Drawing upon seven years of extensive ethnographic research in multiple regions in the U.S. Southwest, this dissertation presents a qualitative, transregional study of the contemporary indigenous practice of Danza Azteca in the United States. This study is driven by several questions. How do Chicanos/Mexicans enact political agency in the face of white supremacy? Put another way, what are the ways that marginal communities organize themselves to resist the destructive legacies of colonialism? Critical analysis of Danza Azteca asks, what types of political narratives are embedded in Native dances, thus forcing us to ask in more compelling ways, what stories do Native dances tell? How is Native dance an alternative sphere that combats power relations within dominant society? How do these ceremonial dances contest power and historical oppression? What do they signify and how do they complicate the boundaries of colonial history and dominant paradigms? I began with the assumptions that Native dance has the potential to be political and could be a form of oppositional consciousness but how? I set out to discover how people organized not just as victims but as agents, and I let my interactions within the cultural circuit of Danza guide parts of the research. This research offers an analysis of the political, cultural, and spiritual significance of the dance form. In the chapters that follow, Danza Azteca is an all encompassing space of political possibility that connects seemingly disparate sites such as formal education, Mexican women's leadership and group interactions amongst Native Americans and Mexicans in the U.S. and México. Ultimately, Danza Azteca is a practice that bridges Native spirituality and politics

This project seeks to disrupt a black and white paradigm that rests on the foundation of a dominant narrative of American society that creates a binary understanding of race relations in the U.S. This binary privileges the social position and historical trajectory of Euro- Americans by simultaneously creating a deviant "other" through black and brown bodies. I disrupt this binary by centering the parallel experiences of Chicanos and Blacks during the 1960s and 1970s; and see their struggles as a common one. I take a comparative approach in my analysis of the historical Brown Berets and the Black Panther Party and use a Critical Race Theory framework of "counterstories" ; a way for oppressed voices to disrupt dominant narratives of white supremacy, legitimacy, and "truth." I focus on the Power Movements, represented by both groups, which embraced a distinct political and cultural politic that resisted various forms of white racism; this politic typically veered from assimilationist models of integration. I was interested in the comparison of the Brown Berets and the Black Panthers and throughout the literature did not find compelling comparisons about the intersections of both racialized groups. The primary sources that inform this project are the independent newspapers and its' content, published by each organization, La Causa and the Black Panther. Major themes revealed in the newspapers included social justice, self- defense, cultural pride, and a re-evaluation of American society. These primary sources helped me identify the larger social intersections of the Chicano and Black community explicated by both organizations