Women's Studies

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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. .
Phantom Futures: The Cultural Politics of Education-Related Debt
(2017) Madden, Jaime; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
My dissertation examines the cultural politics of education-related debt. In a time of spiraling higher education costs, I focus on students who face challenges repaying debts and participating productively in the market economy. Taking on debt in college orients students towards a supposedly “better future.” But what happens to those who are unable or unwilling to realize these better futures? This is the broad question that motivated my dissertation. The students I interviewed often complicated the familiar timeline of progress that posits education as leading to employment. I carried out field research in two sites: i) for-profit colleges; and ii) Gallaudet University, a historically deaf university. I also analyzed content in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which I treated as a key archive of contemporary narratives about debt. The for-profit education networks where I conducted research were Virginia College, where I had taught in the general education program for one year, and the recently defunct ITT Technical Institute. I visited campuses in Austin, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; Richmond, Virginia; Los Angeles, California; and Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin. This regional breadth across the southwest, mid-Atlantic, west coast, and Midwest allowed me to reach more general conclusions. My interviews, visual ethnography, auto-ethnography, and narrative analysis led me to focus closely on how students experience and invoke time. The for-profit colleges constantly asked students to imagine better and more secure futures in ways that distracted them from their present struggles. Such an orientation pushed students to incur further debt. At Gallaudet, the temporalities are different. The university’s ability to privilege deafness makes it a site of security and refuge; some students are therefore risking educational debt in order to access deaf culture. Yet, funding issued through Vocational Rehabilitation programs are conditional on a student’s ability to achieve future employment. This mandate influences how students think about their futures and creates deep tensions in their relationship to debt. In sum, by exploring how students imagine time, my dissertation presents a range of orientations to debt that can serve as alternatives to dominant cultural narratives.