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Bancroft Fellows 2002 - present

2008-2009 ACADEMIC YEAR

Audrey Wu Clark, Department of English, UC Berkeley
"The Asian American Avant-Garde: Internationalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature, 1882-1945"

My dissertation attempts to analyze and give shape to early Asian American literature before the inception of the Asian American literary canon following the civil rights era. It studies common internationalist aspirations that grew out of particular racial struggles among Asians in the U.S. which antedated and eventually enabled articulations of Asian American panethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s. My project proposes that cultural commonalities of formal and social internationalisms among early Asian American literary works dialectially stem from American universalisms which assume Asian exclusions and racism in U.S. domestic and foreign imperial affairs. The Asian American internationalisms - inclusionary internationalisms that envision collectives of empirically democratic or socialist Asian nations and the U.S. - in these works are articulated through western avant-garde forms during the modernist period of literature.

William Wagner, Department of History, U.C. Berkeley
"Reading, Writing, and Rambling’: The Literary Culture of Travel in Antebellum America"

This dissertation explores the cultural history of vernacular travel writing in America from 1815 to the Civil War. During these years of intense demographic mobility, diary keeping and epistolary writing emerged as commonplace activities among a surprisingly diverse array of transient Americans. While this was partly a democratization of literary practices long associated with genteel tourism, travel writing also acquired novel uses and meanings as physical mobility became increasingly linked to social mobility in antebellum culture. This study examines how wayfarers used diaries and correspondence as tools for assessing the prospects of places and narrating movement through physical and social space. It also considers how a heightened demand for geographical information created new opportunities for disseminating travel writing, both in manuscript form and in the mass medium of print. The numerous diaries, narratives, and letters in the Bancroft Library’s Western Americana Collection will form a core source base for the final chapter of the dissertation, which probes the unprecedented literary output of participants in the California Gold Rush.


2007-2008 ACADEMIC YEAR

Seth Roger Lunine, Department of Geography, UC Berkeley
"Private City, Public Threat: Entertainment, Industry and Illusion in Emeryville, California 1880-1950"

This research will examine the intertwined struggle over jurisdiction, uses and meaning of urban space that under grid Emeryville’s formation and structure its anomalous developmental path. Two research themes will guide my research at the Bancroft Library. One is the political economy of place, addressing interconnections between industrialization, the politics of urban entreprencurialism and land speculation, including transportation development. The second approach is more interpretive, examining cultural representations. Most significantly, my research will show how political economic restructuring and urban imagery are mutually constructive and collectively helpful in explaining Emeryville’s historical development. Collections at the Bancroft Library are not only integral but imperative to my work.

Maria Belen Bistue, Department of Comparative Literature, UC Davis
"Collaborative Writing: Translation Strategies in Early Modern Multilingual Texts"

The description of medieval and early modern multilingual translations in order to study the many interpretive positions and identities available in these texts as a model for collaborative writing and interpretation. This dissertation argues that the frequency with which early-modern translators multiplied words and phrases( offering several synonyms and alternative rendering for a single word of phrase in the original) was also away of including the original into the new version, together with the different interpretive choices available in the process of translation.


2006-2007 ACADEMIC YEAR

Sean Burns, Department History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
"Working Class Hero: The Intellectual and Activist Legacy of Archie Green"

This dissertation organizes and interprets the intellectual and activist legacy of Archie Green. Next year Archie Green turns ninety. He graduated from Cal in 1939, and to this day, Archie has worked tirelessly to advance working class struggles through an expansive range of trade union activism, ground breaking folk, labor lore scholarship, and creative public sector advocacy. In pursuing all the leads, each generating more and more fascinating historical and political questions, I was became inwardly convinced that one project urgently demanded my attention like none other: the intellectual and activist legacy of Archie Green himself.

Although a handful of journal articles, books, and films refer to Archie Green’s myriad of contributions, no has dedicated a full study to his life and work. Archie’s seventy years of political and scholarly labor offer dozens of compelling intellectual questions. To analyze Archie’s life and work is to engage in fields of study including labor history, cultural theory, folklore studies, social movement, history, and the sociology of education. The Bancroft collection has the resources to develop a comprehensive understanding of the historical, political, and cultural climate within which Archie worked and organized.

Archie Green is a familiar presence at the Bancroft Library. He began exploring the archives in 1937, has donated a portion of his collection, and continues to do research at the Bancroft.

Nat Zappia, Department of History, UC Santa Cruz
"The Autonomous Interior: Trading, Raiding, and Freedom in Native California, 1700-1857"

This study sets out to answer the question: how did Mohaves, Quechans, Southern Paiutes, Utes, Yokuts and other indigenous societies of the California interior maintain their autonomy amidst the unprecedented political, economic, and demographic changes occurring throughout the region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Between 1700-1857, these interior societies forged an autonomous, interethnic indigenous world that solidified and even expanded amidst an ever-encroaching global market economy. Through extensive trading networks, military and political alliances, slave raiding, war, and even the incorporation of Euro-American goods, the southern California interior remained almost exclusively Indian Country in the face of non-native expansion. Between the solidification of the powerful Quechan and Maricopa Alliances around 1700 to the culmination of the Mohave-Maricopa War in 1857, all of the indigenous societies engaged in an--"Indian economy"--that remained free of Euro-American influence and control. Situating itself between these major events unfolding in Indian Country, this study will investigate the interethnic exchanges forged and disrupted during this period.


2005-2006 ACADEMIC YEAR

Ruben Flores, Department of History, UC Berkeley
"States of Culture: The Central Government and Ethnoracial Consolidation in Mexico and the US 1920-1950"

Several Bancroft collections are central to the interpretation of the influence of the Mexican Revolution on the US civil rights movement. This fellowship will help prepare the central chapters of my project outlining Mexico’s post-revolutionary influence on American intellectuals. Historians have long known that radical and left-leaning American intellectuals found inspiration in the Mexican Revolution, especially in the 1910s and 20s.

The influence of post-revolutionary Mexican statecraft on American intellectuals who helped shape the postwar U.S. civil rights movement has not been studied. Historians know little about the motivations that attracted these thinkers to the Mexican state amid, paradoxically, the largest aggrandizement of the American state in history.

Collectively these collections reflect the evolution of the two narrative themes of my project. First, they preserve the common influence on social reform movements in Mexico and the U.S. of Franz Boas and John Dewey, whose ideas made it possible for these Mexican and American intellectuals to converse discursively with one another across their distinctive national histories. Second, they help us to understand how these intellectuals formed personal relationships with one another across the cultural boundaries of their two nations that strengthened the political commitment by the Americans to civil rights in postwar America.

Francisco Casique, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley
"Race of Space in the San Francisco Mission District"

This project explores patterns of consumption and crisis as they are reflected in urban form. It will grapple with concerns such as identity formations. The role/s of the state nation-building, and resistance/opposition to dominant spatial narratives.

This project focuses on three major points, each of which provided a transformative moment in the history of The Mission District. The 1906 earthquake and fire and the rebuilding period proceeding it the 1940s-70s, when civic leaders and powerful organizations fell into the national fervor for redevelopment and a recent (mid-late 1990’s) wave of gentrification. In each of these distinct eras I shall demonstrate how crisis, manufactured or otherwise, led to an attempted seizure of space, both by elite’s and the masses. Finally I shall attempt to silicate these individual larger theoretical framework on the role of the "state" during these points of crisis.


2004-2005 ACADEMIC YEAR

Rachel A. Chico, Department of History, UC Berkeley
"Navigating Nation: Communication and Orientation in the Veracruz-Mexico City Corridor, 1812-1867"

This dissertation project explores the impact that change in the political topography had on individuals’ identities in the aftermath of Mexico’s independence from Spain in 1821. This study focuses on one of Mexico’s central information arteries, the highly trafficked corridor between the port city of Veracruz and the national capital, Mexico City. Rich documentation exists in government records, traveler’s accounts, and mercantile proceedings housed in The Bancroft Library.

Research efforts will include extensive work with Bancroft’s holdings on infrastructure development in Mexico, newspaper production and reception in the 19th century, and political upheaval in the area. Materials to consult include the 1861 statutes of the Orizaba-Veracruz Railroad Company and the Mexico-Puebla Railroad Company and an 1820 exchange over a controversial anonymous pamphlet titled Analisis del Romance de Veracruz. The large corpus of 19th century Mexican newspapers housed in Bancroft and many secondary works regarding the Veracruz-Mexico City corridor will also be examined.

Anil K. Mukerjee, UC Santa Barbara
"An Examination of the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection"

This project will support a dissertation that examines the colonial roots and the early development of Brazil´s economy and will focus on its financial administration during the 17th century. The overall aim of the dissertation is to establish the extent that the colonial imperative shaped Brazil´s post-colonial economic realities. The “Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection” contains material pertaining to the history of Brazil during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and reflects Professor Sluiter's interests in the economic and political history of Latin America. The collection amounts to more than 160,000 transcribed pages of manuscripts from Spanish and Portuguese archives and remains largely unexamined following its acquisition by The Bancroft Library.

Hellen Lee, Literature Department, UC San Diego
"Never Done: Women's Work and Culture in the United States, 1870-1910"

This dissertation project explores the important role that culture plays in mediating the processes of racialization and gender formations of labor. The archival and print resources of The Bancroft Library will support a rethinking of asymmetrical race relations, constructed in the circuits of the burgeoning mass culture industry along with immigration policies in the 19th century, to demonstrate the complexity of gendered laboring practices in the United States within a post-nationalist frame.

Media representations of three women: Lola Montez, an Irish immigrant who made a career as a Spanish dancer and writer; Ah Toy, a Chinese businesswoman and madam; and Mary Ellen "Mammy" Pleasant, an African American entrepreneur will inform this project. Montez, Toy, and Pleasant, despite their other labors, were associated with sex work and within a few short years of the arrival of white, middle-class families to California, these women were notorious, for their occupations would be seen as evidence of excessive female and ethnic sexuality.


Summer 2004 Fellows

Penelope Anderson, English Department, UC Berkeley
"The Rhetoric and Politics of Audience: Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, and Katherine Philips"

This project explores the rhetorical construction of audience in the poetry and prose of three writers overtly identified with oppositional political communities: Lucy Hutchinson, John Milton, and Katherine Philips. It analyzes the material evidence for readership and composition in conjunction with addresses to and frustrations with audience and nation evinced in the works themselves. These texts, while partially directed to audiences of like-minded readers, also illuminates the larger contestation around interpretation as a political issue at the time of the English Civil Wars.

Stephen M. Fountain, History Department, UC Davis
"Big Dogs and Scorched Streams: Horses, Beaver, and Ethnocultural Change in the North American West, 1769-1849"

The fates of two animal species shaped an era in the North American West. One was the horse, an exotic species that became so abundant they were vermin in the eyes of californio ranchers. The other animal was the beaver, a valuable fur-bearer nearly exterminated by trappers in a geopolitical struggle between Britain and the United States. This research project explores the impact of Europeans and these animals upon the peoples and environment of the northern Great Basin. The interaction of Spanish and Mexican californios, British and American trappers, and Native Americans transformed ecosystems and indigenous cultures with new goods and biota reaching inland far in advance of European colonization.

Jean V. Gier, Department of English, UC Berkeley
"Writing Communities and Constituencies: Literature of the U.S. Filipino Press During the Early Twentieth Century"

This dissertation focuses on the recovery and study of the literary discourse (poems, short stories, essays, and their historical and material contexts) emerging from the culture of early U.S. Filipino print media on the West Coast prior to and during the Depression era. The Filipino Student’s Magazine (1905-1907) and The Filipino Student (1912-1914) are the earliest of these periodicals. The Philippine-American News Digest (1940) includes a crucial (and hard-to-find) record of early U.S. Filipino literary criticism, foreshadowing significant issues that would rise for Filipino American literature after World War II. The Benjamin Ide Wheeler Papers contain correspondence between editors of the Filipino Student’s Magazine and the then President of U.C. Berkeley. Bancroft also holds copies of The Filipino People (Washington, D.C., 1912-1914). Subsidized by the Philippine Legislature (with support from the American Anti-Imperialist League), this periodical focused almost exclusively on Philippine independence issues, and presents an interesting comparison with U.S. Filipino periodicals on the West coast, which were much more involved with local labor and civil rights issues.

Ki Won Han, Department of History, UC Berkeley
"The Rise of Oceanography in the United States, 1900-1940"

Marine science, oceanography in particular, developed gradually throughout the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States in close relationship with practical purposes such as navigation and fisheries. It was established as a scientific field in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This project will focus on the institutionalization of American oceanography.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley pioneered American oceanography. William R. Ritter, Charles A. Kofoid, and others established a summer biological station which would evolve into the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Soon, oceanography at the University of California became the model for American oceanography. This project will explore how the specific economic, political, social, geographic, and academic circumstances of California at that time influenced the development of American oceanography.

Stacy C. Kozakavich Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
"The Archaeology of The Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth’s Advance Townsite"

This project explores the documentary and material histories of 19th-century “intentional communities” in western North America, in particular, the Advance Townsite, occupied between 1886 and 1892 by members of the California-based Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth.

The Kaweah Co-operative Commonwealth was a socialistic community created in reaction to industrial and commercial conditions in urban California during the late 19th century. Archaeological investigation of the group’s main habitation site of Advance, in Tulare County, California will help us understand the complex negotiations of materiality and social status that members experienced while attempting to transform their daily activities and habits to those more fitting their trustees’ envisioned utopia.

Michael Kunichika, Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, UC Berkeley
"Visions for Verbal Art in the Russian Symbolist Journal, 1899-1917"

This project focuses on discussions and reproductions of visual arts in four journals that span the Silver Age of Russian Literature – The World of Art (1899-1904), The Balance (1904-09), the Golden Fleece (1906-09), and Apollo (1909-1917). Published during tremendous political upheaval, these journals testify to extraordinary developments within Russian artistic culture, the mutual interaction and influence of the visual and literary arts, and the influences of international artistic movements on Russia from the beginning of the 20th century though to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

This research will explore how these journals provided visions for Symbolist poetry, and contribute to our own understanding of the literary works published within the journals. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the principal developments of Russian Modernism, particularly those of Russian symbolism, took place on the pages of these journals. The articles in them delineate the broader contexts, both indigenous and international, from which Russian modernists would find inspiration for their literature.

Marissa López, English Department, UC Berkeley
"Nationalism, Narrative, and History: The Formal Case for Chicana/o Literature"

This research project focuses on the papers of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, specifically his memoir, Recuerdos Historicos y Personales Tocantes á la Alta California, 1769-1849. It will explore the narrative strategies authors employ in treating history, how those strategies change over time, and what these changes tell us about the shifting value of the national identify.

Elisabeth R. O’Connell, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, UC Berkeley
"Recontextualizing the Tebtunis Papyri"

When Grenfell and Hunt excavated ancient Tebtunis on behalf of UC Berkeley in 1899/1900, they were primarily interested in papyri. They found much of it in the human mummy cartonnage and the wrappings of mummified crocodiles from the Ptolemaic period; but, they also excavated parts of the mostly Roman period town, cemeteries, and temple enclosure. The Bancroft Library maintains the texts on papyri from the excavations while the objects are in the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Since Grenfell and Hunt left few records concerning the archaeological context of their excavations, the Roman-period collections are largely understudied. Using the Tebtunis Papyri Collection, Hearst Museum records, Museum catalogue publications by H. Lutz, and a newly acquired facsimilie of a field notebook belonging to Hunt, this research project endeavors to reestablish, to the extent possible, the archaeological context of the texts and objects belonging to Berkeley's Tebtunis collections.

This research project includes a survey of all known documentation relating to Grenfell and Hunt’s 1899-1900 excavation of Tebtunis and an effort to re-contextualize the Roman period texts and the objects now housed in Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology in their original archaeological environments. This research project will utilize the Tebtunis Papyri Collection, the Hearst Museum database and accession records, the Lutz publications, and the newly acquired Hunt notebook.

Julie K. Tanaka, History Department, UC Berkeley
"Germania Fiat: German Historiography and Identity in the Holy Roman Empire"

This dissertation project examines the conceptualization of a German identity within the larger political and religious cultures of the Holy Roman Empire as the Empire began to transform from the medieval empire of Latin Christendom into what would eventually become Germany. Fundamental to this research is The Bancroft Library’s collection of early printed German books, including Hartmann Schedel’s Liber Cronicarum (Nuremberg, 1493), Sebastian Franck’s Germaniae Chronicon (Frankfurt a.M., 1538), and Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (Basel, 1544). These works and other German histories provide a comprehensive view of a developing German self-consciousness that responded to the political, religious, and intellectual transformations occurring in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.


2003-2004 ACADEMIC YEAR

Kimberly Bird, UC Santa Cruz
"Unsettled Frontier: Poetic Radicalism and the Question of Nationalism in California, 1930-1940"

This dissertation contributes to the project taken up by a community of United States scholars who have been working since the late 1980s to fill a gap in American Leftist literary history. These scholars are recovering and devising new approaches to reading literature written by pro-communist writers from the 1930s and 1940s, giving special attention to the genre of revolutionary poetry. While the scope of these studies is national, poets living and publishing in New York City along with a few writers in the Midwest and Los Angeles have taken precedence. Most California writers have not yet been thoroughly explored, and the Bay Area stands out as a region where significant research is needed. Furthermore, while there are quite a few studies of popular movements in California from this era, no work examines the role of poetry and poets who were engaged in those movements.

Lisa Conathan, UC Berkeley
"Language Contact and Linguistic Change in Northern California"

This dissertation focuses on linguistic areal features in Northern and Northwestern California, including primarily the languages of Yurok, Wiyot, Hupa, Karuk, and Chimaruk. The most important source of material on many of these languages is unpublished notes of the early twentieth century linguists and anthropologists, many of whom were affiliated with the University of California. This study critically re-examines proposed areal linguistic features for Northern and Northwestern California, and proposes additional areal features. The strongest cases for areal features are in conceptual structure and grammaticalization. Many of these languages are no longer spoken, or are spoken by only a handful of people. This situation of endangerment and extinction contributes to the timeliness of the research. In addition to scholarly contributions, this work seeks to contribute to preservation and revitalization efforts by increasing the quality and quantity of readily available materials on the native languages of Northwestern California.

Karen McNeill, UC Berkeley
"Building the California Women's Movement: Architecture, Space and Gender in the Life and Work of Julia Morgan"

This dissertation is an intellectual biography of a noted Bay Area architect, Julia Morgan (1872-1957), and situates her in the women's movement and progressivism in California before World War II. Each chapter of Part I focuses on a specific space or place that shaped her personal and professional life: her childhood home in Oakland, the State University in Berkeley, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the Morgan atelier in San Francisco. Part II shifts to architectural history and how specific building types illuminate social, cultural and gender problems. Although a vast network of clients solicited Morgan's expertise, and a variety of historical issues intersect with Morgan's life and work, one man and one building dominate most scholarly and popular writings about Julia Morgan, the infamous media mogul William Randolph Hearst and his pleasure castle on California's Central Coast. The final section of this dissertation considers how and why Hearst and his mansion have come to overshadow Julia Morgan's career, as well as how one can better understand her legacy to California, architectural history, and women's history.


Summer 2003

Nicole Caso, UC Berkeley
"Practicing Memory in Central American Literature: Reflections on Histories, Space and Language"

This dissertation is organized around the polisemous metaphor of "space" in order to explore mult8ple representations of historical memories in twentieth century Central American literature. The critical theories of Michel de Certeau, Edward Soja, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, among others, are central to this study that attempts to elucidate particular social and power relations that might be determined and reproduced by given forms of organizing space. This work explores the aesthetic form and rhetorical strategies of the fictional texts, which help capture and reveal such socio-political dynamics in their representation of history. Ultimately, this research will reflecti upon the way in which spatial dynamics organize language and how language itself determines the outline of possible social geographies at a given time. Each chapter addresses different types of spaces in the representation of the past: geographical space, urban space, a space for difference within homogenizing social movements, the organization of language to create a totalizing or fragmentary space of representation, and the forging of a space for cultural self-expression in the current Pan-Maya movement in Guatemala.

Alison Fraunhar, UCSB
"Revisioning the Mulata in Cuban Visual Culture 1880-1980"

This dissertation is situated within the discourse of art history. The sites of visual cultural production examined are tobacco packaging and lithography from the 19th century, painting from the mid-20th century, and film and printmaking from the late 20th century. The methodology moves beyond the formal concerns of the discipline to engage with mass-produced and widely disseminated visual culture that has been traditionally considered unsuitable for analysis within the framework of conventional art history. Rather than analyze the artistic context and circulation of art objects, including fine art, popular art and mass art, this work will focus on the social use and the social history of visual media. In studying both fine art as well as other media, the construction and contestation of identity in visual culture, which includes satire and punning that may not always be considered as appropriate for the canon of fine art is important. By analyzing a wider range of visual material one can locate deeply embedded cultural codes and see how they operate. Through these media it is possible to track epistemological as well as stylistic shifts as ideological and social imperatives change.

Haden Guest, UCLA
"The Police Procedural Film & the Organization of Postwar America 1930-1960"

This dissertation is a study of the American police procedural film focused on the period from 1930-1960 which considers this little known but vigorously popular film genre of the Hollywood studio era in terms of its broader historical and socio-cultural contexts. One of the most important of these contexts is that of the American law enforcement establishment itself which was undergoing a profound transformation during the pre- and postwar years in an attempt to reform and modernize itself. Many of the key police procedural films were, in fact, made in close cooperation with some of the more prominent reform-minded law enforcement agencies, such as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and William Parker's LAPD. This study offers insights to such collaborative films as "The House on 92nd Street" and "The Naked City." Both films are of particular interest in that both use so-called "technical advisors," police experts who served as consultants to the film to ensure the utmost "accuracy" of the image of law enforcement shown on-screen. The final section of this dissertation focuses on August Vollmer, whose work is turned to for their clear expression of the struggle of the American police to reinvent themselves in the public eye.

Joyce Mao, UC Berkeley
"China-town: Cultural Politics & Racial Space in San Francisco, 1850-1910"

This doctoral dissertation seeks to investigate the rhetorical tactics and ideological implications of a discourse about Chinatown as a symbol of urban danger during the post-Civil War era. San Francisco in particular exemplified these sweeping trends: a populations sharply divided by race and class, large numbers of restless laborers, corrupt politicians running amok, and a proliferation of popular imagery in newspapers and magazines laid the foundation for a political culture of socio-economic unrest. The combination of these factors with a conveniently situated Chinatown made the city the setting for an exploitation of instinctive apprehensions, one that resulted in the manufacture of racial animosities. This work offers a meaningful bridge between urban history and the history of Anglo-Chinese relations in the United States. Of especial importance is the explicit connection between anti-Chinese Sentiment and the development of early San Francisco.

Nadia Nurhussein, UC Berkeley
"Verbal Topiary Work: Reading Dialect in American Poetry, 1870-2001"

This dissertation examines the possibilities and problems surrounding literary dialect in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American poetry. By investigating the history and politics of dialect poetry in the United States, this study traces the ways in which writers attempted representations of "nonstandard" speech in poetry to the socio-cultural contexts of reading literary dialect, both silently and aloud, during this period. As a result of the attention given to orality in the analysis of dialect poetry, the visual element of literary dialect is seriously undervalued. In response to this neglect, this work develops a reading that treats the visible manifestations of dialect writing in American poetry- especially odd orthography, punctuation and spatial arrangement- as the traces of the vacillation between orality and literacy. The four literary-historical periods represented in my chapters (poetry of Gilded Age; America and the Harlem Renaissance; late modernist and contemporary African American poetry) mark a development in the use of dialect roughly from didactic and pedagogical to innovative and productive.

Jose Pastrano, UCSB
"Immigration Policies and Low-cost Labor: The 1920s Political Debates over Mexican Labor"

This dissertation examines the significance of Mexican labor in south Texas between 1890-1930. Mexican workers -even though growers classified them as unskilled and low-wage - were indispensable to the economic progress of the area. Large-scale cotton, fruit and vegetable growers in south Texas favored Mexican labor that, they claimed, reduced their costs significantly. Manufacturers in industrial centers like Dallas, For Worth and Houston agreed, proclaiming that these laborers lowered the cost of production. This study focuses on the political significance of Mexican labor in the 1920s immigration policies, the agricultural policies and farm-labor market data of the 1920s and 1930s, and the Mexican views of the working and living conditions.

Evelyn Rodriguez, UC Berkeley
"Coming of Age: Identities & Transformations in Filipina Debutantes & Mexicana Quinceaneras"

This dissertation examines the rites of passage celebrated in the Filipino and Mexican cultures. The turning points these ritual commemorate, the dramas they magnify and engender, and the identities they help highlight and bestow provide windows into understanding how we imagine whom we are, the world we inhabit and who we would like to be. Original research includes more than fifty individual , in-dept interviews with Filipino and Mexican immigrant family members in California who have had, are having, and/or are considering having a debutante ("debut") or quinceanera (quince). This study also examines the planning, performance, production, staging, and outcomes of these celebrations, along with the history of both rituals. Comparing these groups can help highlight how structural factors such as economic and educational opportunity structures, media, residential discrimination, and immigration legislation contribute to the divergent experiences of American immigrant groups.


2002-2003 ACADEMIC YEAR

Yu-fang Cho, UC San Diego
"Visions of Pacific Destiny: Culture of Western Expansion and American Women's Work if Benevolence, 1880s-1900s"

Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, U.S. nation-building was punctuated by racially inflected conflicts over territorial claims, economic interests, and spheres of political influence indexed by several key historical events: the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the Mexican War (1846-1848), the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the 1898 Spanish-American War. In this development of continental expansion culminating in imperialism overseas, U.S. domestic racial rule was not only consolidated through political, economic, and military actions, but it was also mediated by cultural productions and organized social activities, such as the emergence of western regional magazines and the establishment of mission home for immigrant women and prostitutes.

Dulcinea Michelle Lara, UC Berkeley
"Historical Evolution of Education and Its Detrimental Ideological and Identity Forming Consequences on New Mexico"

Education for Chicano/Mexican American students in contemporary New Mexico is in crisis. Many schools and surrounding communities are characterized by a devastating combination of community violence and deep sense of racialized inner-hatred, manifested through high drop out rates, low life expectations, crime, and extreme poverty. This research investigates the origins of this crisis by examining the complicated process of identity formation. This work begins with a contextual overview, narrating ways in which identity was formed and re-formed during the dual colonization of New Mexico.

Jeffrey Alan Ow, UC Berkeley
"Contested Isles: The History and Representation of Ellis Island and Angel Island"

This dissertation examines the interaction of federal and state agencies, commerce, and public interest groups regarding changes in the immigration policies and conceptualizations of American nationalism through the transformations of Ellis Island and Angel Island Immigration Stations into social history museums.


2002 SUMMER

Samantha Holtkamp Gervase, UCLA
"Life and Law in the Lower Mississippi River Valley: Categories and the Expansion of America, 1800-1860"

The Mississippi River system provides a crucial lens into the social and legal processes of the antebellum western world. The river itself acted as n important transportation route, for persons, goods, and ideas. The system challenges the idea of boundaries and represents literal fluidity. The Mississippi River enabled movement between North and South as much as it did Eat and West. Those who worked on the river, traveled on the river, and even those who lived near the river were part of a social context more diverse than is often portrayed by scholars sued to encountering rigidly defined systems. The labeling of the lower Mississippi River Valley as "South" rather that the "West" had shifted historical questions in a particular direction. Such a shift hides historical processes and assumes the inevitable development of regional structures. Viewing the area as both western and southern reveals dynamics that previous scholarship had ignored.

Rudy Poscallo Guevarra, UC Santa Barbara
"On Common Ground: Mexican and Filipinos in San Diego Agriculture, 1920 - 1965"

This dissertation is a comparative social history of Mexican and Filipinos in San Diego, California from 1900 to 1965. It examines various factors that contributed to the development and growth of multiethnic Mexican-Filipino communities in San Diego. The context of this community formation is a shared colonial past with Spain, Catholicism, Spanish language, immigration, racial segregation, and mutual wage labor experiences. The primary focus of this research is to delineate the migration patterns, community formation, and racial unrest that occurred as a result of the labor activities of Mexican and Filipinos in the agricultural sector of San Diego, California.

Chantelle Nicole Warner, UC Berkeley
"Literacy Identity Construction in Works of Dutch Clandestine Literature Written During the Second World War"

This research will involve a comparative analysis of works within the Clandestine Dutch Book Collection housed in The Bancroft Library and the post-war writings of these authors and their followers. A primary focus will be an analysis of the presence of what Louis de Jong calls the "geest can verzet" (the spirit of resistance) in those works which do not explicitly deal with the Second World War or occupation subjects and their relation to Dutch Reconstruction of identity which necessarily followed the events of the war.


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