Decolonizing Western Uni-versalisms: Decolonial Pluri-versalism from Aimé Césaire to the Zapatistas

In the contemporary United States, nonprofits serve as central conduits of urban reform and welfare provision including legal, health and job assistance for racialized neighborhoods. Despite the salience of nonprofit organizations in urban politics, few academic analyses investigate their crucial political work. My work critiques normative academic and popular understandings of nonprofit organizations as ahistorical and nonpolitical service providers fundamentally delinked from the state. In contrast, my dissertation examines how nonprofits operated as a critical technology that intensified the state's relationship to urban racialized communities in the mid 20th century. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, CA and archival research in four different sites, I argue that nonprofit organizations are a powerful vehicle in the remaking of contemporary racial subjectivities and citizenship. As critical community-routed organizations, they negotiate how urban racial subjects relate to the state and social movements.

This project probes the material and political consequences of discourses of benevolence in state, nonprofit, and social movement projects. By focusing on projects professing compassion, I unsettle dominant academic frameworks that overwhelmingly focus on two problematics regarding race making: 1) the state as a monolithic entity monopolizing all modes of power; and 2) the attribution of intentional violence to projects of race making. I advance the "politics of care" as an analytic for understanding contentious projects of urban improvement normalized as benevolent acts of kindness. Academic debates typically construct welfare as the privileged site of state projects. In contrast, my conceptualization of the "politics of care" attends to the role of the state and the work of non-state actors such as nonprofit health clinics, legal-aid centers, and community development corporations. Far more than mere service providers, nonprofits enact diverse techniques of government that target specific racial identities and populations.

My findings reveal that nonprofit organizations are a productive site of power in contemporary urban racialized communities like Fruitvale. Nonprofits engaged in multiple sites/acts of production that have spatial, demographic, as well as political effects. First, they build extensive patronage networks that cohere Fruitvale residents as a united Latino "community" despite the existence of diverse and often competing factions along class and nationality. By producing this community as a target of projects of improvement and care, nonprofits also link Fruitvale with fiscal patrons outside the geographical confines of the neighborhood. Second, they market the neighborhood as Latino and produce representations of Latinidad that are architecturally and aesthetically visible in the urban form. Third, nonprofit-mediated projects demarcate Latinos from other racial groups and politicize the neighborhood as a haven for immigrant rights and in so doing link residents with constricted citizenship to alternative avenues of belonging. My study fills an important gap in the social movement literature by demonstrating the diversity of 1960s Chicano mobilizations, how they related to African American movements, Asian American experiences, and how this translated into contemporary political formations. Furthermore, my dissertation troubles academic and popular conceptions of Oakland as a Black/White city. This move remaps Latino Studies scholarship into less traditional areas of inquiry outside the metropoles of Los Angeles and Chicago.

Considered the World's Busiest Border Crossing, the San Ysidro port of entry is located in a small, predominantly Mexican and Spanish-speaking community between San Diego and Tijuana. The community of San Ysidro was itself annexed by the City of San Diego in the mid-1950s, in what was publicly articulated as a dispute over water rights. This dissertation argues that the annexation was over who was to have control of the port of entry, and would in turn, set the stage for a gendered/racialized power struggle that has contributed to both real and symbolic violence on the border.

This dissertation is situated at the crossroads of urban studies, border studies and ethnic studies and places violence as a central analytical category. As such, this interdisciplinary work is manifold. It is a community history of San Ysidro in its simultaneous relationship to the U-S///Mexico border and to the City of San Diego. In addition, it considers multiple forms of both direct and symbolic violence often overshadowed by attention to drug violence: the annexation dispute in the 1950's (territorial); the 1984 McDonald's Massacre of predominantly Mexican patrons (corporeal/racial); a subsequent fight over a memorial monument (cultural/symbolic); the resurgence of vigilante-like anti-immigrant groups (ideological); and critical responses by cultural producers to the very existence of the border wall. In sum, it considers the relationship between coloniality, nation-state borders and violence to understand the region's role in an increasingly globalized world.

In analyzing the varied responses by local residents, this study thus considers broader theoretical issues of raced/gendered violence, power, and nation-state borders. It challenges two established assumptions in much of the literature on border cities:

1) the normative descriptor "San Diego-Tijuana" as a proper name for the region, and

2) a related insistence on "San Diego-Tijuana" as an exception in relation to other

U.S. counterparts among border cities.

In doing so, my dissertation unsettles the demarcation of San Diego as a border city, given its location and relationship to San Ysidro and the U-S///Mexico border?

In this dissertation, San Ysidro functions as a lens to study the U-S///Mexico border, as San Ysidro is emblematic of globalizing processes, where local dynamics intersect and often conflict with regional, transnational, and global political/economic interests embodied in free trade policies said to make borders increasingly irrelevant. The case study of San Ysidro reveals, however, the contradictory nature of fortified yet permeable nation-state boundaries and surrounding border regions.

Situating education within world-systems analysis and in the longue durée of capitalist history affords a critical view of public schooling and Islamic education in the US. While the American Muslim community copes with the aftermath of 9/11 and the effects of the war on terror, the business of providing Islamic education to young American Muslims and educating them about the larger world they live in remains a challenge. Public schooling represents democracy, the right to free and universal education, and the prospect of social mobility, but it also hides the underlying historical forces of colonialism, capitalism, cultural domination, cultural genocide, and segregation. Yet, unlike many centuries past, Islamic education during the Cold War also served a geopolitical agenda against communism, distorting and defaming the teachings of Islam. Contrasting epistemological and ontological dissimilarities between California public school standards and Islamic education makes visible the tensions and tendencies that arise out of combining the two in a private Islamic school. Centering on a private Islamic school located in the Silicon Valley, and with a view to serving the learning needs of Muslim children in the US post 9/11, this dissertation surveys the fears and hopes of the Muslim community, and the opportunities and challenges of Islamic education that lie ahead. Effectively, the necessity arises in formulating a new vision of Islamic education that prepares young American Muslims to contribute positively to an increasingly militarized, racialized, divided world. Based on the longue durée of Abrahamic faiths, relating modern and Islamic history, Islamic education inside the US must re-conceptualize the understanding of the Qur’an and Islam, so as to develop a spirituality and worldview that prepare young American Muslims to serve the social and political needs of their communities, their country, and the world at large.

This dissertation claims a decolonial turn in healing sciences is possible by nurturing theepistemic and ontological practice that I call “panza awareness” (gut-knowing in English and el saber de la panza in Spanish), which is the embodied exercise of listening to our gut feelings and learning to interpret the information that comes from our body as valid knowledge. It proposes a mapping (or constellation) of possibilities for healing the body that centers Black and Indigenous people of color (BIPOC)—with a focus on a Black, Indigenous, and Chicanx/Latinx perspective. It outlines the limits of biomedical ways of understanding the body through race-based, individualized medicine; and it introduces an alternative, race-conscious approach to producing knowledge about health and the body alongside students and community members of color. Using interpretive methodologies in a transformative action research framework, this dissertation generates ethnographic data through a community-engaged, BIPOC-oriented workshop called the Panza Knowing Workshop. I designed and tested the Panza Knowing Workshop through the pilot program discussed in this dissertation. For this dissertation’s first intervention, I 1) study and critique the cultural concept of distress known as ataque de nervios (loosely “nerve attack”) and 2) develop panza awareness. Using a decolonial, feminist-informed critique of nervios, I propose a shift from the individualist mandate, “Te tienes que cuidar tus nervios” [You must take care of your mental health], to a collective, empowered invitation to foster panza awareness. Through panza awareness, we can begin to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of healing and the body. As a second intervention, I demonstrate that the Panza Knowing Workshop generates knowledge of connections between body, mind, health, and knowledge of embodied and ancestral healing modalities. The workshop enacts action research by reciprocally providing psychoeducation and community resources for health and healing to workshop interlocutors. It imagines how biomedical and embodied and ancestral knowledge of the Global South may continue to emerge in respectful, humanizing coexistence in line with the Zapatista imperative to imagine a world where many worlds are possible.

Thick from Behind the Veil: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Philosophy of Race examines the philosophical contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois. I investigate and develop on the phenomenological, metaphysical, and ethical elements of Du Bois’s early writings. I show how a philosophy of double-consciousness offers critical contributions to an existential understanding of racialization. By focusing on the literary and theoretical aspects of The Souls of Black Folk, I demonstrate how Du Bois’s employs classical Greek philosophy, mythology, and ethics to support and explain the material conditions of Black folk in America. I provide a Du Boisian account of double-consciousness in relation to the making of self-consciousness. I also argue that Du Bois’s literary work in “Of the Coming of John” is a modern reimagination of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. As a result, I illustrate how Du Boisian metaphysics can be understood as a meditation of the human condition in response to metaphysical catastrophe. Lastly, I argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’s metaphorical use of “second-sight” and the concept of “the gift” should be read as an ethics and as a cosmopolitan vision for the role and value that Black and other racially oppressed people have to offer the global community.