Latina/o Studies Commons^™

Revealing Luz: Illuminating Our Identities Through Duoethnography, Carrie Diaz Eaton, Luz Marizza Bailey

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

Hispanic Americans make up 15% of the current US workforce, but they only account for 7% of the STEM Education workforce [8]. One effective way to reach this population, particularly Latinas, is by providing stories and ethnographic biographies of successful Latinas they can relate to. It is important to note that Latinas have been earning PhDs in STEM disciplines outside of the US much longer than US-born Latinas have been earning them inside. Thus we offer the story of a mathematics educator, from Peru, Dr. Luz Antonia Mendizábal Gálvez de Rodriguez, a girl who was given a chance to be …

María Guadalupe García De Perales, María Guadalupe García De Perales

Coming to the Plains Oral Histories/ Llenando las Llanuras Historias Orales

María Guadalupe García de Perales proviene de Durango, México. María está casada con Constancio Perales y juntos tienen cuatro hijos. El esposo de María inmigró a los Estados Unidos para mejorar su situación económica. Después de varios intentos, García finalmente logró cruzar la frontera de EE. UU. junto con sus hijos para reunir la familia. María se sintió bienvenida en un país nuevo. María tuvo la oportunidad de trabajar en varios empleos lo cual ayudó a sustentar a su familia y a darles a sus hijos la oportunidad de tener una buena educación.

María Guadalupe García de Perales is from …

Family Functioning In Latino Families Of Children With Adhd: The Role Of Parental Gender And Acculturation, Anne Malkoff

Master's Theses (2009 -)

It has been well established that parents of children with ADHD report significantly higher levels of parenting stress (Heath, Curtis, Fan, & McPherson, 2015) and chaos in the home (Wirth et al., 2017) than parents of children without ADHD. Parents of children with ADHD also report feeling less efficacious in their parenting abilities compared to parents of children without ADHD (Primack et al., 2012). To date, a majority of the literature on ADHD has focused on European American children and families, resulting in a paucity of research and clinical practice with ethnic minority families of youth with ADHD, specifically among …

Relations Of Discriminatory Experiences And Marianismo Beleifs With Ptsd Symptoms In Latinx Women, Claire Maria Bird

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Research examining the discriminatory experiences of Latinx women in minimal. The present study examined if various forms of discrimination predicted mental health symptoms in a sample of Latinx women, with the conceptualization of chronic discrimination as a possible form of trauma. There is evidence showing that Latinx individuals are at risk to develop posttraumatic stress disorder at higher rates than their non-Hispanic White counterparts, with many studies pointing to the experiences of racial/ethnic discrimination as a significant contributor (Kaczkurkin, Asnaani, Hall-Clark, Peterson, Yarvis, & Foa, 2016). Given the multiple forms of discrimination that women of color experience, ethnic discrimination, sexism, …

Enedina Manríquez, Enedina Manríquez

Coming to the Plains Oral Histories/ Llenando las Llanuras Historias Orales

Enedina Manríquez was born in Guanajuato, Mexico. Her family moved to the United States when Manríquez was ten months old. Manríquez and her family have lived in many places in the United States, moving to find work. They finally settled in Scottsbluff, Nebraska where her parents could work at a restaurant that Enedina’s uncle owned. Manríquez’s parents now own the restaurant. Manríquez is a part of DACA, which allows her to attend school and work in the United States as an undocumented immigrant. She discusses how being undocumented has impacted her life. Manríquez attended the University of Nebraska at Kearney …

The Social Provision Of Healthcare To Migrants In The Us And In China, Van C. Tran, Katharine M. Donato

Publications and Research

This article develops a comparative analysis of healthcare provision to migrants in the US and in China. It proceeds in three parts. First, we begin by describing the growth of the unauthorized population and trace the evolution of social provision of healthcare to immigrants, highlighting the restrictive nature of federal social provisions and greater autonomy of state and local governments in redefining eligibility criteria in the US. Second, we examine the impact of legal status on healthcare access and utilization among Mexicans, using original data from the 2007 Hispanic Healthcare Survey and the Mexican Migration Project. We find that unauthorized …

Yes We Can Can, Eliseo Angel Casiano

LSU Master's Theses

Yes We Can Can is a compilation of paintings and short stories that depict my placement and role among substantially white rural communities in the South. Through portraiture in painting, I interpret family and biographical events that examine representations of race, family relationships, and my maneuverability through a space of otherness.

Casiano, 2018

Mapping The Nature Of Empire: The Legacy Of Theological Geography In The Early Iberian Atlantic, Ángel Jazak Gallardo

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

This investigation revolves around one central question: if Christianity became the official ideology for sixteenth-century imperial expansion, then how does a theological conception of nature undergird or undermine colonial configurations of knowledge and power? I argue that, in the wake of 1492, Iberian empires racialized religious identity and mapped hemispheric dominion by leveraging a theological geography, that is, a scholastic vision of the natural world.

In Chapter One, I examine the order of nature in late medieval cosmology. By analyzing Fra Mauro’s Mappamundi (c. 1450), I show the ways in which Aristotelian Thomism provides an intellectual framework for subsequent global …

Carlos Ortega, Carlos Ortega

Coming to the Plains Oral Histories/ Llenando las Llanuras Historias Orales

Carlos Ortega was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. His family moved to the United States in 2001. Ortega initially struggled in school because of his difficulties with English. With the support of a dedicated teacher and through immersion, Ortega eventually became fluent in English. Both in school and in the community, Ortega has faced much racial discrimination, including physical assaults. Ortega wishes to become a teacher to teach tolerance to young students and to help both adult and young Hispanic immigrants learn English.

Carlos Ortega nació en Chihuahua, México. En 2001 su familia se mudó a los Estados Unidos. Ortega inicialmente …

The Nature Of My Nature; A Story About Relationships, Andrew Mcilvaine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

As a second generation Hispanic, I am a painter whose work is informed by my personal experience of displacement and longing to belong. In turn, I hope, this longing inspires an important dialogue about place, memory, otherness and belonging. I work in small, intimate scale, evoking narratives of vastness yet also of solitude. The landscape and the natural environment I represent, become populated by anonymous creatures. Both animal and human, posed in semi-natural and semi-artificial settings.

I was born in Texas and grew up in Missouri. The images I produce are often tranquil and surreal yet are grounded through …

El Mundo Anti-Negro Y Los Hip-Hop Blues: Los Rakas Y J-Cole, Josué R. López

The Quiet Corner Interdisciplinary Journal

Tenemos que contender con el mundo anti-negro. Los Rakas, un dúo artístico panameño-estadounidense, y J-Cole, un artista afro-estadounidense, utilizan al hip-hop como una avenida para comunicar sus ansiedades, sufrimientos y fortalecerse en la lucha infinita al ser el Otro Oscuro. Los blues forman parte de como uno lidia con la permanencia del racismo y nuestra existencia en un mundo anti-negro. A través de Frantz Fanon, Derrick Bell y Lewis Gordon, argumento que el estilo musical de J-Cole y Los Rakas constituye una forma de los hip-hop blues. Examino las canciones “Sueño Americano” y “Neighbors” para analizar cómo los artistas entienden …

Suing For Spanish: Puerto Ricans, Bilingual Voting, And Legal Activism In The 1970s, Ariel Arnau

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how the legal activism of a Puerto Rican group of activist-lawyers and community members contributed to the reshaping of voting law and language policy during the 1970s. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund (PRLDEF) coordinated a series of lawsuits in Chicago, New York City, and Philadelphia during the early 1970s. The decisions in these lawsuits provided the legal framework to rewrite federal voting rights law during the Voting Rights Act (VRA) reauthorization hearings in 1975. These cases resulted in vastly expanded opportunity to vote for all language minorities in the United States. These civil rights …

Tracing Dominican Attitudes Towards Race: A Historical Analysis, Marcos Polonia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The common misconception is that all Dominicans are racist – that Dominicans live in a Fanonesque reality where we believe we are white, but we clearly inhabit black bodies. These attitudes permeate Dominican society from the highest echelons of power to the everyday experiences of Dominicans on the street. The notion that Dominicans are racist is widespread among Latinos and African-Americans as well. Recently, global attention was focused on the Dominican Republic as the country changed its constitution in order to prevent Dominicans of Haitian descent from becoming Dominican citizens. But, where do these notions of race come from? This …

The Communal "I": Exclusion And Belonging In American Autobiography, Melissa Coss Aquino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Communal “I” in American autobiography emerges as an aesthetic response to the pressure of using “the master’s tools” to write from a community on the margins to disclose identity in the conflicts of exclusion and belonging. In this case “the master’s tools” to refer to several distinct elements the communal “I” is tasked with navigating: the use of what we have come to identify as standard English, the form and function of European autobiography as a celebration of individual exceptionalism, and the contradictory pressures on these autobiographies to both elevate and protect the communities in question from further marginalization. …

Culture Care Needs Of Puerto Rican Women Receiving Hiv Care From Nurse Practitioners In New York City, Michele Crespo-Fierro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this mini-ethnonursing research study was to discover, describe, and interpret culture care values, beliefs, expressions, practices and needs of Puerto Rican women receiving HIV care from nurse practitioners (NPs) and other providers in New York City. The emic, or insider, perspective of Puerto Rican women living with HIV was the focus of this study and Leininger’s Culture Care Theory (CCT) provided the theoretical framework. Various enablers of the CCT, including Leininger’s Sunrise Enabler to Discover Culture Care, guided the design andimplementation of the study. Six key and twelve general informantswere interviewed and data from the interviews were …

The Other At War: Performing The Spanish-Cuban-American War On U.S. And Cuban Stages, Juan R. Recondo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish-Cuban-American War, declared by the United States on April 25, 1898, marks a colonial shift in the history of the Caribbean and solidified the expansionist thrust of the United States outside national borders. Theatres in turn-of-the-century New York, which at this point was one of the theatrical centers of the nation, debated for audiences the imperialist character of the U.S. The Cuban struggle and the resulting Spanish-Cuban-American War permeated U.S. drama, thereby portraying a Caribbean in need of salvation by the military intervention of the United States. New York stages of the time became locations where various cultural representations …

Perspectives From The Streets And The Classrooms In The Same 'Hood: Linguistic Landscapes Of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Luis Guzman Valerio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the linguistic landscape of the neighborhood of Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, New York by taking into account both a main commercial avenue and a public school with a dual language bilingual program in English and Spanish. Sunset Park is a multi-ethnic and immigrant neighborhood (Hum, 2014). While research has been done into the linguistic landscape of streets, cities, and communities, on the one hand, and about the linguistic landscape in education, on the other, the co-existence of these two in the same context has barely been studied (cf. Maldonado, 2015). This dissertation makes a contribution to the …

The Us’S Economic Promises Are Over: An Interview With Miguel Luciano, Marisa Lerer, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. The island was left without electricity and clean water for months. However, the natural disaster was not the only cause of this lasting devastation. The financial fall-out from predatory loans, which led to Puerto Rico’s inability to invest funds in its own infrastructure, caused an enduring humanitarian disaster. Artist Miguel Luciano (b. 1972) in this interview discusses his work in relation to the 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis and the legacy of the over 100-year span of Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a US territory, which gives the US disproportionate control over …

First Generation College Parents: Bridging The Gap Between The American Higher Education System And Latino Families, Georgina Pérez

M.A. in Leadership Studies: Capstone Project Papers

This paper explores the gap that exists between the American higher education system and the families of Latino first-generation college students. Research conducted for this paper details the many barriers immigrant Latino families encounter when navigating the American education system, as well as how parent involvement is key to student success no matter where the student is in their educational career. Furthermore, this paper offers a possible solution to closing that gap by implementing a program that would mentor and support the parents of first-generation college students through the transition from high school and up until students graduate from college. …

An Analysis Of The Effects Of Cultural Expectations And Family Obligations On Latina Women Attending College, Valeria Bielma

M.A. in Leadership Studies: Capstone Project Papers

This paper explores the existing research involving the cultural roles, expectations and family obligations that may be affecting Latina college students. Latina higher education attainment rates are significantly lower compared to their female counterparts and this paper seeks to explore how strong collectivist orientations may be contributing to this achievement disparity. Familismo is a cultural value that emphasizes loyalty, reciprocity and solidarity, involves strong identification and attachment to the family, and requires members to prioritize family. Latinas may be prioritizing family obligations or fulfilling cultural expectations over school responsibilities, which could lead to the decision to stop pursuing a higher …

Self-Perceived Success Of First-Generation College-Going Latinx Students, Sarah Mongillo

Honors Scholar Theses

This exploratory study aims to address the unique experiences of Latinx first-generation college-going students during their undergraduate careers. Literature has emphasized the obstacles Latinx students face during admission phase to college; this research examines the experiences of students attending a predominantly white institution (PWI) in the northeast. Latinx individuals are the most underrepresented ethnic group on college campuses, and those whose parents lack knowledge of the US education system must overcome additional struggles. Through qualitative data analysis of 20 undergraduate students’ survey responses, this study finds that first-generation college-going Latinx students feel isolated in their college experience and prioritize non-traditional …

“The Only Way Out Is In”: Negotiating Identity Through Narrative In The House On Mango Street And The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Brianna E. Taylor

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

While aimed at vastly different audiences, Sandra Cisneros’s beloved coming-of-age story The House on Mango Street and Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao both uniquely capture the complexities of navigating the hyphenated territory between their respective Mexican-American and Dominican-American identities. Cisneros engages readers with the simple yet profound narrative voice of Esperanza in a series of vignettes that subtly reveal a growing consciousness of her role as a young Mexican-American woman and her creative consciousness as an artist. Through the multifaceted narrative perspective of Yunior, Díaz skillfully weaves together “ghetto nerd” Oscar de …

Fresa Style In Mexico: Sociolinguistic Stereotypes And The Variability Of Social Meanings, Rebeca Martinez Gomez

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation examines the flexibility in the social meanings of sociolinguistic stereotypes and how linguistic and non-linguistic information affect these meanings. The investigation consists of four empirical studies surrounding the case of fresas in Mexico –members of the upper class that are perceived as using a unique linguistic style.

Study 1 investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics associated with the fresa stereotype. Through a qualitative analysis of 64 webpages and 3 performances of the style, it is shown that fresasare perceived as the counterpart of another construct, nacos,and that their linguistic style is linked to English due to …

Purgatorio, Rosie Pineda

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

Rodrigo Reyes’ provocative essay film re-imagines the Mexico/U.S. border as a mythical place comparable to Dante’s purgatory. Leaving politics aside, he takes a fresh look at the brutal beauty of the border and the people caught in its spell. By capturing a stunning mosaic of compelling characters and broken landscapes that live on the US/Mexico border, the filmmaker reflects on the flaws of human nature and the powerful absurdities of the modern world. An unusual border film, in the auteur tradition of camerastylo, Purgatorio ultimately becomes a fable of humanity, an epic and visceral experience with powerful and lingering images. …

Lupe Under The Sun, Rosie Pineda

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

Lupe Under the Sun is a neorealist film following an aging migrant worker living in California, who longs to return to Mexico before it is too late. Featuring a cast of nonprofessional actors, real farmworkers and authentic locations, Lupe Under the Sun tackles issues of depression, homesickness and the immigrant myth of the American Dream.

Long estranged from his family in Michoacán, migrant laborer Lupe finds relief from the backbreaking work of harvesting peaches in California’s Central Valley through camaraderie and a quiet love affair with fellow immigrant Gloria. Soon the stability of his daily routine begins to crack under …

Borderlands After Anzaldúa: Queer/Latinx Identity In Theory And Practice, Joshua Truett

Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies (2015-2021)

The Latinx queer subjectivity complicates the racial and social discourses of the United States and Latin America, in both the academy and popular culture. The complex intersections of identity that marks the queer Latinx subject disrupts conventional narratives of race, ethnicity and culture, as well as gender and sexuality.

The Latinx identity breaks down the rigid construction of race as a biological “truth,” challenging the Black versus White racial binary that is the foundation of the United States racial mythology; the Latinx subject is constructed in the American racial imaginary as neither black nor white, but ¨brown.” This construction of …

Leslie García, Leslie García

Coming to the Plains Oral Histories/ Llenando las Llanuras Historias Orales

Leslie García is from Lexington, Nebraska. She is the youngest daughter of Mexican immigrants. Her parents were well respected in their hometown, but they immigrated to the United States to build a better life for their family. García’s life has been marked by the experience she had growing up with Hispanic heritage in Lexington. García has extended family in California, Kansas, and Mexico, allowing her to experience the different cultures of both the United States and Mexico. García plans to become a Spanish teacher after graduating from college. She has been both a participant in and an assistant on Coming …

La Discriminación Contra Latinos (Discrimination Against Latinos), Lauren Swan

Research in the Capitol

This study examines the types of discrimination Latin@ college students in Iowa face in day-to-day life. The study focuses on both covert discrimination (i.e. microaggressions) as well as direct discrimination. Based on the analysis of ethnographic interviews with 8 undergraduate students at UNI, Latin@s face discrimination in three primary ways. The first is due to people making assumptions about them. The second way is through exoticizing Latin@s. These types of discrimination are often not recognized as offensive or derogatory by the wrongdoer. Lastly, Latin@s are often the recipients of language-based discrimination. This form of discrimination has to do with the …

Access To Mental Health Care For Depression Among Latina Women In Adams County, Alison P. Lauro

Student Publications

This research project focused on what barriers prevent Latina women in Adams County from accessing mental health care. A survey was distributed to 52 women over several weeks. These participants, particularly immigrant and undocumented women, have lower rates of health insurance, low incomes, and limited transportation, and the county does not have accessible, Spanish speaking mental health professionals, which makes it nearly impossible for these women to access mental healthcare in the county.

“La Culpa Es De Los Tlaxcaltecas”: Gender, The Burden Of Blame, And A Re-Examination Of The Myth Of La Malinche, Erin M. Lanza

Student Publications

This paper explores Elena Garro’s short story “La culpa es de los tlaxcaltecas.” Supplementing close readings with analyses drawn from relevant authors and theorists, I highlight the key ideas regarding gender, identity, memory, and history that Garro weaves into her text, and I consider Garro’s emphasis on patriarchal control, the internalization of female culpability for the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, and women’s role in constructing and reconstructing historical discourses. By travelling into her own and Mexico’s past, Laura Aldama, one of the main female protagonists in the story, not only challenges gendered histories but also reveals how patriarchal thought continues …