This dissertation explores the politics surrounding women's authority and power in the affairs of state governance and religion in ancient Mesoamerican societies. While the goal is to elucidate the political and social relations of pilgrimage practices in the Maya and Veracruz regions, this research notes that despite the abundant material evidence that points to women's leadership positions in the pilgrimage practices of the Postclassic period (A.D. 1000-1519), women remain absent from archaeological narratives. Using feminist and historical materialist methodologies it deconstructs archaeological stereotypes regarding the public vs. private spheres of ancient society, queries models of fertility that define women's social roles in terms of dependency, and interrogates narratives that link gender relations to nature where they are beyond critique. It utilizes archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic sources to demonstrate that women in the Classic period (A.D. 300-1000) participated in a multi-regional pilgrimage network that entitled them to some of the highest positions of political, religious and military power. This history is important for understanding the prominence of Postclassic priestesses. Research carried out at the British Museum focused on the Nepean Collection, the largest collection of artifacts from the Postclassic pilgrimage site of Isla de Sacrificios in Veracruz, Mexico. The analysis of figurines and spindle whorls found in this collection indicate a previously ignored feminine component to pilgrimage relations which is explained in terms of a larger regional history. Finally, this research reclaims and refashions the fertility narrative by demonstrating that ancient Mesoamerican women controlled their reproduction rights within the context of Postclassic pilgrimage practices.

This dissertation examines rock art from 20 sites in the District of Huánuco, in the Central Andes of Peru. The art spans the history of human occupation in the Andes; from approximately the seventh millennium BCE to the sixteenth century CE. When analyzed diachronically, the paintings elucidate changing social practices, as they relate to the relations between people and the creation of anthropogenic landscapes. As markings on stone, pictographs served to advertise territorial connections, but also reveal the primary importance of the land in instantiating and negotiating social relations for the Pre-Columbian peoples of Huánuco.

Episodes of painting were identified through a combination of stratigraphic analysis, revealed through an examination of instances of superposition, and the existence of stylistic relationships evident in an analysis of the formal qualities of the art. Chronology was subsequently revealed using stylistic seriation, cross-dating between sites, and analyzing the styles and motifs in comparison with art from other, more securely dated materials. This combined methodology allowed the chronological placement of the art to be determined without damaging or altering it.

The data were analyzed through the lens of Andean ethnographies and ethnohistories that relate to the themes depicted, and in combination with archaeological data from within and outside the study area. This analysis revealed the multifaceted functions of rock art, as well as illuminating some of the changing social trends and cosmological beliefs in the region. Some of the main themes that emerged from this analysis are an early focus on animals shifting to a focus on camelids as they were domesticated, the sharing of motifs and themes with Amazonian peoples beginning in the Preceramic Period (3000-1800 BCE), and a later emphasis on anthropomorphic figures that are interpreted as the founding ancestors of local social groups beginning in the Early Intermediate Period (200-700 CE).

The dissertation demonstrates that the creation of rock art was a practice that was far more actively engaged in the initiation, documentation, and negotiation of the social arrangements of Andean people than has heretofore been acknowledged or understood.

This project documents and analyzes changing notions of masculinities in the Mixtec transnational community San Jerónimo Progreso. San Jerónimo is a small Mixtec speaking agencia municipal (town) in the municipality of Silacayoapan, and Region Mixteca of western Oaxaca, Mexico. Despite the town’s fragmented appearance (the majority people from San Jerónimo now live permanently outside of the town) San Jerónimo is by all accounts a transnational community; its members recreate their sense of community and belonging to the town across the borders and boundaries of nation-states. San Jerónimo’s families are now primarily located in two satellite communities: Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico and the small farming towns of the San Joaquin Valley, California, in the United States. This dissertation demonstrates how transnational migration and the development of households across the U.S. and Mexico borders have impacted and modified indigenous masculinities as they are constituted in the context of San Jerónimo’s usos y costumbres (uses and customs, including customary law). In telling the stories and experiences of San Jerónimenses (people from San Jerónimo Progreso), I explore indigenous masculinities as an outcome and expression of culture and ever-changing socio-cultural, political and economic contexts of their usos y costumbres.

This dissertation explores how usos y costumbres, as socio-cultural practices and customary law, continue to impact men’s sense of self. In Oaxaca, the referent of usos y costumbres (now sistemas normativos internos) is used to describe a broad gamut of socio-cultural practices often associated with indigenous communities. Many these practices, or costumbres, are pre-Hispanic but some originated with the Spanish Conquest of the Americas. These socio-cultural practices include the system of civic-religious posts called cargos (burdens), which are often the most cited and researched example of usos y costumbres. At times, usos y costumbres is very much about an indigenous community’s socio-cultural practices, but in other situations the term can take on more formal definitions associated with a community’s unwritten and uncodified customary laws or social rules. I consider how transnational migration has resulted in a growing number of men and women who no longer find many aspects of usos y costumbres important to their sense of self. These individuals are most visible amongst San Jerónimo’s non-Catholic Christians, who live predominantly in Central California. I explore how masculinities have or have not changed amongst these non-Catholics as they continue to take part in San Jerónimo’s transnational community.

This dissertation is the result of multi-sited and transnational ethnographic research gathered over the course of several years, beginning in 2011 and ending in the summer of 2015. I contextualize indigenous masculinities within these new transnational settings, and demonstrate how socio-cultural, political, and economic environments impact and at times reinforce people’s attitudes, practices, norms and values towards gendered identities. Although this dissertation examines masculinities, it is not just about men. This dissertation is also about indigenous families and their continuous efforts, despite tremendous hardships, to recreate a sense of community in an era marked by continuous political and economic change.

I am an actor. I wrapped a lot of my identity around that sentence. After moving to New York, churning through four years of training at an undergraduate level, and spending some time as a working professional, I began to feel stagnant. The sense of play had been lost. Pounding pavement just for the sake of audition was beginning to take its toll. While I had worked around the country, I felt that theatre had become an obligation. Success was mandatory. Then I got sick.

I developed an autoimmune disorder known as alopecia areata. While it can happen to healthy individuals, my doctor decided that the amount of stress in my life combined with the fact I was not eating had caused my body to shut down. A change

was necessary. Acting had ceased being pleasurable. I wanted to find my way back to that feeling of weightlessness on stage. Adjusting my attitude, I decided to train again, but this time with a positive energy.

Throughout my time at UCSD I concentrated on being easy on myself. I know I am harsh with myself. Explaining the transformation three years of training is impossible in limited space, but in my final show, She Stoops to Conquer, I re-found lightness. The training, from voice to movement, has been unexpected and immensely fulfilling. While I am continually working on myself emotionally and physically, this program has done more than make me a better actor. It has made me a happier, fuller human being.

This study is a contribution to the post-Middle Horizon ceramic chronologies for the central coast of Peru in general, and for the Lurín valley in particular. This project contributes to our knowledge of central coast Peruvian ceramics thricely: First, it is a fine-grained stylistic analysis of surface collections from sites in the Lurín valley and its environs from sites which were destroyed by the rapid growth of the city of Lima in the last fifty years; second, it compares the ceramics styles found in the Lurín valley to other published material; and third, it articulates the archeological and ethnohistoric record to address larger questions about socio-cultural evolution of the inhabitants of this central coast valley. The methodology of this analysis is detailed stylistic and seriation analysis of ceramic collections made in the mid-1960s. A fine-tuned stylistic and seriation ceramic sequence is detailed in chapter 1-4 which is incorporated to other published material in chapter 5-6, and finally the updated ceramic sequence is used to supplement, collaborate, and/or challenge the ethnohistorical record in chapter 7. I conclude that at a local level individual communities were not fundamentally upheaved at certain historical points as some of the ethnohistorical literature suggests. That is to say, large supra-structural changes at various historical points –the presence of the Inca empire at the dawn of the Late Horizon, for example, did not affect every day ceramic production traditions as much as would be implied in the ethnohistorical record. Overwhelming examples of ceramic changes indicate that these are slow, gradual, and local. At any one location throughout the valley, and at any particular time, their local ceramic traditions are reminiscent of the neighboring people’s ceramic traditions. These findings suggest a reconsideration on future directions of study for central coast societies post the Middle Horizon.

For most of the century before the 1970s, the Tzotzil-Mayas of highland Chiapas, Mexico, depended for their livelihoods on seasonal migratory labor in the commercial agriculture of Chiapas's lowlands. Whether picking coffee on the plantations of Chiapas's southern coast and mountains or in its northern lowlands, growing corn and beans as sharecroppers and day laborers on the cattle and grain estates of the central, Grijalva Basin, or cutting cane in that same basin, indigenous men from the highlands spent an average of six months a year working outside of their communities to make Chiapas's commercial agriculture among the most prosperous in Mexico. In return, the income they took home made life possible for their households in the densely populated, less fertile "traditional" communities of the highlands.

And then beginning in the 1970s, as a result of stagnating commodity prices, rising expenses, and credit and foreign exchange difficulties, Chiapas's plantations began to fail. Over the next two decades, while Chiapas's indigenous population was doubling, the demand for seasonal agricultural laborers actually declined. The result was growing stress on households, communities and the state as a whole. Based on participant observation, demographic and economic surveys, and life histories, this dissertation traces the effects of this stress as it worked its way through Chamula, one of the signal Tzotzil municipios of the Central Highlands. It is divided into three sections. The first characterizes the macroeconomic change in Chiapas from the 1970s through the 1990s and the economic adjustments by households as men and women found new ways of making money to replace what was lost with the decline of agricultural labor. The second traces political change as dissidents in the municipio first combatted the authoritarian, cacique-ruled local government from the eve of the crisis in the 1960s through the 1970s, and then were increasingly drawn into extra-communal economic and political organizations by their new economic activities in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, the third section describes the extension of migratory labor to the United States beginning in 2000, and urbanization of the Chamulas and other highland indigenous people from the mid-1970s through 2009.

This dissertation investigates how the aggressive implementation of neoliberal policies and practices in the agrarian sector of the Chilean economy from the late 1970s onwards has affected the ways in which female workers in the fruit industry navigate a labor regime marked by instability, high seasonal unemployment during the winter months, and structural constraints of the political and economic arenas in which they live. Specifically, it is concerned with how female seasonal workers (temporeras), who constitute seventy percent of the agribusiness workforce, reconfigure their notions of personhood and create contested spaces as they enter and leave the fragmented agribusiness labor cycle in Chile's Aconcagua Valley. It explores the articulations between the inherently unequal structures created by the neoliberal policies and practices of both the government and the agribusinesses of the Aconcagua Valley; the ways in which the state, agribusiness, and the workers themselves deploy notions of citizenship and responsibility; and the forms of negotiations employed by female workers as they forge social identities and quotidian practices during the fragmented labor cycle.

With the understanding that the expressions of neoliberalism are both varied and contested, the dissertation approaches the analysis dialectically. The first domain considers how the neoliberal policies and practices underpinning Chile's fruit export industry were implemented in the early 70s and reinforced after the transition to democracy in the early 90s. Second, the research gives voice to the temporeras as they engage with enabling and disabling attributes of flexibility, forging their personhood while confronting varying constructions of morality, sexuality, and citizenship in the work environment and national discourse. Third, the dissertation examines how female workers respond to disciplinary practices in the packing plants, employ technologies of self, and engage in strategies of making do throughout the winter months, frequently recurring to debt as a way of making ends meet.

Background

Methods

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Conclusion

Capitalist agriculture, not family farming has dominated the California agricultural economy throughout its history and unlike the rest of the nation has relied upon the interchangeability of numerous migrant and immigrant groups whose employment opportunities were limited. An examination of the history of California agribusiness highlights four periods in which the labor force is mainly single/unattached males, or family units. This dissertation examines the social and economic consequences of the changing use of labor in California agribusiness and the impact of these changes on women farm workers and their families.

Mexican-origin and Dust Bowl families are the only two family groups who have labored in California agribusiness during the twentieth century. The historical importance of women farm workers has been neglected in the literature of California agriculture, as well as the importance of family and household strategies in the initial incorporation of women into agricultural wage work. I document the contributions of Mexican-origin farm working women within the context of their historical experiences, along with the strategies that they and their families utilized, making the family viable as an important labor unit despite the disruptions and complexities of a pattern of changing labor in California agribusiness. I focus on the role of women in California agribusiness and their importance in the settlement process, family maintenance, and community development. Women enter wage labor out of extreme needs of the family and at times as heads of households, and their income is essential to the survival of the family. Their entry into wage work adds substantially to their workload as they continue their domestic role in addition to their role as wage worker. They and their families acquire substantial benefits from the women’s involvement in community building and networking with institutions that are available to them, particularly if they acquire English as a second language.