moments about the types of businesses located near your home. Are these businesses places you frequent? Considering socio-economics, how do land uses differ from locale to locale throughout your city or state? Do all citizens have an equal voice in the land use approval process? The answer is likely no, which creates environmental and economic justice issues.

Like all businesses, when it comes to payday lenders, geography matters. Payday …

Book Review: Jonathan P. Thompson, River Of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, And Green Behind The Gold King Mine Disaster (2018), Clifford J. Villa

Faculty Scholarship

On August 5, 2015, contractors for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) investigating the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado accidently released some three million gallons of contaminated water into the Animas River, triggering weeks of front-page headlines, months of congressional hearings, and now years of litigation. River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster, a new book by Jonathan P. Thompson, suggests by its title a human folly behind this “disaster” much broader and deeper than one tragic accident wrought by EPA contractors. On this thesis, Thompson certainly delivers. However, what …