Many Latino students continue to experience low academic achievement across educational contexts. Despite programmatic efforts, few academic or school-based interventions in the recent past have demonstrated a reliable way to increase their student outcomes. While parent involvement has been considered as an intervention to improve Latino student behavioral and academic outcomes, there are still significant gaps in the ways schools relate to these parents. In the last fifty years we have learned that the most impactful form of parent involvement is not when they come to the school site for meetings or workshops to ameliorate perceived deficits, deficiencies in their parenting or home environment. But rather, when they establish home behaviors that set academic supports and expectations for their children and which match the expectations of the school.

To introduce or strengthen such academic home behaviors and support some studies have suggested that the targeted use of school liaisons at home has led parents to become aware of the skills, assets and resources they possess and whose utilization have led to measurable positive results in schools. In these cases, school liaisons were used as an extension of the school or district academic program. They visited targeted students’ homes and utilized a strength-based approach which involved them guiding parents to identify available strengths and assets inherent in their family. The strengths and assets that the family possessed were then combined with the resources that the liaisons provided or identified. They were then combined to improve student outcomes.

However, in Migrant Region X, the current training that migrant liaisons receive do not prepare them for the specific purpose of working with parents. This lack of training does not allow them to develop and empower the family’s capacity to activate and use their existing social and human capital (inherent family strengths and assets) to address their children’s’ academic needs. Even if migrant liaisons were aware of the valuable assets and strengths that families possess they have no established formal protocol in which to consistently approach their interaction with migrant families. A tool is needed to guide them upon engaging parents in a strength-based process. Without proper training and access to a strength-based protocol these strengths and assets remained untapped.

My intent in this design study was to format a sequence of workshops and development activities to guide a team of migrant liaisons in their problem resolution interactions with parents to a higher degree of sophistication. Migrant liaisons would be led to expand their level of knowledge about factors that affect parent involvement. In particular, they would come to understand the need for employing a strength-based approach with families. Another change expected was that interaction with parents would be standardized and accorded by co-developing a Migrant Strength-Based Protocol (MSBP). A final expected study outcome would be that having benefitted from the study’s content and protocol, migrant liaisons would report an increase in their perceived sense of efficacy in regards to working with parents. I found that the study produced data that showed liaisons moved decidedly towards favoring a strength-based approach with parents. However, the afforded study timeframe was not sufficient to fully develop the intended protocol. Liaisons also showed an increase in their perceived efficacy in working with parents.

Arrested Solidarities: Resistance and Racial Contact Zones in the 19th Century U.S. examines how minoritarian writings articulated and imagined resistance during the period from the Mexican American War (1848) to the Spanish-American War (1898). Each chapter settles on a historical and cultural flashpoint, each displaying a different set of literary and political forces. I claim that these writings, which existed in contact zones of race and politics under the encroachments of a growing and expanding U.S. Empire, pushed the political boundaries of their genres as well as the communities in which they participated and intervened. My curated use of underread texts and forms such as newspapers also call attention to the importance of expanding the literary archive and in doing so expanding the lexicon for how humanities understands literary resistance during this period.

This dissertation studies the identity formation and cultural production of Latin American authors of Arab descent. More specifically, it focuses on the strategies used by Arab-Latin American authors and cultural producers to build spaces of belonging and transform the cultural landscape of Latin America through the production of cultural artifacts such as travelogues, testimonies, short stories, novels, films, documentaries, and poetry. Since most of the research on the Arab presence in Latin America has been studied from socioeconomic and political perspectives, this study attempts to fill a vacuum in the study of contemporary cultural production of Arab and Latin American authors of Arab descent in two ways. First, from an interdisciplinary approach and the perspectives of postcolonial, decolonial, and affect theory lenses, this dissertation analyzes the cultural products of Arab-Latin Americans as emotional repositories that served as the basis for the creation of spaces of belonging where Arab-Latin American communities were able to not only survive but thrive and climb the social ladder as they immersed themselves into different countries across Latin America. Moreover, this study reflects on how these emotional repositories assisted in the development of self-identities and pride in Arab ancestry while simultaneously promoting the process that Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz identified as transculturation. Second, most studies on the relationship between the Middle East and Latin America have focused on the Arab people and Arab-Latin Americans as passive objects of study by analyzing their migratory patterns, socio-economic conditions and development, and political structures, among other topics. While this dissertation builds upon this prior research, it attempts to underscore Arab-Latin Americans' agency and self-definition of identities as it highlights their experiences and voices as agents of their own history.