İFandango!

Sarah A. Blue | Department of Geography and Environmental Studies  

Abstract 
As record numbers of Mexican and Central Americans arrive at the US-Mexico border, they encounter an asylum system that has evolved to exclude them. After detailing the specific legal changes that racialize these nationalities through criminalization, this study uses asylum data to illustrate how the current structure of the asylum process produces illegality for Mexican and Central Americans seeking protection in the US. We draw on asylum data outcomes for the largest groups filing defensive asylum claims to halt their deportation over the past decade to emphasize the impact of changing laws and the divergent impact of the implementation of those laws on Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran, Chinese, and Indian asylum seekers. While Chinese and Indian nationals have relatively high rates of success obtaining asylum, their Mexican and Central American counterparts are consistently denied asylum, partially as a result of their criminalization in the US asylum system.

Jessica Pliley | Department of History

Abstract   
Borderlands have historically posed a challenge to the enforcement of US immigration law due to the ways that these geographic and cultural zones have been defined as much by their permeability as their international border. By 1917, the United States had passed comprehensive legislation to address the problem of sex trafficking at its borders and within its borders through the Immigration Acts of 1903, 1907, 1910, & 1917 and the passage of the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910. Together, these laws made it illegal to bring a woman or child over international and state borders for the purpose of prostitution or “any other immoral purpose. This legislation prioritized the expulsion of immoral women, the deportation of sex traffickers, and the careful policing of international borders. This paper examines how anti-trafficking legislation was enforced along the United States’ busiest migration corridor in the interwar period: the Detroit-Windsor region. It seeks to highlight how government officials implemented anti-trafficking policy on the ground, by utilizing 50 deportation cases that were reported to the League of Nations in compliance with the 1904 International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic. These cases reveal that though US immigration law was characterized as an administrative process to protect national security, enforcement of anti-trafficking provisions functioned as a type of punishment meted out to people thought to be criminal, yet without any of the constitutional protections that accused criminals had in criminal trials.

Sara Ramírez  | Department of English

Abstract    
In this talk, I focus on the ways in which settler-colonialism has created what I identify as “subjects of trauma,” a term that I use to simultaneously point to 1) groups of people who have been subjected to historical and intergenerational violence and subsequent trauma as a result of the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism; and 2) topics that serve as points of departure for discussions about these kinds of traumas. I posit subjects of trauma, like people with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), exhibit complex interrelated psychological, biological, and social responses to historical and intergenerational violence. 

The work of visual and performance borderlands artist Andrea Muñoz Martinez, whose art has helped her contend with misrepresentations of the U.S-Mexico borderlands as a place of only violence and danger, serves as an effective vehicle to conceptualize my theory. I argue that Martinez’s work engages historical and intergenerational trauma by re-narrativizing the self and history through her Borderlandia series (2013-2020) of paintings in addition to her performance art as “Racha La Cucaracha” (2009) and “Mala Cara” (2020).

I underscore Martinez as a subject of trauma whose visual and performance art as a type of “healing” art that induces altered states of consciousness and is conducive to integrating trauma into the psyche. Art enables the artist to impose order on the chaos of trauma around her–for not only herself but her audience as well. I examine Martinez’s art through the lens of Gloria nzaldúa’s understudied theorization of “el cenote,” a source of untapped collective knowledge, which I define in relation to the “imaginal realm.” The artist’s engagement and self-making through her visual and performance art incites us to reconsider the construction of not only geopolitical borders but also metaphysical borders between realities. I argue that by asking us to rethink space and reality, Martinez offers her audience a way to journey into a “healing” space, and I complicate our ubiquitous use of the term “healing.” More specifically, the visual and performance artist “as shaman” takes the viewer, especially a subject of trauma, on a journey through a metaphysical borderlands that requires psychic and somatic attention in order to begin to integrate trauma. Ultimately, I emphasize that the maintenance of an “official” (rational and ocularcentric) reality and subsequent dismissal of a metaphysical world keeps subjects of trauma from processing psychic pain.

Lori Gallegos de Castillo | Department of Philosophy 

Abstract  
The 2016 Census Bureau’s American Community Survey found that nearly 28 million people in the U.S. have limited proficiency in speaking English. Many of these individuals rely on family members to interpret both culture and language in a range of situations. This paper proposes that those who interpret for loved ones commonly confront a challenge to their personal autonomy that I refer to as the interpreter’s dilemma. The dilemma arises when those who interpret for family members face the decision of whether to act in accordance with their personal desires, or whether to act out of love or loyalty on behalf of their dependent loved one who requests that the interpreter act in a way that the interpreter does not want to. The difficulty of this dilemma is exacerbated by a racist or xenophobic social context, which gives rise to special obligations to amplify the agency of the dependent family member. I argue that this dilemma constitutes a moral burden because the interpreter must personally invest in their own instrumentalized role in order to carry out their responsibilities effectively.

José Carlos de la Puente | Department of History

Abstract  
This communication will explore the creation of documents in the standard variety of Quechua (lengua general) and their translation into Castilian (and vice versa) during the First General Land Inspection (Primera Visita y Composición General de Tierras), conducted in the central Andes of Peru between 1594 and 1597. Scholars have shown the centrality of this first general inspection for Peru’s agrarian history, linking it to the appropriation of indigenous lands and the formation of colonial rural estates (haciendas and latifundios). Many works have explored the mechanisms by which Spanish actors secured title to formerly indigenous lands during the inspection, the start of a process that has been recently termed “the great dispossession.” Much less attention has been placed, however, on the strategies of native Andean commoner groups that not only used the Composición General to protect their holdings but also relied on this judicial mechanism to break away from their villages of origin, acquire new lands, establish new settlements, and gain recognition as independent communities. Through the analysis of the primordial titles of two communities from the Yauyos province, I show that, key in this process was the creation of narratives that, when committed to writing in the form of maps and testimonies, gave Quechua-Spanish translation during the Composición a significant role in these self-directed projects of commoner colonization.

John Mckiernan-González | Center for the Study of the Southwest

Abstract   
In 1923, a loose coalition connected to the Klan, Christian Scientists and the Carpenter’s Union posed a public challenge to the requirement that every student and employee receive a vaccination against smallpox to be able to study or work for El Paso Public Schools. The challenge seemed deep enough that the El Paso City Council decided to host a forum in Fort Bliss to address the variety of claims being made regarding the nature of compulsion, the ability of ‘the state’ to regulate one or one’s households’ access to public goods, and the identity of people being regulated.  The key overlapping phrase among the dissenters was that no government can pass laws that can determine what a citizen can do with their bodies.  In response, US Public Health Service Officer J.W. Tappan pointed to the practices and requirements that they implemented on ‘Mexicans’ at the Santa Fe bridge and the U.S. Army required of its conscripts and volunteers demonstrating that, indeed, the federal government could and did pass these laws and require this cooperation. Tappan and the City Council, with no irony, pointed to the incorrect assumption that only people identified as Mexicans could be subject to these compulsions. 

School districts across Texas passed compulsory vaccination requirements to attend school, alongside compulsory attendance requirements.  They passed these laws with confidence after the Supreme Court determined these laws were constitutional in Zucht v. Texas. Here, Justice Brandeis reiterated that despite the challenges posed by the wealthy and established Zucht family in San Antonio, the regulations passed by San Antonio ISD did not break with the due process clause of the 14th amendment but, “Unlike Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356, 6 Sup. Ct. 1064, 30 L. Ed. 220, these ordinances confer not arbitrary power, but only that broad discretion required for the protection of the public health.”  

What this project argues is that resistance to compulsory vaccination in Texas is ‘not Mexican.’  That is, there is a broad assumption that public health laws and practices are best directed at ethnic Mexicans and other subject classes and that one of the privileges of citizenship (again, not Mexican) is being able to demand substantive due process to avoid being subject to the laws debated and passed by duly established jurisdictions. This legal attitude regarding the privileges of whiteness has accelerated as public spaces become increasingly inhabited with ethnic Mexicans, African Americans, Asian Americans and Latina/o/xs. 

With the advent of antibiotics, departments and disciplines devoted to tropical and infectious disease specialties became a subset of pediatrics and vaccines became identified with border crossing and childhood medical guidelines.  By examining discussions and challenges during the Polio and MMR campaigns, families of color pushed to receive a measure of substantive due process expected by white heads of household in Texas.  

The paper ends with our current ethnographic moment, where the Texas governor has adopted policies nearly identical to the Klan members, Christian scientists and Carpenter Union members who dissented in El Paso in 1923: End the visible movement of ethnic Mexicans crossing borders, detain people who seem to be vulnerable and foreign, and demand the right of citizens to ignore “the broad discretion required for the protection of public health.” Only entering Mexicans (and Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Brazilians and Haitians, etcetera) deserve to be detained, criminalized and treated as public health threats and any other public health policies regulating movement across public and private borders challenges the incorrect assumption that only people who are ’not Mexican’ deserve substantive citizenship and the protections of public health.

Casey Nichols | Department of History 

Abstract  
My paper demonstrates that a close analysis of the Model Cities Program provides a lens into the impact that the 1960s federal antipoverty initiatives had on shaping the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. I argue that while poverty in northern cities such as Chicago and Detroit were primarily characterized by the economic gap that separated black and white residents, Mexican American populations in western cities complicated national debates about race and poverty in urban United States. In Los Angeles, African Americans and Mexican Americans made up the two largest communities of color and were increasingly involved in civil rights activism by the 1960s. My paper argues that efforts to assess racial discrimination and poverty in Los Angeles after the Watts Rebellion of 1965 through federal initiatives, like Model Cities, cultivated a local and national discussion about the complicated web of race relations that were unique to the west coast. 

Joshua Paddison | Department of History 

Abstract   
In "The Birth of the Cult Leader: Thomas Lake Harris, New Religions, and the American West," I examine the origins of the idea of the "cult" and "cult leader," categories that have always been associated with California and the American West. I argue that Thomas Lake Harris, leader of the Brotherhood of the New Life, became the prototype for the California cult leader after an 1890s sex scandal established many of the hallmarks and tropes that would remain associated with subsequent "cult leaders" in the popular imaginary. 

Aimee Villarreal | Department of Anthropology

Abstract    
Reading Indigenous and Chicanx histories of resistance alongside the 1980s sanctuary movements, I compare the fugitivity and exile of two Civil Rights era radicals: Dennis Banks, a leader in the American Indian Movement (AIM), and Francisco Martinez, a Chicano activist attorney affiliated with Crusade for Justice. Both men were accused of committing crimes related to their participation in ethnic nationalist movements that the FBI deemed subversive. Banks and Martinez were political dissidents made into refugees around the same time that hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fled revolutions tainted by U.S. military interventions. I show how examples of “domestic refugeedom” challenge categories of national belonging and reveal unruly sanctuary/escapes across state lines, tribal territories, and national borders. 

Gloria Velásquez | Department of World Languages and Literatures & Adult, Professional and Community Education (APCE)

Abstract  
Inspired by the Chicano history, with this research collaboration of the researchers, who are Mexican, Jamaican, and Egyptian, through understanding the different Chicano movements, we aim to describe the current state of the Chicano community in San Marcos, Texas. By identifying the primary stakeholders, we will involve them to develop a pragmatic action plan that resonates with the community intrinsic and extrinsic needs as well as its future endeavors towards better representation in higher education and the professional arena. Celebrating the Chicano consciousness and the creation of a strong sense of self-identity are paramount to our endeavors.

Colleen C. Myles | Department of Geography and Environmental Studies 

Abstract   
Wine is not just a drink; it is famously part art and part science, but it is also so much more. Shaped by geography and environment, constructed by culture, and defined by rules, wine is a complex socio-material assemblage. Texas serves as a compelling locale to deconstruct entrenched notions of quality in a notoriously place-driven product embedded within an increasingly globalized industry. Using one particular grape—Sagrantino—as lens, I trace how its constituent products are conceived of as in and out of place in the “wild west” of wine, the “lawless” fermented landscape(s) of Texas. Based on an analysis of primary and secondary documents, a series of participant observation activities, professional embedding, and key informant interviews, I paint a picture of the power-laden world of (fine) wine in Texas.

Adam Clark | Department of Geography and Environmental Studies 

Abstract   
When facing a hazardous situation, the public often relies on the popular press, such as newspapers, to communicate and disseminate information about the dangers they face.  This communication comes in various forms and can include text, maps, and/or other hazard associated imagery.  Since the public often depends on these communications to prepare for hazardous events, the press can then leverage them for their own benefit.  

This project examines the ways in which hazard imagery, specifically hurricane themed editorial cartoons published by the Houston Chronicle between 1945 and 2020, have been used to communicate information about hurricane risk to the Houston Area, as well as how these images have been leveraged as both windows of opportunity and metaphors to advance the Chronicle’s agenda. This is part of a larger dissertation project examining the Hazard Cartography of the Houston area from 1945 to 2020.  The dissertation employs cartographic analysis, hazard communication analysis, and discourse analysis to examine hazard maps and images, including cartoons that metaphorically leverage hazards for commentary on social issues, to investigate how hazard risk has been communicated to Houston residents over the last 75 years.   

Tom Alter | Department of History

Abstract 
This presentation will give a beginning analysis and history of the intersection of working-class punk, Chicano, and Queer protest against the rise of neo-liberalism in Texas from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s. A particular focus will be given to Austin and Houston as high-tech industries and the US’s thirst for oil transformed these cities into neo-liberal Sunbelt centers to the benefit of economic elites. 

Recently academics have been producing histories of punk rock in the US. These works overwhelmingly focus on the East and West Coasts. With exceptions, the punk scenes along the Coasts were primarily made-up of middle-class white suburbanites alienated by suburban life and mass consumerism with lyrical content reflecting these frustrations. However, the punk music produced in Texas was explicitly more political, reflecting the working-class backgrounds and sensibilities of many in the punk scenes of Austin and Houston. This is seen in the bands the Dicks, MDC (Millions of Dead Cops), Big Boys, D.R.I., the Offenders, Really Red, and Mydolls among others. These bands were influenced in varying degrees by the Black Panthers, Maoism, and the Chicano movement. The home base of the Austin punk scene in its formative years was the working-class Chicano bar Raul’s. These bands did not limit their politics to their lyrical content but actively participated in the struggles of the Texas Farm Workers, the John Brown Anti-Klan Society, anti-nuclear protests, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and the Rock Against Reagan tour in 1984. While the punk scenes on the Coasts often were dominated by an aggressive masculinity, the Texas punk scene, in the midst of a raging culture war, was a much more sexually fluid space. Many people in the Texas punk scene were open with their queer identities and participated in the gay and lesbian rights movement.