UCLA

Through a critical examination of mobility as a social, cultural, and historical concept in and through Chicana/o communities in Southern California, Transit-Oriented Performance Through Chicana/o Spaces in Southern California argues mobility to be a consubstantial element in Chicana/o subject formation. It scrutinizes transit-oriented performances (TOPs) and their entanglements with history, space, memory, and identity. At the heart of this dissertation is an autochthonous philosophy informed by the earliest civilizations of the Americas (Olmec, Inca, Maya) that influenced the Mexica. In this way the relationship of mobility—the movement of people, objects, and ideas—and the shifting social, political, and cultural borders that they constitute will come into focus. Following the Mexica, this work acknowledges mobility, movement, and motion as autopoietic aspects of lived Chicana/o culture and argues them to be not only cultural markers of Chicana/o experience, but as a means through which Chicana/os become and are made conscious of their culture and identity. This postulation enables a robust analysis of subaltern subjects and their negotiations inside of the perpetual motion in Los Angeles’ Chicana/o communities. This dissertation studies the specific ways that site-based theory and praxis construct meaning in public space, and centers on the historiography and contemporary signification of Los Angeles through three instances of TOPs: Hopscotch, a mobile opera; lowriders; and loncheras (Mexican food trucks). Through a critical analysis of these performances held inside or through transportation vehicles, the dissertation highlights the ways these performances operate as a dynamic palimpsest that constructs important but undertheorized significations of and in motion.