An important cultural and political figure in Mexico’s twentieth century, Concha Michel was part of a generation of Mexican women activists whose actions and resolutions demonstrated their resolve in calling for changes to the law, access to the vote, and altering education and culture. While Mexican women participated in organizational efforts in both Mexico and internationally during the first three decades of the twentieth century, scholars have continued to identify the need to recognize their work as activists and their intellectual writings. In focusing on the activism and political thought of Michel during the 1920s and 1930s, I trace out Michel’s militant resolve to advocate on behalf of women’s complex structural needs: immediate and long-term. A globally significant activist, singer, and composer, Concha Michel was an advocate for women’s, campesino’s, and worker’s rights within the women’s movement in Mexico. Historical and archival in nature, this biographical study employs qualitative analysis, including a close reading of primary sources. I utilize governmental archives, periodicals, published books and articles from the period in question. Michel published a number of articles, books, and treatises, that are significant for my study. I analyze these texts as a lens to better understand Michel’s feminism and theoretical dispositions. The chapters present a reconstruction of Michel’s lived experiences, political activities, and engagement with reformist efforts as they pertain to women during the period that encompasses the years 1920-1940. This study proposes that during the 1930s, Michel articulated a theoretical position to simultaneously abolish class oppression and patriarchal oppression that was unusual for her time. Michel took part in international activities in connection with the Communist Party. For Michel, the Communist Party did not develop effective mechanisms for organizing against gender inequalities, prompting her to develop proposals to transgress the obstacles that kept men and women from fighting for each other’s liberation. I show Michel was asserting gender demands while rejecting the socialist stance of advancing the indiscriminate and undifferentiated incorporation of women into productive work.

Child neglect is the most common form of child maltreatment, and yet less recognized, treated, or researched than child physical or sexual abuse. Child neglect is also highly associated with parental substance abuse, parents' trauma histories, and trauma symptoms. This study explores the relation between parental substance abuse, parental history of trauma and trauma-related symptoms, and child neglect within a sample of families involved in a family treatment drug court (FTDC) for parental substance abuse and child neglect. Data were collected on 70 mothers and fathers who became involved with the FTDC because they neglected their children as a result of their substance abuse. Parental substance abuse was assessed at intake using a semi-structured clinical interview. Parents' trauma history, trauma symptoms, and parenting attitudes were collected using self-report measures. A trained clinician assessed family functioning and parenting techniques. The severity of parents' alcohol problems and trauma histories were found to impact their use of adaptive parenting techniques. Parents' trauma symptoms and trauma histories were found to differentially impact the parent-child relationship; children of parents with more severe trauma symptoms were at a greater risk of neglect while children of parents who experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences were at a lower risk of neglect. Parents' trauma histories and experience of childhood neglect also impacted treatment gains. Recommendations for assessing parents' trauma histories and symptoms as they relate to substance abuse and child welfare treatment planning are discussed. Methods to improve the study of child neglect are also identified as they pertain to families affected by substance abuse and trauma.

My dissertation, Mexican Religion on Trial: Race, Religion and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, presents three critical junctures in United States history (between the nineteenth century and the present) to explore political and legal discourses surrounding Mexican Catholicism after the Mexican-American war. This research employs historical, archival, and ethnographic methods. My analysis of numerous legal case studies, law enforcement training manuals, oral histories, ethnographic methods, and archival documents reveal processes by which Mexican Catholic practices and performances become signifiers of illegality and criminality, used as evidence against the inclusion and extension of national and cultural citizenship. While the surveillance of Mexicans communities reflects increased anxiety and suspicion about immigrant communities and their religions in the 9/11 period, this history positions contemporary legal debates on Mexican religion within a larger history of anti-Mexican and anti-Catholic attitudes in the Southwest.

The Twelve Steps can be viewed as an alternative medium for the transference of cultural knowledge, one that offers a different approach to constructing and maintaining cultural artifacts. Through this unique process of ethical self-examination and the resultant cessation of old modes of operating within a society that this recovery model encourages, oppressed and marginalized persons of all faiths have been given the tools to rid themselves of constructs that cause them to remain imprisoned in an existence they have participated in creating. Twelve step recovery is itself a path of negation, but not of what the sacred is not; it is rather, a path that deconstructs intellectual, spiritual, ethnic, and societal outlooks and configurations that take part in and enable wide-reaching exploitation of alcoholics, addicts, and other marginalized persons.

This dissertation examines the impact of the Twelve Step recovery model on middle class Americans through the interpretive lens of liberation ethics. It takes as an entry point the contention that the particular form of triumphalism engaged in by this group is both contributory to and a manifestation of the substance and process addictions which the Twelve Steps were designed to address. By examining the historical development of twelve step recovery programs as a response to the ethical tensions of participation in a culture of dominance, this dissertation seeks to elucidate the course of action by which the movement is involved in both transforming and reifying these structures of dominance. I seek to challenge the notion that twelve step movements are primarily effective only in bringing people back in line with the dominant ideological representation of American culture. This challenge will manifest in an interrogation of whether the twelve step movement, through its process of ethical self-assessment and restitution is converting this ideology of dominance of others (which is the dominant ideology) into a belief system based on mutuality and interconnectedness.

A growing community of Latino Muslims in the United States expands already dynamic categories of what it means to be a Latino and what it means to be a Muslim at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through various avenues, including the Internet, Latinos have come into contact with Islam and Muslims in the U.S. A small but notable number of Latinos have adopted Islam as their religion. Despite their modest numbers, lack resources and inability to unify nationally, various organizations have managed to garner a dominant voice in the public sphere. In its relation to other media forms, the Internet, I argue, has been integral to the formation and dissemination of a particular Latino brand of Islam that focuses on narratives of ethnic marginalization, reversion to Islam and roots in Muslim Spain. Latino Muslim by Design is a study of race, religion and Internet discourse as they intersect to form new minority groups within minority groups in the U.S. and further expand the already dynamic categories of Latinos and Muslims in America.