Latina/o Studies Commons^™

Echándole Ganas: Pláticas Of Belonging + Resistance In Art + Design, Itzanya Bravo

Masters Theses

This thesis centers the experiences of Mexican American students, alumni, faculty, and community-based artists navigating art and design higher education in the United States. Grounded in the question ¿Dónde está la gente latina?—where are the Latino people?—this research examines how representation and culturally sustaining practices shape Mexican American students' sense of belonging and creative agency in a country with systems built on white supremacy

Using pláticas as the primary methodology—a relational, conversational approach rooted in community and storytelling traditions—alongside autohistoria-teoría and Chicana Feminist Epistemology, this study draws on eight in-depth pláticas with Mexican American creatives across art + design higher …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

El Maíz Del Abuelo: Fidel Márquez Sanchez’S Legacy And Mexico’S Historical Maize Agriculture, Lucia Marquez-Uppman

Scripps Senior Theses

The Green Revolution was an era of scientific development in productive agricultural methods and technologies in the mid-twentieth century. High-yielding seed varieties, artificial fertilizers, irrigation infrastructure, pesticides, and herbicides all developed from this period. Texcoco, Mexico was the center of much of the Green Revolution's education and research from the 1940s onward at the Autonomous University of Chapingo, a prestigious agricultural school, with funding from the US-based philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation. Powerful consequences in the globe's agriculture emerged from the Green Revolution, including the production of maize, a staple crop in Mexico, especially for Indigenous and campesino populations. My abuelo, Fidel …

Patchwork: 76km Between Juárez And El Paso, Naheyla Medina

Masters Theses

Located at the western edge of Texas where the Río Bravo ~ Rio Grande, becomes the border between México and the United States. Resides a spectacle of misconceptions that, along with an expansive corten steel border wall embedded into the earth, live to suppress the histories, culture, and environment entangled together like patchwork along this border space. The built environment influences our daily experiences, and our daily experiences can often influence our built environment. This project seeks to leverage, murals as a medium, creative writing, and architectural representations, to rework the mapping between Mexico and the US. Honing in on …

Impacting Queer Trans-Migrations In Mexico: A Case Study Of Civil Society Organization Casa Frida Refugio Lgbt+, Leticia Morales

Master's Theses

Mexico has historically been known as an emigration or transit country. In this context, civil society organizations have played pivotal roles in addressing the voids in support for migrants. Among these organizations, Casa Frida Refugio LGBT stands out as a significant service provider, specifically for LGBT+ migrants. This study engages in a qualitative case study analysis of the organization Casa Frida, drawing from interviews conducted with nine LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees, personal observations, and Casa Frida’s website and social media accounts. The research seeks to answer two central questions: Firstly, what role does an LGBT+ specific service provider like Casa …

Las Aztecas: Gender, Nationalism, And Sport In Mexico And The World In The Early 1970s, Madelina Marie Homberger Cordia

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

In 1970, a Mexican women’s national fútbol (soccer) team participated in the first-ever women’s World Cup, held in Italy. Organized by private business interests, Mexico competed as the sole representative from outside of Europe. The Mexican media and State officials, such as Mexico City regent Alfonso Corona del Rosal, used this opportunity to frame the team’s travel abroad as defending not only the honor of the Mexican nation, but the entire Western Hemisphere against more developed and wealthier European teams. The following year, in 1971, Mexico hosted the second women’s World Cup and, in the same way that the State …

Blending European And Latin Sounds: A Study Of French Horn Repertoire In Mexico, Aj Bernal

Theses and Dissertations--Music

As a first generation Mexican-American, it is crucial that I advocate and promote music of the culture I grew up in. This project aims to unearth Mexican compositional techniques that derive from the fusion of European and Indigenous roots in an effort to promote diversity within the realm of Western Classical music. Music in Mexico is characterized by a unique blend of indigenous rhythms, European classical structures, and regional folk influences. This project will discuss how the bold timbre of the French horn intertwines with traditional Mexican and indigenous melodies, rhythms, and forms that create a unique style. The horn’s …

Mama’S Got A Brand New Degree: Education And Changing Perceptions Of Femininity During The Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), Eden E. Baize

The Cardinal Edge

Bloody struggles, tense political debates, and general unease characterized Mexico in the early twentieth century. Under former president Porfirio Díaz, tensions grew as the lower classes pleaded for labor and land reform, culminating in a violent period of revolution from 1910 to 1917. As with all conflicts of this scale, the Mexican Revolution prompted the challenging of many long standing social conventions, specifically as they pertained to the role of government and the organization of social classes. With the restructuring of society already underway, many activists capitalized on the uncertainty of the era to push against the subjugation of women. …

Ships In Houston, Nadia Villafuerte, Julie Ann Ward

Undiscovered Americas

Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with …

Migratory Material: Epigenetics & Weaving At The Us-Mexico Border, Valerie Navarrete

Masters Theses

Discourse often sutures the body shut, disallowing representations of identity to outgrow sociopolitical interests. This issue may originate from borders, but also from the unnamable pathology that generational colonial trauma transmits to the mind, body, and environment. Without a direct form of translatability, this thesis proposes a new materialism that deviates from any object-oriented ontology. Untethered and intra-active, epigenetics and weaving represent objects that transform typical ways of knowing and seeing. Their sensitivity to the environment, in addition to their mobility across generations of time, broaden the spatiotemporal loci of the body and its embodiment. Proposing new materials that expand …

Flores, Rigoberto Flores

Masters Theses

My name is Rigoberto Flores and I was born in Guerrero, Mexico. The work I make involves politics, immigration, cartel violence and religious themes. I’m interested in presenting these challenging and difficult concepts, to have them remain in the public consciousness. The work I produce involve charcoal drawings, textiles, print, and painting. The work I create is intended to address inconstancies in established ideas, usually involving government violence. Throughout history art has been used to promote institutional propaganda. I am searching to do the same, but to oppose those structures.

Why Have There Been No Rich Women Artists? Examining The Gender Price Discount In The Contemporary Auction Market For Early Twentieth Century Mexican Avant-Garde Art, Lucy P. Bloomstran

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper examines the gender price discount for early twentieth-century Mexican avant-garde art in the contemporary auction market. A premium for art by men is established through the econometric analysis of a dataset of auction transactions taking place at major American and Mexican auction houses between 2000 and 2022. After this price discount for women’s art is established, a deep delve into gender discrimination in the creation and exhibition of Mexican Muralism and Surrealism is presented to provide possible art historical explanations for the results of the regression analysis.

Boundary As Borderland: Mexico City’S Central Plaza And The Politics Of Presence, Re'al Christian

Theses and Dissertations

In the postcolonial era, the land surrounding national borders—the borderland—has inherited a specific identity and relationship with those who navigate it. While national borderlands are oft discussed amid conversations on globalization, land disputes, and war, the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the new establishment of borderlands from within in the form of segregative boundaries that purported to separate Indigenous and European peoples. This thesis concerns the manifestation of the borderland as not only an external entity, but an internal one as well. Using Mexico City, the center of the Spanish colonial empire, as …

The Strategically Broken System: A Grounded Theory Study Of The Clinical Implications Of Immigration Law, Policy, And Practice, Kelle Agassiz

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

The majority of clinicians do not receive education pertaining to the legal aspects of immigration in their curriculum, training, or continuing education. In addition, the process of navigating the immigration system has been exacerbated in recent years due to rapid policy changes under the Trump administration, which has contributed to a hostile political climate, particularly for immigrants from Central America and Mexico. Using a classic grounded theory research approach, this study explored the relationship between the psychological implications of immigration and the legal challenges that immigrants face today, with a specific focus on immigration from Central America and Mexico. Through …

Mexico And The People: Revolutionary Printmaking And The Taller De Gráfica Popular, Carolyn Hauk, Joy Zanghi

Schmucker Art Catalogs

During its most turbulent and formative years of the twentieth century, Mexico witnessed decades of political frustration, a major revolution, and two World Wars. By the late 1900s, it emerged as a modernized nation, thrust into an ever-growing global sphere. The revolutionary voices of Mexico’s people that echoed through time took root in the arts and emerged as a collective force to bring about a new self-awareness and change for their nation. Mexico’s most distinguished artists set out to challenge an overpowered government, propagate social-political advancement, and reimagine a stronger, unified national identity. Following in the footsteps of political printmaker …

Distorsión Y Silencio En El Lienzo De Tlaxcala (1892) De Alfredo Chavero: Notas Metodológicas, Jannette Amaral-Rodríguez

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1581–1585), a Tlaxcalan manuscript that contains homologous images to the ones in Lienzo de Tlaxcala (of which there are only modern copies in existence), was found in 1976 and published in three modern editions since 1981. Even though this sixteenth-century manuscript offers authentic images on the history of colonial Tlaxcala, literary critics and historians continue to use the Lienzo de Tlaxcala copied by the painter Genaro López and edited by Alfredo Chavero in 1892. To develop a critique of these methodological practices through the consideration of the historical and ideological context of …

Pieces Of Place: Finding Meaning Through The Material And Process Of Artisanal Craft In Central Mexico, Eliza S. Homer

Expressive Therapies Dissertations

The research in this study focused on how storytelling through artmaking, specifically, narrative embroidered story cloths (tela bordada) has been used traditionally in rural Central Mexico. The study explored place-based identities and traditions embedded in the culture, and examined how these processes could potentially be incorporated into art therapy practice in these communities. The research question, “What is the experience of engagement in tela bordada?” illuminated the meaning of Indigenous theory and expanded the import of the experience of the material and process. This led to the discovery of finding meaning explicit in the participants’ experiences and implicit …

Perceptions Of The North American Free Trade Agreement And Mexican Migration: “What Is The Relationship Between Trade Liberalization And Labor Mobility?”, Colin Gonzalez

Political Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

In an effort to understand the effectiveness of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the author uses previous academic literature to assesses the success of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s primary and peripheral goals. To understand how North American citizens, perceive NAFTA and their future relationship with one another, the author uses survey data to analyze attitudes of American and Mexican citizens towards trade liberalization (NAFTA) and labor mobility. Regression analysis reveals that there is a positive relationship between labor mobility and trade liberalization for Mexican citizens but not for American citizens. This is a significant finding that contributes …

Stills Of Passage: Photography And Migration In The Us-Mexico Borderlands, 1978-1992, Nadiah Rivera Fellah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates documentary photography at a critical juncture in the history of the US-Mexico borderlands. Following a period of rapid industrialization and growth in Mexico, the 1970s and 1980s were marked by moments of economic and political crisis, which simultaneously spurred a massive wave of northward migrants and the militarization of the US-Mexico border. These developments produced a large class of Mexican undocumented workers in the US, which in turn stimulated the formation of a hybrid border culture. At the same moment, a generation of young artists from Mexico and the United States, eager to document these changes, radically …

America's New Favorite Food, Laura E. Duclos, Sshiva Tejas M

Capstones

America's New Favorite Food focuses on the culinary shift the United States is making. The days of burgers and fries are dwindling and tacos are taking over. This short documentary series follows four people who hold distinctive views on Mexican cuisine. Viewers are also able to experience Mexican food in augmented reality, where they can tinker with the models via computer or phone.

LINK TO PROJECT: DuclosTejasCapstone.weebly.com

Los Códices: An Exhibit Of Illustrated Books From Indigenous Mesoamerica, Jacob S. Neely

Hispanic Studies Student Research

This is an exhibit of facsimile codices housed in the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.

The exhibit is on display in the Great Hall on the second floor of the Margaret I. King Library at the University of Kentucky from September 17, 2018 to November 9, 2018.

The exhibit is also available online.

The World On A Whorl: Considerations On Aztec Spindle Whorl Iconography, Jesper Nielsen

PreColumbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII (2016)

An unpublished collection of Aztec (Late Postclassic central Mexico, ca. 1400-1520) spindle whorls (totaling 33 items) with rich iconographic embellishment is the focus of this paper, which will discuss a set of recurring iconographic themes, such as the ’sun disk’, ’eagles’, ’jade disks or chalchihuites’ and ’cloud-scrolls’, on the whorls. Previous treatments of spindle whorl imagery have tended to regard such motifs merely as decoration, but here I suggest that the repertoire at hand indicate a limited scope of motifs that share some cosmological and religious significance. In a broader perspective these observations point to the potential mythological underpinnings of …

Precolumbian Textile Conference Vii / Jornadas De Textiles Precolombinos Vii, Lena Bjerregaard, Ann H. Peters

PreColumbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII (2016)

Contents:

Introduction — Lena Bjerregaard and Ann Peters

Mexico

1. Mesoamerican Archaeological Textiles: An Overview of Materials, Techniques, and Contexts — Laura Filloy Nadal

2. Urdimbres enlazadas de Mesoamérica. Textil de la Cueva del Gallo, Morelos, México — Patricia Ochoa Castillo & Rosa Lorena Román Torres •

3. Los textiles procedentes del actual estado de Guerrero, México: una revisión a su estudio desde la perspectiva arqueológica y etnohistórica — Elizabeth Jiménez García

4. Classic Textiles from Cueva del Lazo (Chiapas, Mexico). Archaeological context and conservation issues — Davide Domenici & Gloria Martha Sánchez Valenzuela

5. Textiles y otros materiales arqueológicos …

Smoking Selectivity Among Mexican Immigrants To The United States Using Binational Data, 1999–2012, Nancy L. Fleischer, Annie Ro, Georgiana Bostean

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Mexican immigrants have lower smoking rates than US-born Mexicans, which some scholars attribute to health selection—that individuals who migrate are healthier and have better health behaviors than their non-migrant counterparts. Few studies have examined smoking selectivity using binational data and none have assessed whether selectivity remains constant over time. This study combined binational data from the US and Mexico to examine: 1) the extent to which recent Mexican immigrants (< 10 years) in the US are selected with regard to cigarette smoking compared to non-migrants in Mexico, and 2) whether smoking selectivity varied between 2000 and 2012—a period of declining tobacco use in Mexico and the US. We combined repeated cross-sectional US data (n = 10.901) on adult (ages 20–64) Mexican immigrants and US-born Mexicans from the 1999/2000 and 2011/2012 National Health Interview Survey, and repeated cross-sectional Mexican data on non-migrants (n …

Negotiating Mexican Citizenship: Examining Implications Of A Narco-State And Rebellions In Contemporary Mexico, Nereida Guadalupe Montes

Scripps Senior Theses

Neoliberal has bee largely responsible for the creation of a narcoestado. As the Mexican state abandon its previous cultural projects such as education, employment, and social services, economic void increased. Narco-traffickers have increasingly filled this vacuum. Arguably, the weaken pillars of Mexican society allowed narco-trafficking to penetrate the areas once fulfilled by the state. It has led to the recruitment of economically dislocated farmers and citizens to turn to narco-trafficking for financial stability. Although, the state and narco-traffickers at times compete with each other to fulfill some of these functions, they also at times co-exist and merge into what …

“Mexico, Public Policy And Obesity In A Global Context”, Daniela Carina Bermudez

Master's Theses

Mexico has one of the most obese populations in the world. A country known for its diversity of rich flavorful food is drowning in low nutritional food products. This thesis examines Mexico’s obesity epidemic within the larger global context of international economic trade policies, public policies and Mexico’s health policies. The key research questions are 1) why is there an obesity epidemic in Mexico? and 2) what remedies should Mexico implement to control it? This thesis contributes to a viable policy strategy for the Mexican government to control and prevent the further increase of this obesity epidemic. Reviewing both the …

Mexica Music, Tizoc E. Ramirez-Marquez

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper explores the society of Mexica, or the Aztecs, and some of the instruments that were produced in the civilization and used in today’s compositions. The history and their creation mythology will also be deliberated for those individuals who do not know this information of the culture. In the history, the subjects of the Mexica constructing a giant city in a lake to the conquest that was lead by Hernan Cortez will be discussed. The creation story will also exhibit the ideology of the Mexica and how their culture is sustained before the conquest. In the music section, the …

New Matriarchs: Louisville, Kentucky Ii (Fa 1001), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

Folklife Archives Finding Aids

Digital audio interviews, transcripts of the same, photographs and digital photo files, and corollary material related to a project conducted by Laura Fleming Ospital titled "New Matriarchs: Louisville II" in 2014-2015. It details the lives of women from Guatemala, Kazakhstan, Mexico,and Uzbekistan. The digital interviews are stored in the WKU Sound Archives and the digital images are stored in The WKU Photo Archives.

Contributions Of The Jesuits To Human Rights In Mexico: A Case Study Of Center Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez, Luis Arriaga Valenzuela

LMU Theses and Dissertations

In Mexico, as in other parts of the world, human rights violations have deep historical roots. In the forty years before this study, these violations had been increasing, especially with respect to excluded populations and vulnerable groups, such as women, indigenous peoples, migrants, and victims of repression (Center Prodh, 2013). To reverse or at least decrease these conditions, disenfranchised people needed to become aware of their rights within civil society. Toward that end, diverse non-governmental organizations (NGOs) had taken on the task of providing education and strategic practices to disenfranchised people and communities. The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) had …

Diario De Perla Jimenez, Brenda Dorantes

World Languages and Cultures

The aim of this project is to present the effect of the immigration issue in the United States, with a direct focus in San Luis Obispo, and including a spread of intercultural knowledge between the Hispanic and the Caucasian community. Through a fictional short story, the manifestation of these ideas will relate to current events occurring in our society today. These events focus primarily on immigration in California, deportation issues, socioeconomic issues in Mexico, and the cultural barrier seen in Mexican and American cultures; expressed through the main character: a young college student named Perla.

My primary goal in completing …