Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Güeras, Morenas, y Prietas: Mexicana Color Lines and Ethnoracial Sameness-Difference(2013) Perez, Ana Maria; Bolles, Augusta Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This interdisciplinary study documents the ethnoracial identities and racialized experiences of women of Mexican descent residing in the greater Tampa Bay region and the multiple meanings that they assigned to race and color categories. Tampa's in-between status, straddling North and South and black/white imaginaries provides important insight into the ways that this rural Mexican population negotiate questions of race and color. The study's participants share a history of migrant farm work and by extension experienced familiar tropes of Mexican racialization that connect manual labor, illegality, to low social status. What is less known is the significance of vernacular Mexican color terminology such as morena, prieta, and negra (approximate translation: brown, dark brown, and black) and the migration of meaning of this dynamic and relational lexicon of race, color, and gender. The use of this informal language of race and color suggests an ethnoracial form of cultural citizenship that permits the right to difference in the face of Mexican non- racialism and U.S. color-blindness. The simultaneous practice of tolerance and rejection of racial difference reflects the constant negotiation of mestizaje (race mixture); that has worked to erase a larger history of Mexican multiraciality. The everyday use of this dynamic color terminology serves as embodied testaments to Mexico's overlapping Indian-Black-European histories and cultures. I argue that the ethnoracial location morena works as an idealized and ambiguous middle ground that permits ethnoracial heterogeneity. Most telling, this idealized racial middle ground bends and shifts to accommodate a range of skin colors and tones symbolically located in between a white and black color line. This major finding complicates contemporary theories that presume that Mexican and Latin American racial ideologies reject and eliminate black and white polarizations. The everyday negotiations of color labels among women of Mexican descent offer a window into the translocal movement between and among these fluid categories. This research promises to recast mestizaje as an embodied experience and reanimate color as a category of analysis to consider the significance of the overlap of Indo-Hispanic and Afro-Latin American racial formations in Mexico. .Item Laboring in the Magic City: Workers in Miami, 1914-1941(2011) Castillo, Thomas Albert; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Laboring in the Magic City" examines the development of class relations in the tourist Sunbelt city of Miami, Florida, from the World War I-era until the eve of WWII. It contributes to the historical scholarship of class relations in the United States by demonstrating how employers and workers continually negotiated economic and political power in the development of the twentieth century city. Specifically, the dissertation explores why Miami's labor history was marked by apparent peaceful class relations--that is, despite successful union activism and other forms of persistent class struggle, the city has not been remembered or imagined as a place where continual or virulent class conflict occurred. Central to my analysis is the concept of harmony discourse -- a worldview that assumed the existence of harmony rather than continual conflict among the classes in matters of economic development and social order. The importance of this perspective is that it challenges historical interpretations that too often assume employer hegemony and worker complicity in the existing political economy. My study thus seeks to infuse new life into the study of class by demonstrating an active and vibrant citizenry existed in Miami, one shaped by both individualistic values of self-interest and by communalism. Harmony discourse represented an engagement with capitalism that remained critical of its results, of the ordering of power, and of the organization of society. At the same time - given the vital role that black workers and middle-class professionals played in the local political economy -- race relations are central in my dissertation. Harmony discourse shaped relations between the white and black communities, and thus reinforced capitalistic relationships while also allowing for internal challenges of existing social structures. "Laboring in the Magic City" is a study of how workers and business interests defined opportunity. It is a story of workers involved in real though at times subtle struggle across a variety of fronts: the workplace, the political arena, community affairs, and in leisure. The dissertation seeks to return to a study of class with a fresh perspective that transcends triumphant deference to and righteous condemnation of capitalism.