UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941(2024) Brahms, Darien P.; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The New Old Deal: Colonial Social Welfare and Puerto Rican Poverty During the Great Depression, 1928-1941 Abstract In 1941, at the end of the Great Depression, continental observers noted that Puerto Rico's urban shantytowns were expanding despite the US government's efforts to alleviate poverty through New Deal programs such as low-income housing and slum eradication initiatives. Their consensus was that working-class Puerto Ricans had it far worse than many poor Americans—including African Americans in the Jim Crow South. And yet, over the course of the 1930s, policymakers in Washington, D.C. came to conclude that a large portion of the Puerto Rican population were deserving, “white” American citizens. One would expect that, as they became increasingly categorized as “white” in the national census, federal aid to Puerto Rico would have followed the same patterns of racialized welfare that historians have associated with the New Deal. Why then were so many islanders moving to city squatters’ settlements while the white, continental working class benefitted from New Deal housing and employment initiatives? This conundrum prompted the following exploration of how Puerto Ricans' access to New Deal labor legislation, jobs creation and housing programs influenced the reinforcement of the island’s class structure, entrenched poverty, and the dramatic growth of its urban shantytowns. This dissertation considers how an analysis of island squatters’ settlements and housing programs for the island’s homeless can contribute to our understanding of how the Great Depression unfolded in a U.S. colonial territory as well as the race and class-based exclusions of New Deal aid programs. It also reveals that some U.S. officials did attempt to increase federal aid to the island during the 1930s. However, in addition to a relative lack of funding from D.C., local resistance to the New Deal fomented by insular politicians sympathetic to the colonial sugar industry prevented any meaningful aid from reaching the pockets of the island’s working classes for the bulk of the decade. And finally, this dissertation explores how exclusion from federal programs led to popular unrest that threatened to destabilize colonial rule and eventually caused a political sea change in Puerto Rico beginning in the late 1930s. This work will add to a growing body of transnational literature addressing New Deal scholarship which overlooks Puerto Rico as a topic of analysis. Including the colony in discussions about the discriminatory policies that reinforced the spatial isolation and poverty of mainland minorities will provide a new perspective on the ways power was maintained in America during an era of socioeconomic crisis. The following research also responds to works that privilege Puerto Rico's rural class struggles and agricultural capitalism while obscuring their effects on the island’s urban areas. Rural unemployment fueled migrations that swelled Puerto Rico's shantytowns, which became key sites for policy implementation battles between local and federal authorities. Such factors call for an analytical focus that includes the island's cities more fully. This approach will provide a holistic look at the interplay between the island's rural and urban regions and the mainland during the 1930s while broadening our understanding of class and racial dynamics during the American depression.Item COLONIAL CHOREOGRAPHY: STAGING SRI LANKAN DANCERS UNDER BRITISH COLONIAL RULE FROM THE 1870s – 1930s(2018) Madamperum Arachchilage, Sudesh Mantillake; Lee, Esther K; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In textbooks the terms “Kandyan dance” and its equivalent in the Sinhala language “udarata nätuma” are used to describe the dance tradition that was predominantly practiced in the Kandyan region of Sri Lanka. Nationalist histories portray Kandyan dance as a continuation of a pristine tradition that was passed down from ancient Sinhala kingdoms. As the Sinhala nationalist discourse glorified Kandyan dance vis à vis its Tamil counterpart, it obscured the British colonial encounter with Kandyan dancers by leaving out a part of the rich history of dance. As I demonstrate in this dissertation, colonialism transformed to a significant extent the Kandyan dancescape of the British colonial period, particularly between the 1870s and 1930s. Therefore, this dissertation re-examines the history of the so-called tradition of Kandyan dance with the focus on the British colonial encounter with performers of the Kandyan region. As a Sri Lankan dancer, I try to trace and interpret the histories of dancers that were ignored or shrouded in silence in colonial and Sinhala national histories. As a historian, I interpret archival materials through textual and visual analysis while as a dancer, I interpret archival materials through my embodied knowledge of Kandyan dance. I examine: How did the Sinhalese devil dance become a showpiece during the British colonial period, setting the ground for it to be elevated with the new name of “Kandyan dance”? Who defined its aesthetic parameters and repertoire? How did the performers respond to their colonial experience? I argue that, with the help of the native elites, the colonizers displaced, mobilized, manipulated, staged, and displayed performers of the Kandyan region for the benefit of colonial audiences through processions organized for British royal dignitaries, colonial exhibitions, photographs, and travel films. I call this process “colonial choreography”, which defined the aesthetic parameters and repertoire of Kandyan dance. However, the dancers were not just the victims of colonial choreography but also contributors to colonial choreography through their creativity and resistance. Therefore, I also argue that while collaborating with the colonizers, the dancers responded creatively to their experience and covertly resisted the colonial masters.Item Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community: Native Hawaiian Claims to Selfhood and Home(2016) Soon-Ludes, Jeannette; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1898 the United States illegally annexed the Hawaiian Islands over the protests of Queen Liliʽuokalani and the Hawaiian people. American hegemony has been deepened in the intervening years through a range of colonizing practices that alienate Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaiʽi, from their land and culture. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community is an exploration of contemporary Hawaiian peoplehood that reclaims indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity from colonizing narratives of nation and race. Drawing from archival holdings at the University of Hawaiʽi, Mānoa and in-depth interviews, this project offers an analysis of public and everyday discourses of nation, race, and peoplehood to trace the discursive struggle over Local identity and politics. A context-specific social formation in Hawaiʽi, “Local” is commonly understood as a multiethnic identity that has its roots in working-class, ethnic minority culture of the mid-twentieth century. However, American discourses of race and, later, multiethnicity have functioned to render invisible the indigenous roots of this social formation. Dissonant Belonging and the Making of Community reclaims these roots as an important site of indigenous resistance to American colonialism. It traces, on the one hand, the ways in which Native Hawaiian resistance has been alternately erased and appropriated. On the other hand, it explores the meanings of Local identity to Native Hawaiians and the ways in which indigenous conceptions of multiethnicity enabled a thriving community under conditions of colonialism.Item "Founding a Heavenly Empire": Protestant Missionaries and German Colonialism, 1860-1919(2012) Best, Jeremy; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the relationship between German Protestant missionaries and secular leaders of colonial politics and culture in the German colonial empire during the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines how missionaries defined their collective identity as an international one against pressures that encouraged mission societies to adopt and promote policies that favored the German colonial state and German colonial economic actors. Protestant missionaries in Germany created an alternative ideology to govern Germans' and Germany's relationships with the wider world. The dissertation examines the formation of an internationalist missionary methodology and ideology by German missionary intellectuals from 1870 and the shift to traditional Protestant nationalism during World War I. It then examines the application by missionaries of this ideology to the major issues of Protestant mission work in German East Africa: territorial rivalries with German Catholic mission orders, mission school policy, fundraising in the German metropole, and international missionary cooperation. In so doing, it revises conventional interpretations about the relationship between Protestantism and nationalism in Germany during this period.