There is a paucity of scholarship that centers the experiences and resistance efforts of Students of Color in higher education institutions. More specifically, there is a need to grow Chicana/o student activism literature in the late 20th Century through a Critical Race Theory lens. This study centers the multiple people that participated in the 1990-1993 movements for Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). By focusing on this historical moment, the dissertation contributes to a variety of academic discourses.

The theoretical framework used in this study is Critical Race History (CRH) that draws from existing scholarship in Critical Race Theory in Education, Critical Race Theory in the Law, Chicana Feminisms, and Jotería Theories. The CRH lens is used to analyze a number of academic writings that inform the topic, hundreds of archival documents in institutions as well as with individuals, and 39 oral histories of students, community leaders, faculty, staff, and administrators that witnessed and took on leadership roles during the 1990-1993 period.

The dissertation finds that the racial climate in the 1990's in California impacted the discourse on departmentalizing Chicana/o Studies at UCLA. Specifically, the dissertation finds that race is complicated by elements of class and citizenship in a number of archival documents. The oral histories also surface racial, class, and citizenship tensions, and further include gender and sexuality into the narrative.

We describe a novel technical approach with enhanced fluorescence detection capabilities in two-photon microscopy that achieves deep tissue imaging, while maintaining micron resolution. Compared to conventional two-photon microscopy, greater imaging depth is achieved by more efficient harvesting of fluorescence photons propagating in multiple-scattering media. The system maintains the conventional two-photon microscopy scheme for excitation. However, for fluorescence collection the detection system harvests fluorescence photons directly from a wide area of the turbid sample. The detection scheme relies on a wide area detector, minimal optical components and an emission path bathed in a refractive-index-matching fluid that minimizes emission photon losses. This detection scheme proved to be very efficient, allowing us to obtain high resolution images at depths up to 3 mm. This technique was applied to in vivo imaging of the murine small intestine (SI) and colon. The challenge is to image normal and diseased tissue in the whole live animal, while maintaining high resolution imaging at millimeter depth. In Lgr5-GFP mice, we have been successful in imaging Lgr5-eGFP positive stem cells, present in SI and colon crypt bases.