The three largest mass mobilizations ever witnessed in this country occurred in 2006 on March 25th, April 10th, and May 1st, when undocumented immigrants and supporters marched against repressive enforcement-only antiimmigrant legislation and then for immigration reform. Academics have since scrambled to understand these mobilizations. Some misguidedly labeled the Latino community as a "Sleeping Giant." Contrarily, interviewed in this research were dozens of veteran Immigrant Rights Movement (IRM) activists who illustrated that there is a longstanding immigrant rights struggle in the cradle of the IRM, Los Ángeles, the majority of which have been mobilizing against repressive antiimmigrant legislation as far back as the 1960's. Drawing from the social movement literature, this dissertation utilizes two dominant concepts to examine the IRM - the political opportunities and resource mobilizations models. From the dual perspective of a participant and researcher, the present researcher examines the IRM's organizational history in order to understand the decision-makers, while paying closer attention to the efforts leading up to and during the spring 2006 mobilizations, thus providing a unique contribution to this literature based on an insider perspective of the Movimiento. In this analysis, two factions in the IRM emerge, the leftist faction that includes both the radical and traditional factions of the Movement, and the moderate faction that represents the elite level of the IRM. The traditional faction by itself has gained much respect amongst the immigrant rights community in LA and has a history of working with either the radical or moderate factions. This research found the necessity for a future examination of the immigrant community's response to join in the IRM's mobilizations to investigate more systematically the effectiveness of leaders and organizations in their mobilizing efforts by which to guide the immigrant rights community's future endeavors. It also challenges other students of social movements and Latino Studies to involve themselves in the Movimiento to garner first an insider perspective that would draw a more in-depth look into the inner-workings of the IRM, thus reliably adding to the extant social movement literature, the burgeoning literature on the IRM, and Latino Studies.

Since the May 25th, 2020, murder of George Floyd there has been a worldwide rebellion against anti-Black racism and policing. The movement for Black lives has opened up much-needed space to investigate and broaden the study of racialized policing to other communities. In assessing attitudes of Latinos towards law enforcement, previous studies have found that the racial oppression that exists between Latinos and White officers is exacerbated by Latino fear of deportation and procedural unfairness (McClusky et al., 2008; Messing et al., 2015). Latino perceptions of police performance have been poor since the Garner v. Tennessee (1985) decision. Noting that the prevailing rule here in the U.S. has been that the use of lethal force is justified in apprehending felons is outdated. The Supreme Court held that a police officer is authorized to shoot at a fleeing felon only when the officer believes that the escapee poses a threat to the officer or the safety of others (1985). This precedent-setting case is utilized by police as a means of sanctioning the use of deadly force when an imminent threat occurs and has led to an increase in officer-involved shootings (Katz, 2015).This dissertation is a nontraditional approach in book style, which is based on participants observations and a historical narrative. It examines racially biased policing in Latino communities, police use of lethal force from 1942 to 2005, and a police initiative aimed at quelling conflict between barrio residents and the police. This is an autoethnography approach, in which newspaper stories, television news, collected emails, and working notes were collected over the years. I aim to extend Erving Goffman’s description within dramaturgy using an autoethnographic approach to illustrate police performance and community responses. It is through this performance that I attempt to develop the concept of holistic policing, in which officers’ behaviors are embedded within a whole community model. The findings from this examination could lead to mutual contributions from law enforcement and the community to improve on policing methods that develop trust. Pseudonyms are used throughout most of the dissertation.

By the end of 2020, an astounding 26.4 million refugees were forced to leave their homes (McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou 2021). Setting an all-time record for refugees across the globe, this number is sure to rise as these migrants confront arguably the most violent of circumstances that force them to flee. As they grapple with relocation, refugees must simultaneously navigate language barriers, financial hardship, potential deportation, and other various factors that may stifle their opportunities to integrate. As millions have drawn public eye to this international crisis, past literature has failed to assess these issues across various populations or from bottom-up perspectives. Although thousands of miles apart, Latin America and Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) share historically embedded political and social unrest that has altered the positions of current internal strife. Given the regions’ historical and contemporary conditions, this study will comparatively analyze two disparate war refugee populations of Latin America and SWANA: Salvadorans and Afghans. Among these two groups I ask: 1) How does societal racialization impact their ability to integrate into southern California? 2) What commonalities of racialization and its outcomes can be understood through a comparative Critical Refugee framework? Employing flexible coding analyses, 26 semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 Salvadorans and 13 Afghan respondents residing in southern California. This study finds that there exists a perceived racialized binary of negative and positive racializations amongst both refugee populations. External attributions imposed on Salvadoran and Afghan refugees are highly attributed to the “negative” violent histories of their homeland while also being “positively” attributed to their resilience. With refugees at the center of knowledge production, this study cross- regionally ties diverse lived experiences as cites of juxtaposed societal racializations and foreign militarization.

This project is a qualitative exploration of masculinity, race, sexuality, and identity found within the lowrider style of automobile customization. By employing the frameworks of homosociality, visual sovereignty, and rasquachismo, I map the terrain of Chicano masculinity as it is intertwined with car culture. Using an insider perspective, I find that the production of identity in this arena is far more complex and nuanced than it appears on the surface. The men discussed in this study produce their social location using mechanisms that often contradict commonly held assumptions about lowriding. They have intricate strategies to appropriate and manipulate power while at the same time constructing gender and sexual identity that is quite common to hegemonic standards of heteronormativity.

This dissertation examines the obstacles college student-athletes face with respect to academic achievement. Through 37 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 20 former student-athletes and 17 current student-athletes, it asks student-athletes how they define success academically, athletically, and professionally, and examines ways to help student-athletes succeed as well as challenge the narrative that student-athletes disengage with their coursework as a result of apathy. Instead, it suggests that the challenges of juggling a full academic course-load, combined with time spent for practices, travel, and competitions, and in some cases, additional employment, may be too stressful for student-athletes to be able to consistently succeed in all areas. Further, they are encouraged to succeed academically by their families and significant others, but not always by their coaches, some of whom emphasize eligibility over excellence. I suggest an alternate way of viewing the apathetic student-athlete as an overwhelmed student-athlete who does not want to show weakness, and has a role that is accessible to them and to instructors, and this veneer of apathy allows the student-athlete to save face by not admitting needing help.

This project has two intertwined goals: 1) to understand the formation of Japanese-Peruvians' national ethnic identities across Peru, Japan and the United States of America by analyzing data from 40-indepth interviews with Japanese-Peruvians living the United States, and 2) to develop and explain the Stacked Bar Model of Ethnicities and Ethnic Identities as a new analytical system by which to understand the national ethnic identities of migrants. In order to do this, Japanese-Peruvians' ethnic identities are treated as working outside of a zero-sum context and shown to function as multiple ordinal variables that can grow and shrink independently of each other. National ethnic requirements and ethnic othering qualifiers are then identified as ideal types of ethnic traits that govern the identities that are restricted and made available to Japanese-Peruvians in each country.

Despite the increasing concerns regarding police shootings nationally, the victimization of Latinos has been historically and largely ignored compared to the more publicized cases involving African-Americans. This paper explores a police initiative, the Adelante Project, aimed at improving trust after three unrelated fatal shootings involving white police officers and Latino residents that occurred within five days of one another in 2005, in Southern California. The two years of community protests that ensued, and the police responses as a result of these shootings. The 10-Point Project was designed to develop positive police relationships between the police department and the Latino/a community. The data, collected between 2005 and 2008, included participant’s observation, ethnographic field work, and archival materials. In the first year of the Adelante Project’s inception, the FBI violent crime index declined, community trust and relationships in police officers increased, and the community protests dissipated. Regardless of the success of the project, police administrators and leadership abruptly ended the project for reasons apparently related to strategic funding. Since departments receive increased funding when crime rates are high. The analyses of this research is aimed to bring awareness to the current racial (Latino-European American) disparity in police responses to police violence in Latino/a communities, best practices used and the lessons learned from the Adelante Project.

Women’s mixed martial arts (WMMA) is among the fastest growing sports in the world. Long existing on the margins of combat sports, women are now routinely punching, kicking, kneeing, elbowing, and strangling opponents into submission in front of sold-out crowds in the United States and around the world, as women’s “cage fighting” has suddenly become a very lucrative business for combat sports promoters. Despite this, there is currently scant sociological literature on WMMA. Who are these new female subjects? In what ways are they challenging and reproducing gender? And to what extent should we characterize their participation in this new sport as empowering? My dissertation addresses these questions through a critical ethnography of WMMA. Drawing from more than four years of ethnographic fieldwork, content analysis of WMMA media, and 40 semistructured interviews with professional WMMA athletes, I offer the most thorough sociological account of WMMA to date and assess WMMA’s potential as a site for the empowerment of women. I find that although women’s participation in combat sports offers potential to challenge patriarchal constructions of gender and influence feminist social change, this potential is not currently being realized in WMMA. Rather, women’s experiences in WMMA only seem to strengthen their beliefs in “natural” sexual difference and male superiority, as well as instill in them an ideology of individualism that blinds them to social inequality. I argue, therefore, that women’s participation in WMMA does not produce outcomes consistent with feminist conceptions of empowerment. I conclude by discussing the implications of my research for women’s empowerment in sport and call for a reconceptualization of empowerment that centers intersectional concerns with capitalism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy.