Líderes Campesinas (formally known as Organización en California de Líderes Campesinas) is the only statewide women farmworker’s organization in the country. With historical roots stemming back to a 1988 Coachella Valley organization called Mujeres Mexicans, Líderes Campesinas gained nonprofit status in 1997. With headquarters in Pomona, California, the group has more than five hundred members who are organized through twelve local committees throughout the state. The organization works to improve the dismal working conditions in the fields and packing houses and also educates women farmworkers on pesticide exposure, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment and assault.

Drawing on oral histories and participant observation fieldwork with Zapotecs in Los Angeles, California and Oaxaca, Mexico, my dissertation, Zapotec Generations Across Settler Colonial Borders: Gendering Belonging and Identity, examines how the experiences of the U.S.-raised generations, and women participation in particular, are central to sustaining transnational immigrant Indigenous communities across borders. I argue that through their involvement in traditional dances, Oaxacan brassbands, and immigrant hometown association (HTA), Zapotecs in the U.S. diaspora, shape their Indigenous identities in ways that challenge their racial categorization as Latina/o and/or Hispanic. These forms of community belonging confront state notions of Indigenous “authenticity” in the U.S. and Mexico, while also contesting gender role expectations that attempt to exclude women and immigrants from community practices of belonging. By incorporating historical and comparative approaches to race and gender, I consider how the United States and Mexico, as settler colonial states, have shaped, maintained, and/or reconfigured Indigenous racialization into a national imaginary that attempts to make invisible, silence, and eliminate Indigenous peoples. I use a critical hemispheric Indigenous framework that bridges Latin American, Latina/o, and American Indian literature to draw on my theoretical framework, transborder comunalidad, an ongoing Indigenous Oaxacan conception of collective community life sustained through practices and beliefs in diaspora that challenges state violence against Indigenous peoples.

In May 2014 Time magazine declared that we had arrived at the “transgender tipping point,” as visibility of the transgender community increased. Yet, this was hardly the tipping point as violence against transgender men and women had been part of the daily-lived experiences. Indeed, a month earlier the body of Zoraida Reyes, an undocumented transgender women and community activist from Orange County, California was murdered. Reyes’ death was certainly not the first of its kind but one that was followed by an unprecedented number of murdered transgender women in the year of 2015. This paper explores the pedagogical importance of queer and trans communities of color telling their own stories to create a counter narrative to the co-optation of trans narratives via a neoliberal framework of inclusivity that disregards the material condition that transgender woman of color face.

Through an analysis of the short-film Afuera (2016) directed by Steven Liang explores the lives of Jennifer an undocumented transgender women living in Los Angeles. The film portrays the constraint choices that undocumented transgender women face as they attempt to live their authentic self. This paper also examines what took place after a civil disobedience on May 28, 2015 in Santa Ana, California. The civil disobedience called for the release of all undocumented transgender detainees. Santa Ana, Ca. was targeted because the city at the time had a designated space for LGBTQ undocumented migrants. These counter narratives offer sites of epistemology grounded in their everyday experiences that offer both collective and individual stories that speak against power demonstrating moments of joy.

My Master’s thesis project explores the ways Chicanas negotiate an indigenous-based spiritual practice centering the experiential knowledges of women who participate in full moon healing circles. Specifically, this research focuses on Omecihuatl, from Orange County, California, and Coyolxauhqui Full Moon Circle from Los Angeles, California, to demonstrate how Chicanas understand their individual and collective healing. By conducting oral histories of six participants, I trace their healing journey as well as how they came to participate in the full moon circles. In this research, the questions I raise are: how do Chicanas’ spiritual and healing practices inform their journeys toward healing? What are the experiences of some Chicanas participating in healing circles? What are the relationships between these women with Indigenous and Native American peoples, practices, and knowledges within healing circles?

While some of the women I interviewed have a connection to indigenous ancestral knowledge, most women experience detribalization. Inspired by Gloria Anzald�a’s concept of Coyolxauqui Imperative, and Maria Josefina Salda�a Portillo and Maria Eugenia Cotera’s concept Mestizo Mourning, I use Coyolxauhqui mourning to articulate a detribalized Chicana experience. This works in two ways. The first, in attempting to put an indigenous-based spiritual practice, detribalized Chicanas are missing practices and links to indigenous ancestry. Like the pieces of Coyolxauhqui that are lost in her dis-memberment and cannot be recovered, Chicanas face the same dilemma—they can re-member pieces, but something will be lost in their re-connection. In the case of detribalized Chicanas, they must mourn those lost pieces. For some Chicanas, this means grieving the loss of a direct tie to an indigenous ancestry. Second, Coyolxauhqui mourning means a re-connection to an indigenous identity and practice through honoring native and indigenous ceremonies, disrupting indigenist iconography, and honoring elders’ and ancestors’ epistemologies to attain healing and wholeness. I argue that Coyolxauhqui mourning works to understand a possible path to re-connect an indigenous-based spirituality and healing of detribalized Chicanas.

Healing Justice in Chicana/x feminist organizing focuses on an unexplored healing justice tradition, specifically Chicana/x feminist interventions meant to engender whole and healthy communities. In this research, I bring into focus a long lineage of healing justice in Chicana/x movements that–while providing a rich foundation for the contemporary work happening in Chicana/o/x communities—have not been fully explored before now. I assert that Chicana/x healing justice, which I elaborate in this dissertation, includes intersectional wholeness, community care, and healing from historical trauma. I argue that healing justice is not a new phenomenon in Chicana/x feminist organizing. Instead, there is a wealth of examples from different Chicana/x feminist movements that show how Chicana/xs have merged community wellness, healing, and social justice in unique ways according to specific needs. Recognizing this legacy will help ensure that Chicana/o/x activism considers the needs of communities and the importance of addressing intersectional experiences going forward. This dissertation offers a glimpse of the collaborative research I participated in the last seven years with Mujeres de Ma�z and Full Moon Healing Circles, as well as intergenerational conversations with Chicana/x feminists. This research sets out to answer the following questions: What is healing justice in a Chicana/x context? What is the genealogy of healing justice in Chicana/x feminist organizing? How are contemporary Chicana/x activists and artivists practicing healing justice? I draw on ten oral histories and seven years of participant observation to better understand how Chicana/x feminist activists inform a Chicana/x healing justice framework. This dissertation is organized into three parts. The first begins by honoring the early work of Chicana feminist activists Gloria Arellanes and Celia Herrera Rodriguez. Specifically, I center the oral histories of Chicana maestras whose community activism spans about 40 years. Then, I discuss the women of color artivist collective Mujeres de Ma�z to demonstrate how organizing practices and holistic art practices can inform a Chicana/x healing justice politic. I end with a case study on full moon healing circles Omecihuatl from Orange County, CA and Coyolxauhqui Full Moon Circle from East Los Angeles, CA to highlight how self-care is a part of community care.

This dissertation examines the recent establishment and institutionalization of undocumented student services in two university campuses in California and analyzes the ways in which these projects of institutionalization and the “undocumented student” figure fits within the rationalities of neoliberal multiculturalism. I explore how undocumented students (multicultural, racialized subjects who could, in an ongoing process, fashion and refashion themselves through the ethos of self-reliance and competition) came to be accepted at these universities and how undocumented immigrants were able to enter the public imaginary of the university’s projects for diversity and inclusion. I argue that neoliberal multiculturalism illuminates and explains how the ways narratives elevating the social value of undocumented students are congruent and simultaneously occur with the increasing privatization and expansion of the immigrant detention industrial complex, increasing criminalization of immigrants’ daily life activities, and record high number of immigrant deportations. Furthermore, this dissertation asserts that neoliberal multicultural rationalities shape advocacy efforts designed to support undocumented students in higher education. These rationalities inform the scope of values, principles and practices behind the forms of student advocacy that could be possible and intelligible in a university context. I argue that neoliberal multicultural rationalities underlie the dominant frame shaping undocumented student advocacy that replicate the undocumented student subject figure as one contingent on disciplined integration. This in turn limits discourses and frames in undocumented student advocacy. This dissertation follows an intrinsic and instrumental case study design. I conducted 30 interviews with institutional allies, current and former student organizers. I also analyzed written and digital records, including institutional public statements, institutionally affiliated research reports, university taskforce recommendations, university newspaper articles, strategic plan publications, newspaper articles, student- and university-created resource guides, course syllabi and student-led publications. Finally, I conducted 180 hours of participant observation at various student and university-sponsored events, including summits, student retreats, educator workshops, immigrant student conferences, undocumented student welcome receptions and university and student sponsored webinars. This dissertation contributes to scholarships in Critical Ethnic Studies and the emerging intellectual project called University Abolition Studies.

Constellations of the Abject: Brown, Queer, and Feminist Punks in Los Angeles significantly contributes to queer, feminist, Latinx cultures by examining expressive cultures and placemaking in Southeast Los Angeles by queer and feminist Chicanx/Latinx punks. My work moves beyond expected places Latinx cultural production to show how spatial, affective, and sonic practices shape the process of placemaking for communities that often feel out of “place.” Drawing on the theories of space (Handhart 2013), sound (Vargas 2014, Vazquez 2013), and abjection (Alvarado 2018), this dissertation explores how punks use the shared affect of abjection to create community as an alternative form of placemaking in Southeast Los Angeles. Centering Southeast Los Angeles (SELA), CA as the nexus, a community that is defined by the scarcity of jobs, lack of opportunities, bad air, and perceived lack of beauty. Yet, embracing the very qualities that aremade abject and pathologized by gendered, racialized, classed politics of respectability is precisely what brings together queer and feminist punks in SELA to produce new forms of belonging affective communities.

Taking up the task of tracing brown queer and feminist punk genealogies of SELA, through the use of oral histories, ethnography, participant observation, archival research, and visual analysis of performance to answer the following: how does the affect of abjection and unintelligibility form communities? How do archival practices work to preserve the disaffected and excess of marginalized punk communities of SELA? What insights might we gain about queer and feminist punk communities by paying attention to space and sound? Lastly, how do intergenerational collaborations produce knew knowledges of gender, sexuality, and brownness for punks from Southeast Los Angeles? My focus on Latinx punk placemaking centers how queers and feminists Chicanx/Latinx punks collectively create communities through sound by precisely embracing the undesirable qualities of living in neglected neighborhoods. Through community formation queer and feminist Latinx/Chicanx punks contest gentrification, form community.

This thesis takes up “care work platforms” as an object of study. I define ‘care work platforms’ as digital infrastructures that enable care work service providers and individuals seeking care work services to interact. This paper argues for thinking about care work platforms as technoscientific objects that fit the criteria of global assemblages and proceeds to analyze four Los Angeles-based platforms: Tidy, Handy, Care.com and Alia using new media analyses. Furthermore, I consider the implications of care work platforms on what scholars in Latina/o Studies have called technofuturos, or the study of Latinidades during a period of accelerated globalization, in particular the globalization of care work and information.

This dissertation is a Chicana feminist analysis of the work and visual tactics of contemporary Chicana/o digital artivists—artist/activist, according to the work of Chela Sandoval and Guisela Latorre—in California from 2000 until circa 2016. Given the growing body of artivist work being produced today and its distribution via digital means, my research theorizes the Chicana Radical Digital Aesthetic (CRDA) as a praxis and theoretical lens to analyze how new digital artivists are changing contemporary social justice efforts. I focus on six artivists: Elizabeth Blancas, Jesus Barraza, Melanie Cervantes, Jessica Sabogal, Julio Salgado, and Favianna Rodriguez. I center their work and knowledge as key actors in a current Chicanx twenty-first-century digital arts movement exploring the digital realm as a space of production, distribution, and reception of a new generation of Chicanx artivism spanning national and transnational social justice movements. I continue the growing scholarship on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color-made graphic arts that connects the rich tradition of graphic art from the 1960s–1970s civil rights era to contemporary digital art practice. Drawing on my experiences as both an artivist and an active participant in contemporary Chicanx art communities, my methodology combines oral history interviews, visual analysis, and collaborative artmaking. I theorize the Chicana Radical Digital Aesthetic (CRDA) in order to trace the political poster from the printed material object to digital graphic artivist tool. In Chapter Two, I focus on the practice of self-portraits, and portraiture more broadly, through analysis of Julio Salgado and Jessica Sabogal’s work. Chapter Three links the internationalist roots of Chicanx art between 1965 and 1995, as well as the contributions of Chicana feminist printmakers from the post-Vietnam period to contemporary internationalist themes in digital work. Chapter Four examines how Melanie Cervantes and Favianna Rodriguez employ a strategy of embodiment on multiple scales—their own physical bodies as well as their larger environment and the “digital” spaces they inhabit. Chapter Five details what I term “Networks of Care” among Chicanx/Latinx artivists online and the myriad resources they share in a digital community. I conclude by discussing the ways Latinx/Chicanx artivists have engaged with the growing concerns of a racially biased algorithm and new directions that result from this work.