What are the social forces that shape, sustain, and undermine involved fathering for Latino men? My dissertation, Fathering Ideals: The Meanings of Latino Involved Fatherhoods, generates new knowledge on Latino men, fatherhood, and masculinities using an intersectionalities perspective. My study also considers how Latino fathers enact fatherhood, monitor one another’s fatherhoods, and understand the emotional labor of fathering. Drawing upon 60 in-depth interviews with Latino fathers living in California, I pinpoint an emerging fatherhood ideal to which Latino fathers in my study subscribe. These “ideal” characteristics reflect the larger ideals about involved fathering and emphasize the transmission of cultural values and practices including: balancing work and family, not having “too many” kids, being active in their children’s lives (especially their education), being attentive to their children’s mental health, being emotionally expressive and accessible, having greater communication with their families, incorporating Spanish and other Latina/o cultural traditions, and using alternative methods of discipline. The majority of fathers, however, cannot successfully achieve this new ideal due to structural impediments. Consequently, Latino fathers employ diverse, class-specific, strategies to try to accomplish an idealized classed notion of fatherhood.

Overall, my study traces the effects of work and employment, the social construction of childhood, their relationships with their own fathers, and the institution of motherhood on Latino men’s involved fathering. Paid work and employment enables Latino fathers to be good providers, but detracts from accomplishing their fathering ideals. The majority of participants realize that work also prevented them from getting to know their own fathers in a deep, intimate way. This realization drives those able (mostly college-educated, professional, Latino fathers) to adjust their work commitments or schedules to make time for their families. Additionally, many men in my study perceived that they were denied a childhood, an issue that compels Latino fathers to value the “pricelessness” of their children. There is tension, however, between Latino fathers’ desires to give their children a “normal” childhood alongside fears of spoiling their children. I theorize their attempts to negotiate this tension as the concerted cultivation of natural growth (a racialized and classed parenting practice and ideology). Moreover, Latino fathers are forced to reevaluate their own fathers in light of changing cultural ideologies. Their reevaluations of their own fathers, and other father figures, expose a continuum between two extremes: reverence and resentment. Nuanced expressions of idolization and hatred, fulfillment and longing, respeto (respect) and indifference, forgiveness and condemnation exist and they change over the life course. Lastly, by examining men’s experiences of childbirth and custody hearings, I argue that the naturalization of motherhood drives these fathers to frame fatherhood as “work.” Consequently, the meanings that fathers attach to fatherhood are shaped by their beliefs about whether they can be as competent in caregiving as they perceive mothers to be.

My research agenda considers contemporary practices and ideologies of fatherhood among Latino men and reflects the intricacies of inequality in family life. Considering the differences and similarities in how Latino men conceptualize and practice fatherhood, this study dispels prior notions of a unitary Latino father subject essential to researchers and policymakers interested in the role of fathers in the well-being of families. The results of this study contribute to the fields of gender studies, family studies, Latina/o sociology, social psychology, education, and Chicana/o studies.

The Ortega-Murillos, Nicaragua’s presidential couple, have established a distinct political-culture that relies on traditional gender scripts and the collective memory of the 1979 Sandinista revolution. This political culture has conferred legitimacy on the Ortega-Murillos, allowing for the concentration of power within the family. The reliance on the nuclear family and traditional gender scripts has crafted controlling images (Hill Collins 1991) of women that promote a culture of both structural and physical violence against women and girls. To examine the links between the Ortega-Murillo regime’s political culture and violence against women (VAW), I turn to state discourses and aesthetics as well as women’s analyses. In this thesis, I performed textual analyses on a corpus of approximately two-hundred state discourses, comprised of daily radio speeches and speeches made at public state-sponsored events, eleven archival interviews, and six in-depth interviews I personally conducted with feminists. I also conducted ethnographic field work, documenting public art installations in public spaces across Managua and prevalence of political propaganda in the public sphere across the Pacific region of Nicaragua. These data allow for a gendered critique of the political regression taking place under the Ortega-Murillo regime that has resulted in an erosion of women’s rights. Through women’s analyses, the reader is presented with a narrative of women’s struggle for self-articulation.

Sociological research has long documented the ways in which individuals make sense of who they are and where they belong in the world. This thesis seeks to take up this age-old question and apply it to the experience of transnational adoptees from Guatemala. Transnational adoptees, due to their unique experience of moving across normative familial, racial, cultural, and national borders–all at the same time–must navigate their transgressions of these social identities in order to construct a sense of self. In other words, Guatemalan adoptees occupy unique positions within their adoptive families due to their non-biological but very real familial ties; within the US racial system, sometimes cast as (honorary) White, and other times as people of color; within Latinidad because of their divergent lived experiences from other Latinx folks; and a unique connection to their country of origin, with claims to both their birth cultures and adoptive cultures.To better understand these experiences, this thesis makes use of the social psychological concept of reflected appraisals that help explain how one’s sense of self is based in how we perceive and imagine others to perceive us. Additionally, this thesis theorizes the formulation of the Other, the alienation and ostracization of individuals who do not meet a socially constructed, normative identity. These constructs help illuminate how the transnational adoptee’s sense of being and belonging is different from non-adopted individuals, as well as from that of their White counterparts, communities of color, and their national kin. I identify and analyze four instances in which my 33 respondents feel as if they “don’t fit in”–when they are positioned as an adoptee Other, a racial Other, a cultural Other, and a national Other. Each of these instances are associated with Othering experiences and reflected appraisals, moments when the adoptee’s difference is made salient to them. Adoptee Othering is located in the doctor’s office and other biologized interactions, in adoptee microaggressive encounters, and in their comparing themselves to non-adopted persons. Racial Othering is experienced during racial microaggressive questions, racialized gendered experiences of exotification, and via explicit racism. Cultural Othering is made salient through Guatemalan adoptee’s relationship to Spanish language, being institutionally forced to identify as Latinx, and when navigating their relationship to Latinidad. National Othering is brought up when the transnational adoptee is made aware that they were born somewhere outside of the US, when they have to consider their relationship to immigration, and when interacting with Guatemalans living in the US. Through an analysis of these experiences, I show how Guatemalan adoptees challenge normative understandings of identity categories. I find that they confound social roles–despite their membership in adoptive families and adoptive communities, their role as child, brother, friend, or student, Guatemalan adoptees are set apart from others in their predominantly White communities because of their adoptive and racial differences. I also identify how Guatemalan adoptees disrupt our understandings of achieved and ascribed identities. As they move across (and between) race, Latinidad and national borders, Guatemalan adoptees challenge us to reexamine our assumptions around fixed categories, revealing (il)logics of identity politics in the21st century and the continued relevance of racial, cultural, and national fault lines that undergird identity formation and navigation in the age of color evasiveness (Annamma et al. 2017), post- raciality, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. At the same time that transnational adoptees teach us about identity formation, they are personally challenged to make sense of their identity differences. Throughout this thesis, by centering their lived experiences, I show how Guatemalan adoptees constantly navigate their seemingly tenuous claims to family, race, culture, and nationality. Seemingly tenuous in that it is socially normative categories of fixed identity that adoptees have internalized (reflected appraisals) and are reinforced by external interactions (Othering) that tell them they are different. This perpetual sense of difference (or at least, the uncertainty of when they will need to defend of legitimate their sense of self to others) is unique to transnational adoptees and essential to understand how they move through the world on a day-to-day basis. I conclude with a theorization of the adoptee third-space in relation to “coming out of the fog.” I argue that the adoptee third-space is a psychic-social location that the transnational adoptee finds themself returning to over and over again due to their constant Othering and sense of difference. I suggest that their continued presence in the third-space is one way in which transnational adoptees might connect their individual lived experiences to the structural oppressive systems that allowed for their in-betweenness in the first place. This presence and connecting of the dots is akin to “coming out of the fog,” to borrow a phrase popular in the adoptee community, adoptee’s coming into critical conscious. As the only study, to the author’s knowledge, that offers empirical qualitative evidence of Guatemalan adoptee’s experiences, the contribution is significant to both critical adoption studies and Latinx/Central American studies. Through my theorization of identity formation processesand the ways that Guatemalan adoptees challenge our understanding of identity categories, as well as my concluding thoughts on liminality, this thesis also makes a significant contribution to social psychology and social identity theory.

A large scale multi-campus movement against sexual violence emerged in the early 2010s across the United States as a result of changes in gender relations and cultural, social, and political shifts since the 1970s. Gendered and political opportunity structures helped launch this successful movement, but they developed distinctly at the local level. Local contextual factors in the immediate environment of activists constrained or facilitated the broader opportunity structures that enabled this movement. My research examines these factors through the student movement against sexual violence on two University of California (UC) campuses, Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and provides an in-depth analysis of the activists campaigns that developed on each campus and the local factors that influenced them. UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara have the highest reported rates of sexual violence in the UC system, strong anti-sexual violence activist campaigns within the last five years, and a long history of student activism, but they have differed widely in terms of tactics and how sexual violence is framed. I address the following research questions: why and how did students mobilize a movement against sexual violence on UC campuses in the 2010s?; what factors influenced the students’ tactical repertoire and demands?; and what conditions prevented or facilitated the growth of activism against sexual violence on these campuses?

Utilizing qualitative methods, including participant observation, semi-structured in-depth interviews, and archival research, I examine the local and institutional factors that affected various aspects of the campus movement including timing, tactical repertoire, and trajectory. For UC Berkeley, the involvement of student organizations, the school’s prestige, and ties to a larger network comprised of survivor activists from colleges and universities across the country were critical in the development of the movement there. At UC Santa Barbara, the school’s party culture and violent local events mobilized students, but they also diverted attention from issues of sexual violence to broader issues of safety. This had a deterring effect on the movement. The tactics used by students varied and were influenced by when in the cycle of protest the movements developed, the mass media, institutional factors, and the racial and class background of activists. UC Berkeley activist leaders came from more privileged backgrounds and their connections to activists from other schools affected their use of more conventional tactics including Title IX complaints and lawsuits. UC Santa Barbara student leaders were mostly working-class women of color who did not have the resources and social and cultural capital to pursue some of the conventional tactics UC Berkeley students used. Instead, they relied on nonviolent direct action to push the university to address sexual violence.

Although there were key differences across both campuses, emotional labor was key to the emergence of the movement on both campuses. The examination of activist campaigns and efforts showed the invisible emotional labor student activists engaged in and the consequences it had for the movement. Survivor activists disclosed their experiences of sexual assault and mistreatment by their universities through different tactics, but they had the similar effect of evoking collective trauma resonance, or the empathy and emotional connection shared among people who have gone through similar traumatic experiences, among other students. The emotional unpaid labor or managing their emotions while helping survivors of sexual violence took a toll on the activists themselves and the movement.

ABSTRACT Sociological scholarship on Latinx education and incarceration has been largely bifurcated, vexed by the seemingly incommensurable experiences of Latinxs that have attained their Ph.D.s and Latinx adolescents that have been pushed out of academia via the school-to-prison pipeline. This tendency of studying in isolation of what can be considered the poles of what might be considered a Latinx exceptionality and disposability continuum has led to the segmented study of each of these populations as separate and isolated processes. In an attempt to address this practice, my research reorients the lens to not see only one population as a site of inquiry but instead pans out to look at how two seemingly oppositionally construed groups of the same gender and racial strata navigate the institutions that they find themselves in. More specifically, my research seeks to establish parallels in how formerly incarcerated Latinas (those deemed ‘disposable’) navigate the Prison Industrial Complex and how Latina professors with Ph.D.s. (those deemed ‘exceptional’) navigate the Academic Industrial Complex and how these institutional operate despite having seemingly opposite functions. Utilizing a mujerista portraiture methodological framework, I conducted interviews/critical narratives with twenty formerly incarcerated Latinas and twenty Latina professors with Ph.D.s from carceral communities. Grounded in an Althusserian state apparatus framework informed by the intersectionality of the multiple layers of marginalization of these Latinas, my study asks the following questions: 1) What are the continuities in the gendered racialization of Latina prisoners and professors? 2) How do the sanctioned socialization processes of carceral and educational institutions socially control the parameters of these scripts? 3) In what ways do these State Apparatuses benefit from the disposability of Latina prisoners and the exceptionality of Latina professors? Finally, I ask 4) what is the shared ideological constellation that could facilitate a union between Latina faculty and incarcerated Latinas. The areas of inquiry that I connect are violence, social embeddedness, and institutionalization. I argue that despite socially constructed as opposites, Latina professors deemed as exceptionals and criminalized Latinas deemed as disposables are deliberately situated as such within the public imaginary to serve a powerful narrative about worth. The individualizing of professoriate success obscures the intense struggles that working class origin Latinas overcome and the village of support that these women rely on to reach that point. Meanwhile, the individualization of Latina criminalization conceals the hyperbolic interpersonal and structural violence that these women contended with that catalyzed their trajectories of criminalization. Working in conjunction, this construction preaches a neoliberal meritocratic narrative that puts the onus of human behavior and outcomes on the individual all while enacting policies and practices that have devastating consequences in the lives of Latinas inside and outside of carceral communities. Regardless of where they are situated along the exceptionality and disposability continuum, Latinas are forced to navigate institutions whose formal and informal protocols contribute to the reification of Latina devaluation and replication of the existing neoliberal social order. Thus, the many parallels in experiences before and after entering the carceral and educational institutions and the interconnectedness of fates between both groups provide a strong basis for these two groups to unite against their collective struggle. Such a union would demonstrate powerful praxis in refuting the veracity of the exceptionality and disposability continuum.