Browsing by Subject "Mexico"

Now showing 1 - 15 of 15

Contesting the state from the Ivory Tower: student power, Dirty War, and the urban guerrilla experience in Mexico, 1965-1982.
(2012-03) Calderón, Fernando Herrera
This is a study of the rise of urban guerrilla movements in the context of the Mexican Dirty War. It narrates how students used the political and social conditions of their country, state-sponsored violence, as well as the turbulent ambiance in the universities as the justification for embracing the armed struggle. It argues that while historical narratives on urban guerrilla movements in Mexico and Latin America have largely focused on the armed struggle aspect of each movement and followed a generalized view that revolutionaries were adventurist, lacked a political consciousness, and were agents of an international conspiracy, this dissertation proposed a different approach. By looking at the context in which these students-turned-revolutionaries formed their armed struggle against the Mexican government, how they broaden their notion of class struggle to include students, and re-thought their positionality, makes Mexico a unique study to understanding militancy in the 1970s. This project argues that students urban guerrillas were convinced the the armed struggle was the only available option left to change the government, but also stressed they were engaging in an intellectual war against the state in which they had to become the dominate voice in the universities, a space they considered produced adherents of the state, before a revolution could be carried out.
Entertaining Education: Teaching National History in Mexican State-Sponsored Comic Books and Telenovelas, 1963 to 1996
(2013-09) Huska, Melanie
Abstract This dissertation examines the political nature of history and popular culture in late-twentieth-century Mexico. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)'s maintained a monopoly on political power for seven decades (1929-2000). It bolstered its political legitimacy by revising the history of the Revolution of 1910 into a unified national pantheon of heroes who formed part of the party's origin myth and by forging a unified post-Revolutionary identity. Cultural historians of Mexico have demonstrated the fundamental role that the PRI's cultural projects played in its political success and its ability to maintain authority for so long; however these studies examine the period before 1968. My dissertation draws on this field's concern with popular culture and political power and extends it by recognizing the centrality of history to Mexican identity and by asking how the PRI employed history and popular culture as a way to mitigate the political consequences of the changes underway in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of neoliberal reforms that alienated large numbers of voters. Furthermore, it asks, did neoliberalism alter the political nature of history, and if so, how? To answer this question I examine the narratives conveyed by two series of historically themed comic books, produced by the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) and nine historical telenovelas, produced by Televisa in cooperation with various state ministries, particularly Mexican Institute for Social Security (IMSS). The dissertation focuses on three themes in order to illuminate vital features of cultural politics in Mexico at the end of the twentieth century. First, it examines the interplay between historiography and the politics of historically themed entertainment. In other words, it asks how rival interpretations of the past were incorporated into the entertainment-education (edutainment) projects, if at all, and how politics influenced these historical interpretations. Second, the dissertation charts Televisa's and the PRI's progress in learning how to narrate Mexican history in a way that satisfied multiple interests: generating support for the ruling party and profits for Televisa, capturing the interest of audiences, and withstanding the scrutiny of professional scholars. In this endeavor they sought a careful balance between fact and fiction. The dissertation demonstrates not only the continuing political nature of historical narratives in Mexico, but also argues that their impact could not always be anticipated. Consumed in different political contexts, the didactic repetition of appeals to the past highlighted the PRI's departure from revolutionary ideals instead of linking their legitimacy to it. Finally, the dissertation examines the relationship between the public and private cultural sectors, through an analysis of state ministries - SEP, IMSS, National Defense, National Lottery - and the private sector, particularly Televisa. Together IMSS and Televisa produced four telenovelas, but economic changes in the 1990s created conditions that made further projects untenable. For Televisa, these economic changes were the result of increased industry competition, internal concerns, and depleted financial government sponsorship. For the PRI, the expenditure no longer generated legitimacy as a link to the nation's past, but symbolized the waste of a party that had maintained its power through corporatism. Though the PRI and Televisa attempted to use the past to generate political legitimacy, ultimately it was unable to mitigate the fracturing that occurred in the late twentieth century as a result of their transition from corporatism to neoliberalism.
Essays in Food Security in Latin America and the United States
(2018-11) Bohorquez-Penuela, Camilo
This dissertation comprises three essays related with the problem of food insecurity (i.e., lack of access to enough and varied food required by households for their daily activities) in middle and high-income countries. The first chapter, "Subsidized Health Care and Food Insecurity: Evidence from Colombia", suggests that participation in a public-funded health care insurance for the poor is associated with a reduction on the probability of being food insecure. This result principally holds for rural households. The second chapter, "The Effects of Rising Staple Prices on Food Insecurity: The Case of Tortilla in Mexico" provides evidence on how increases in the price of tortilla, the most important staple in the country, is related with higher household food insecurity rates in Mexican states. Moreover, these price surges are more relevant when they take place in grocery stores---that sell low-quality tortillas---rather than locally-owned, small-scale tortillerias, specialized in selling freshly-made tortillas. The third chapter, "Food Price Fluctuations and Household Food Insecurity in the United States, 2005-2010" studies the association between food prices and household food insecurity in this country, showing that the price of grain and dairy-based products has the greatest association with higher food insecurity rates among American households during the Great Recession.
Family violence exposure and Associated risk factors to child PTSD in a Mexican sample
(2012-11) Erolin, Kara Sukja
This dissertation study examines the interactional effects of trauma exposure on parent-child relationships with 87 mother-child dyads from a child maltreatment population in Monterrey, Mexico. The relational impact of trauma on youth is salient given the important role that the parent/caregiver plays in a child's life. Data from four standardized instruments of a larger study piloting an innovative multi-method assessment protocol was examined to gain a cultural and contextual understanding of trauma and family violence exposure and associated risk factors of child PTSD in this sample. Findings indicated high levels of exposure to any potentially traumatic stressor in children and mothers, particularly violence in the home and community. Socioeconomic and sociocultural cultural factors such as poverty, traditional gender role socialization, and excessive community violence were associated with greater PTSD symptomatology in children and mothers in this sample. Results from this study support the need for more family-based research to explore intra- and extrafamilial influences on parent-child relationship and the impact of larger cultural and community factors on the development of PTSD. Implications for families, practitioners, researchers, social institutions within the community and government, and the larger global community are discussed.
From a “Contagious” to a “Poisonous Yellow Peril”?: Japanese and Japanese Americans in Public Health and Agriculture, 1890s – 1950.
(2009-06) Shinozuka, Jeannie Natsuko
In the late nineteenth century, increasing agricultural trade and mass Asian migration facilitated the transpacific exchanges of Japanese insect, plant, and human immigrants. This dissertation, "From a `Contagious' to a `Poisonous Yellow Peril'?: Japanese and Japanese Americans in Public Health and Agriculture, 1890s - 1950," challenges the nation-bound paradigm within the history of American public health and agriculture by examining how the "contagious and poisonous yellow peril" image applied first to Chinese immigrants was also imposed on plants, insects, bodies, and pathogens from Japan in the late nineteenth century. As Japanese and Japanese Americans in California resisted this stigmatization, early views of Japanese and Japanese American plants, insects, fishermen, and farmers as a "contagious yellow peril" evolved into a "poisonous yellow peril," leading to their "quarantine" in the form of incarceration during World War II. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, this study examines the emergence of "biological nativism" and its correlative, "a contagious yellow peril" which soon expanded to include Japanese immigrants. Linking fears of diseased bodies to that of injurious insects from Japan, these earliest biotic exchanges occurred within a larger transpacific dialogue between health officials and agriculturalists. Throughout the 1910s, government officials increasingly monitored environmental dangers from East Asia and Mexico, as well as "infected" produce sold by Japanese fishermen and farmers within their borders. Fears of perils from Mexico and Japan led to a heightened awareness of biological attacks on "native" plants and bodies and the implementation of federal plant quarantine legislation. During the 1920s and 1930s, fears of a "contagious yellow peril" transformed into a "poisonous" menace in the form of the Japanese beetle pest and a rising second-generation Japanese American population. By World War II, government officers enacted a host of regulatory mechanisms in order to eradicate or at least control the beetle pest and prevent the sale of "poisoned" Japanese produce. Quarantine in the form of internment and the medical treatment of Japanese American prisoners helped transform them into viable citizen-subjects worthy of conservation. Yet health officials' changing views of Japanese Americans was determined in relationship to their American Indian and Mexican counterparts. In weaving together stories that are often told separately--including American history, Asian history, public health history, environmental history, and Asian American studies--this study reveals how racial and state formation unfolded across larger transpacific exchanges during American empire-building. Examining the lives of Japanese and Japanese Americans through the lens of public health and agriculture reveals how some species can be included while others could not.
Indigenous experience in Mexico: readings in the Nahua intellectual tradition.
(2010-06) McDonough, Kelly Shannon
Sometimes unwittingly academic trends, disciplinary isolation, and narratives of nation-building have contributed to the exclusion of native voices from the literary and cultural history of Mexico. Literary anthologies mention the "great pre-Colombian civilizations," discussing the Popul Vuh and Aztec codexes, and ethnohistorians over the last thirty-some years have shed new light on indigenous intellectual work in the first centuries of the Colonial Period. But less is heard from indigenous people after this. Did they progressively cease to think, speak, and write poetically, abstractly, or philosophically after conquest? My dissertation discusses how Nahuas, heirs to one of the most widely spoken and best-documented indigenous language in Mexico (Nahuatl), have indeed continued to work as intellectuals. However, as needs of specific communities changed, so did the role of the intellectual along with the genres, forums, tools, and discursive codes he/she used. To demonstrate these shifts, I trace four Nahua intellectuals over a period of nearly five hundred years, dipping into distinct historical time periods that markedly affected indigenous intellectual work. I begin with Nahua and Jesuit priest Antonio del Rincón, the first indigenous person in the Americas to write a grammar of his own native language, Arte mexicana (1595). Next, I discuss the rhetoric of nation-building during the nineteenth century, including the disappearance of indigenous people in the discourses of citizenship through the work of Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca, Nahua politician, attorney, scholar of colonial Nahuatl texts, and Nahuatl teacher to Emperor Maximilian I. Moving to the early twentieth century, I highlight discourses of Social Darwinism manifested in the nation's resolve to deal with the "Indian problem" as read in the testimony of Doña Luz Jimenez, specifically her experience with assimilative schooling. Finally, I explore bilingual education in Mexico and the co-optation of indigenous peoples to promote assimilation in the latter half of the twentieth century. I focus on Ildefonso Maya Hernández's play Ixtlamatinij and a series of interviews with the author. In a move to reconnect the theorization with the people being theorized, I also read the texts in focus groups with Nahuas, some encountering their own cultural patrimony for the first time.
Lindo y Querido: Nationalism, Latin American Modernity, and the Contested Terrain of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games
(2022-05) Campos, Edgar
My dissertation illustrates the intertwining of sport, culture, and politics between the Olympic platform and the cultural politics surrounding the legitimacy of the imagined community of México. The México City 1968 Olympic Games marks an unparalleled case study of the lengths and challenges that a post-colonial nation experiences in their attempts for legitimation, modernization, and acceptance on the world stage. Exploring the Olympic journey of México, from the bidding process, hosting, and reception (internal and external) to the present-day memories and legacies, illustrate how a post-colonial nation navigates international relations and engages with the socio-political forces of nationalism, modernity, and globalization. My dissertation and work are grounded in the broader literature of cultural and political sociology. Culture is a central focus of my research, and I care to understand the real material consequences of political decisions made by leaders in México and the West. Within these traditions, I pay special attention to and study ideas, knowledge, and popular culture as they operate as fields of contested terrain. I engage with symbolic interactionism at the macroscale to help situate the cultural-political work being done by elites with Goffman’s work of presentation of self/stigma helping understand how Mexican elites navigated Mexico’s stigmatized image. In this instance, nation-states are social actors whose government leaders operate in meaningful interaction on behalf of their citizens. Drawing from historical methods, semiotics, textual analysis, site analysis, visual analysis, and extensive secondary literature help paint a nuanced picture of an event that impacted not just Méxican and Olympic history but also global history. Situating the research in the multifaceted context of the Cold War and the Grand Historical Narrative was key. I argue that nations’ stigma and impression management elucidate how nation-states participate in symbolic interactionism to distract, alter, and change their spoiled identities by interacting in key institutional spaces such as the Olympics. México City 1968 is an example of a post-colonial participating in rather than being a recipient of nationalism, modernity, and globalization and demonstrates how their participation was or was not legitimated.
MedSpanish San Miguel de Allende
(2012-05-24) Pogemiller, Hope
The migrating state: Mexico, migrants, and transnational governance.
(2010-03) Mackey, Paul Michael
Since the late 1980s, the Mexican government has been developing a program to assist and defend Mexican migrants that live north of Mexico's territorial borders. Unprecedented in scope and scale, the program has attempted to cultivate in migrants affinity for the Mexican homeland and strengthen the transnational social and economic ties that link migrants to Mexico. This project argues that Mexico's program of "acercamiento" with migrant communities is inextricably linked to Mexico's adoption of neoliberal governing rationalities, and that the government has deployed migration policy as a vehicle for reinventing the reason of state in Mexico. While engaging contemporary issues in political geography and globalization studies, this project explores the rhetorical dimensions of Mexico's outreach to migrants, including rhetoric's pivotal role in rescaling the institution of the Mexican state, in reimagining the governing relationship between the state and migratory subjects, and in disembedding concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and citizenship from their entrenchment in national territory and rearticulating them to transnational migrant flows.
Parenting practices and child behavior in Mexico: a validation study of the Alabama parenting questionnaire.
(2009-04) Robert, Christina Jane
The present study is a validation study of the Alabama Parenting Questionnaire (APQ) in a stratified sample in Monterrey, Mexico. A total of 862 sixth grade children were targeted for the study. Their female caregivers (n=862) were administered the APQ - Parent Report and the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) - Parent Report as part of a larger battery of tests. Measures of positive and negative parenting behaviors were used to predict externalizing and internalizing behaviors of the children. Results show that parenting behaviors of Mexican parents follow similar trends as those established in a similar large scale study conducted in Australia. Results also demonstrate good predictive validity of externalizing and internalizing behaviors in children using the positive and negative parenting practices assessed using the APQ. Results include a greater understanding of parenting behaviors in a large, diverse Mexican sample and implications for future research and directions for intervention with Latinos/as living in the U.S.
Population-level antibiotic treatment policies in the setting of antibiotic resistance: A mathematical model of mass treatment of Helicobacter pylori in Mexico
(SAGE, 2017-10-23) Alarid-Escudero, Fernando
Purpose: Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) is the strongest known risk factor for gastric cancer and peptic ulcer disease. Programs under consideration in high risk countries to prevent H. pylori- related diseases via broad population treatment could be complicated by increasing levels of antibiotic resistance (ABR). We evaluate the impact of different mass-treatment policies on H. pylori infection and ABR in Mexico using a mathematical model. Methods: We developed an age-structured, susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) transmission model of H. pylori infection in Mexico that included both treatment-sensitive and treatment- resistant strains. Antibiotic treatment was assumed to either clear sensitive strains or induce acquired resistance. In addition, the model included the effects of both background antibiotic use and antibiotic treatment specifically intended to treat H. pylori infection. Model parameters were derived from the published literature and estimated from primary data. Using the model, we projected H. pylori infection and resistance levels over 20 years without treatment and for three hypothetical population-wide treatment policies assumed to be implemented in 2018: (1) treat children only (2-6 year-olds); (2) treat older adults only (>40 years old); (3) treat everyone regardless of age. Clarithromycin -introduced in Mexico in 1991- was the antibiotic considered for the treatment policies. In sensitivity analyses, we considered different mixing patterns and trends of background antibiotic use. We validated the model against historical values of prevalence of infection and ABR of H. pylori. Results: In the absence of a mass-treatment policy, our model predicts infection begins to rise in 2021, mostly caused by treatment-induced resistant strains as a product of background use of antibiotics. The impact of the policies is immediate on decreasing infection but also increasing ABR (see Figure). For example, policy 3 decreases infection by 11% but increases ABR by 23% after the first year of implementation. The relative size of the decrease in infection is 50% the increase in ABR for policies 2 and 3, and 20% for policy 1. These results agree across all scenarios considered in sensitivity analysis. Conclusions: Conclusions: Mass-treatment policies have a higher effect on increasing ABR letting resistant strains take over infection. Given the high proportion of ABR at the time of the policy implementation, mass treatment strategies are not recommended for Mexico.
Review of Erased Faces by Graciela Limón
(Voices from the Gaps, 2004) O'Neil, Jennifer
Review of Frida: A Novel Based on the Life of Frida Kahlo by Barbara Mujica
(Voices from the Gaps, 2004) Stephens, Megan
Supporting Agricultural Workers from Mexico
(University of Minnesota Extension, 2011) Alba Meraz, Antonio; Olson, Patricia D.; Burk, Gabriela; Solheim, Catherine A.
Violencia, literatura, y el Estado en la narrativa mexicana de los siglos XX y XXI.
(2022-02) Fajardo Sotelo, Guillermo
This dissertation examines, analyzes, and explain, through literary representation, a multiplicity of violent phenomena in Mexico. From drug trafficking to gender violence, this collection of essays seeks to pinpoint at the causes of this violence, its origins, and its evolution. By using a wide array of Latin American authors from the 20th and 21st century, each of these chapters looks at a specific angle of the violence that has plagued contemporary Mexico.

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