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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2019

"In 1910, Mexican citizens violently rejected dictator Porfirio Diaz. Over the course of more than three decades, Diaz had isolated Mexico's popular classes in regions like Jamiltepec, Oaxaca. In this region, the majority indigenous population joined the revolutionary army and demanded citizenship rights, restoration of communal land, and control over their own pueblos. Jamiltepec's Afro-Mexican residents shared many of these goals and revolted against Diaz as well. They fought to preserve the autonomy of their pueblos, the ability to choose their own elected officials, and the cotton economy that allowed farmers to support their dependent families. Interestingly, even though these two groups of citizens in this isolated coastal region shared similar grievances, they backed different revolutionary factions and fought against one another. Onlookers at the time assumed that racial difference explained these decisions. Scholars working later in the twentieth century incorporated these assumptions into their interpretations of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary violence that plagued the region for decades. This dissertation seeks to understand the root causes of this antagonism by examining how residents of Jamiltepec constructed race and ethnicity in their everyday lives during the nineteenth century. Evidence from the region challenges assertions that Afro-indigenous relations were inherently and historically antagonistic. Afro-Mexican and Mixtec jamiltepecanos at different times did fight on opposing sides in Mexico's numerous nineteenth century wars. They allied against one another for instance during the independence war and the political conflicts in the immediate aftermath of nationhood. However, on many other occasions jamiltepecanos from both groups joined together to defend the cultural authority of the Catholic Church, the country from a foreign invasion, or pueblo land and resources. In fact, examples from local, state, and national archives suggest that race and ethnicity played little, if any, role in which side one chose during the nineteenth century. Residents nevertheless maintained separate communities and identities in their private lives. Jamiltepecanos essentially developed an informal system of identity whereby geographic location, linguistic ability, and cultural practices demarcated race nearly as much as one's physical characteristics. At the same time, Mexico's elite journalists, scholars, and politicians attempted to silence Mexico's ties to Africa. Race and ethnic identity did intersect with notions of citizenship, regional and national politics, and the economy. After the end of the colonial caste system, Afro-Mexicans in the region downplayed race and stressed citizenship when stepping into the public sphere. Mixtecs, in contrast, emphasized their indigeneity and sought to maintain separate "republics" as their ancestors did for three-hundred years during the colonial era. Residents from both groups sought to protect pueblo…

Advisors/Committee Members: Beattie, Peter, Smith, Benjamin, Murphy, Edward, Chambers, Glenn.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2016.

This dissertation seeks to answer the following question: “What is the place of philanthropy in a modernizing society?” It draws from rich archival sources that represent the international and trans-local influences that reshaped the ethics of social responsibility in early twentieth century Tianjin, China. The complex relationship between national identity, diverse civil governance, and institutional legitimacy form the context for each of the dissertation’s chapters. The first chapter records the foundation of the Tianjin Chamber of Commerce and its philanthropic work, analyzes transformations in urban policing that presented new expectations placed on state institutions, and examines the journalistic responses to two significant regional disasters that involved the city in 1917 and 1920. The second chapter centers on the powerful effects of Nationalist discourse on social welfare even in the absence of strong state institutions using communications between different branches of the municipal government and multiple non-state actors to reveal new ways that civil society interpreted and transmitted state ideologies. The third chapter takes a step back from Tianjin to talk about how the secular and spiritual aspects of philanthropy overlapped and reacted to one another in the context of growing nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiment, arguing that small religious associations could have a significant impact on shaping the contours of institutional relief. The concluding chapter examines the conflicting outcomes of philanthropic work under Japanese occupation and discusses the intimate responses of the nationalist government to refugee suffering as bureaucratic control dissolved towards the end of China’s civil war.

Online resource;

Advisors/Committee Members: Smith, Aminda, Keith, Charles, Segal, Ethan, Murphy, Edward.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Sociology 2019.

In this dissertation, I explore deported Salvadorans' experiences of detention, deportation, reception, and reintegration, with an emphasis on the structural barriers that they face and their strategies for surviving these barriers. I also examine returned Salvadorans' sense of belonging, perceptions of citizenship, and civic engagement practices in the United States and El Salvador in order to understand when and how deportees are able to express and enact agency. I argue that deportees' extreme precarity and exclusion makes them "outsiders within" their sending and receiving states, which gives them valuable perspectives on citizenship and national belonging. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews and observations with deported Salvadorans, I find that the Salvadoran deported population is segmented by migration history, gender, and age, producing distinct deported masculinities that foster-and more often constrain-deported Salvadoran men's ability to act as change agents. My fieldwork further reveals that Salvadoran men and women develop diverse, innovative strategies for coping with deportation-related challenges such as violence, un- and underemployment, and social exclusion. These strategies include both individual and collective actions, in addition to claims of belonging and deservingness in El Salvador and the U.S. Together, these findings exemplify the central role that neoliberal globalization plays in creating productive citizens and a disposable global workforce, as well as ways in which deportees use neoliberal ideologies to advance rights claims. This project thus extends theorizing around immigrant re/incorporation, citizenship, masculinities, and agency, in addition to highlighting important implications for migration scholars and practitioners in deportee-sending and receiving states.

Description based on online resource;

Advisors/Committee Members: Nawyn, Stephanie J., Chaudhuri, Soma, Mullan, Brendan, Murphy, Edward.

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This dissertation examines the Ciudad Deportiva of Club Atlético Boca Juniors, a massive stadium, sports complex, and leisure site that aimed to redevelop the city’s dilapidated riverfront in the 1960s. The directors of Boca Juniors drew state and municipal support for the Ciudad Deportiva by appealing to developmentalist ideals that prioritized public-private collaborations, consumption, and leisure space for middle class families. As Argentina’s most popular soccer club, hundreds of thousands of fans and supporters also invested in the project’s fundraising campaign with the belief that Boca’s stadium and facilities would contribute to the city’s modernization and symbolize national progress. Multiple democratic and military governments aided Boca’s efforts throughout a turbulent political and economic period in Argentina’s history, a signal that this kind of mass consumption and family leisure were key concerns for successive, yet divergent, political projects. The club completed most of the original planned facilities by 1970 including various sports fields, an amusement park, an aquarium, a concert pavilion, Argentina’s first drive-in movie theatre, and a social headquarters with a pool and restaurant. However, political infighting at the club, a withdrawal of public and private support, and national economic crises all contributed to Boca’s failure to construct the stadium in time for the 1978 FIFA World Cup. The municipality seized the Ciudad Deportiva in 1979 but over the next thirteen years Boca’s directors were able to regain control of the property and eventually sell it for 22 million dollars. Drawing on newspapers, sports magazines, club documents, and state sources, as well as over twenty oral histories, this dissertation makes two principal arguments. First, that soccer clubs played significant roles in shaping conceptions of neighborhood identity, gender, and class in 20th century Buenos Aires. These institutions did so in tension with their legal status as non-profit civic associations providing services to a membership base while also functioning as producers of the commercialized spectacle of professional soccer. Second, the successes and failures of the Ciudad Deportiva offer a unique perspective through which to consider the very real dreams of development that animated politics in the post-Peronist decades in Argentina. Scholars tend to focus on political polarization and instability, often obscuring the importance of notions about national and urban development embodied in the Ciudad Deportiva.

Online resource;

Advisors/Committee Members: Murphy, Edward L, Alegi, Peter, Beattie, Peter, Elsey, Brenda.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History - Doctor of Philosophy 2015.

The literature on Africans and credit and debt is marked by a double binary. Scholars have tended to separate “traditional” or “informal” credit and debt relations from “modern” or “formal” financial institutions and instruments. In addition, scholars have either focused on the role credit and debt relations played in the economic realm or they have examined the social and cultural significance of debt and credit. As a result, the prevailing picture of Africans and finance in twentieth-century urban Africa is one of inadequacy, lack, and exclusion: the inadequacy of traditional forms of credit in market economies, Africans’ lack of access to formal financial institutions, and their exclusion from the modern world of finance. This dissertation challenges this doubly binary conceptualization and locates the myriad views and uses of credit and debt in one conceptual frame. It shows that credit and debt relations were constitutive of various aspects of urban life, including multi-racial neighborhood sub-communities, respectable identities, urban membership and belonging, urban livelihoods and entrepreneurship, and urban planning and governance. The Kariakoo neighborhood in Dar es Salaam serves as the locus to examine how debt and credit shaped work and business, social and communal life, and people’s identities and subjectivities in urban Africa. If debt is an anthropological and historical constant, the relations of debt and credit changed significantly over the twentieth century when economists and planners as well as urban traders and various groups of lenders hotly debated and discussed these relations. Moral perceptions of credit and debt were central to these negotiations and for the workings of urban life and trade. To get at the various forms of lending and borrowing and the multiple – at times competing, at times intersecting – moralities undergirding them, I combine the tools of cultural, social, and economic history. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of the ways and meanings of borrowing, investing, and doing business in urban Africa in important ways. First of all, it challenges histories of credit and finance in colonial and postcolonial Africa, which have focused exclusively on formal financial institutions to which few had access. Urban Africans made extensive use of informal, semi-formal, and formal credit to create urban communities, trade networks, and personal businesses. Wholesale traders at the Kariakoo market relied on the indigenous credit system known as mali kauli – verbal letters of credit based on reputations and social capital – to trade relatively large amounts of agricultural products while having small amounts of cash at disposal (chapter 4). Kariakoo residents also turned pawnshop credit to their advantage and proved to be reliable borrowers (chapter 2). Second of all, it shows the significance of credit and debt well beyond the economic sphere of urban life in twentieth-century Africa. Credit…

Advisors/Committee Members: Fair, Laura, Hawthorne, Walter, Murphy, Edward, Leichtman, Mara.

▼ Today, Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, or alcohol, is the most efficient biofuel on the market, and the industry is the largest biofuel exporter in the world. However, few remember the military driven state-led development program, Proálcool (the National Alcohol Program), from which it emerged in 1975. Policymakers’ current commitment to ethanol production often obscures the dramatic political, agricultural, and social transformations behind the program’s implementation. This dissertation uncovers the broad impact of the program on what became the largest ethanol-producing region in the country, Ribeirão Preto in the state of São Paulo. Alcohol production began first as a by-product of sugarcane production in the 1930s and later transformed into a national alternative fuel source in the 1970s. Through the lens of the sugar-alcohol producing family, the Biagis, and their central sugar mill, the Usina Santa Elisa, my work reveals the increasingly important connection between alcohol production and the Ribeirão Preto region. The family led sugarcane modernization efforts in the region during the 1950s. Under the military dictatorship (1964-1985), sugar exports became a critical part of the national development agenda. The Biagis were one of many sugar producers that utilized the government’s modernization program to expand both their sugar and alcohol production capacity in the 1970s even before Proálcool took shape.With the famous OPEC-induced oil shocks of 1973, the Brazilian government, like many other countries, sought ways to reduce their dependence on petroleum imports. Key military, government officials, and private entrepreneurs supported the expansion of alcohol production as a solution to this problem. Under these conditions, the National Alcohol Program was born in 1975. The Usina Santa Elisa became one of the first projects approved under the new state-led development program. Government officials debated the feasibility and costs of the program’s expansion behind the launch of the alcohol-fueled car over the next decade. Even as alcohol production brought more wealth to the region, the growth of the sugarcane industry and the dramatic expansion of alcohol production in the 1970s and 1980s underscored the absence of rural workers in these and other development models. The disparate effects of the program and the larger development agenda’s outcomes came to national attention when temporary sugarcane workers went on strike in protest of a new labor policy in Ribeirão Preto with the Guariba Strikes of 1984. Rural workers’ actions reinserted questions about broader social issues related to the program’s development agenda, putting the costs of the idealized agricultural energy development plan into sharp relief.Ethanol’s growth draws important questions about the nature of development in Brazil. My work focuses on the modernization of the sugar industry under government tutelage. State intervention was an essential part of the industry’s growth. The state, international, and domestic influences interweave in ways… Advisors/Committee Members: Beattie, Peter M., Murphy, Edward, Hanley, Anne, Hawthorne, Walter.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2019.

This dissertation examines the debates around Chicana/o nationalism, nationhood, and self-determination by using archival documents and oral histories to study the ideologies and actions of the August 29th Movement (ATM) and the League of Revolutionary Struggle that interpreted the Marxist canon based on their unique experiences as Chicana/os in the U.S to organize against oppression. I explore how these groups used a hybrid of nationalist ideologies with those around class to contribute to both the intellectual tradition of Latina/o activism while diversifying our understanding of activists who utilized the Marxist canon. The activists in these organizations complicate the dominant narratives of identity politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to further enrich the legacy of the Chicana/o movement as one that was ideologically diverse, international, cross-racial, and cross-ethnic. The multi-and cross-racial framework in this research highlights the intersection of race, class, and gender by activists seeking equal citizenship and an end to U.S. capitalism and imperialism. This project is an intellectual, social, and institutional history of Chicana/o communists between the 1960s and 1990.The every-day lives of communist activists fighting for better citizenship and democratic rights during the global Cold War are at the center of this study. These groups and activists identified as some combination of Marxists, Leninists, Maoists, or Stalinists at a time when political surveillance was rampant and being affiliated with communism was seen as being anti-American. I explore how the organizations responded to this surveillance and how they continued to operate across various spheres of activism including in the labor sector, on college campuses, and in electoral politics by using a United Front approach.I show how the groups mobilized among lower stratum workers in the auto industry, cannery factories, and among hotel and restaurant workers because the point of production is where they believed they could be most effective. They also organized students on college campuses by participating in the fights for establishing and protecting Chicana/o and Ethnic studies, as well as affirmative action. These groups such as the League which was the result of the merger between Chicana/o, African American, and Asian American communists were critical because they created linkages between these various spheres of activism that at times were not speaking to one another in order to fight a restricting U.S. capitalist society during the 1970s and 1980s that was switching to neoliberal policies. I argue that this strategy allowed for the organizations to be effective in building support for the struggles they took up in the name of fighting for better democratic, social, and human rights.

Description based on online resource;

Advisors/Committee Members: Pescador, Juan, Murphy, Edward, Dagbovie, Pero, Fernandez, Delia, Stamm, Michael.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Geography 2016

"Henancun, as one of the migrant enclaves in Beijing, emerged in the late 1980s with the development of the informal recycling business. Although rural-to-urban migrants and their recycling business play essential roles in providing the recycling service to the local residents and promoting the environmental protection, their existence is nearly invisible in the city. Focusing on the development history of Henancun, the structural and institutional barriers faced by both migrants and recycling businesses, and their coping strategies in Beijing, this dissertation research uses a combined qualitative and quantitative research method to examine the role of Henancun and the nature of the informal recycling business in recycling migrants' livelihood, and to understand the structural and institutional barriers faced by migrants and recycling as well as their coping strategies in Beijing. Based on questionnaires, interviews, observations and government documentation examinations, this study reveals that Henancun is both a migrant and a business enclave that emerged to cope with the socially and politically marginalized circumstances migrants have been facing in the city. Besides, the space of Henancun, with full-fledged services to accommodate migrants' livelihood and businesses, has gradually become a permanent 'outside' space that exists in between the city and migrants' hometowns. The informal nature of the recycling business also emerged as a strategy to cope with local regulations and uncoordinated governmental policies." – Page ii.

Description based on online resource;

Advisors/Committee Members: Chen, Guo, Murphy, Edward, Gold, Steven J., Pigozzi, Bruce Wm., Darden, Joe T..

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University, Sociology, History 2012.

This dissertation deals with how Chilean emigrants who have migrated to the US since the 1950s remember and define their migration decision in connection to changing historical processes in both the country of origin and that of destination. Using mainly oral histories collected from 30 Chileans I compare the processes that led to their migration; their memories of Chile at the time of migration; the arrival to the United States, as well as their intermediate migrations to other countries; their memories of Chile during the visits to the country of origin; and their self identifications with the countries of origin and destination. I also use census data and migration entry data to characterize and analyze the different waves of Chilean migration to the United States. I separate each wave by a major historical moment. The first wave commences at the end of World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War; the second with the military coup of September 11, 1973; the third with the economic crisis of 1982; and the fourth with the return to democratic governments in 1990. Connecting the oral histories, migration data and historiographies to current approaches to migration decision-making, the study of social memory, and the construction of migrant identities, this dissertation explores the interplay of these multiple factors in the social constructions underlying the decisions to migrate.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF t.p. (ProQuest, viewed Sept. 26, 2013)

Advisors/Committee Members: Mullan, Brendan, Beattie, Peter, Moch, Leslie, Nawyn, Stephanie, Murphy, Edward, Ayala, Isabel.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. History 2014.

In the mid nineteenth century, Liberal and Conservative forces fought a series of wars – later called the Reform – to determine the place the Roman Catholic Church would occupy in Mexican society. Liberal state builders, for their part, sought to curtail clerical power and influence in the young, politically unstable country. From 1855 to 1857, Liberal politicians enacted a series of anticlerical decrees designed to forcibly sell off ecclesiastical property and separate Church and state. Conservative rebellions erupted in response. This study examines the two largest and least understood Conservative uprisings in this period in an attempt to explain why thousands of men and women gave their lives in support of a Church many historians have reviled as elitist and oppressive. Essentially, these rebellions demonstrate two modes of popular Conservatism: a pragmatic and a clerical mode.The first rebellion took place in northwestern Jalisco along the western foothills of the Sierra del Nayarit. From 1855 to 1873, Manuel Lozada and thousands of supporters gradually pushed back Liberal forces from Nayarit and there constructed a Conservative quasi-state. In this pragmatic mode of popular Conservatism, rebels and the Church represented two more or less distinct entities that negotiated to reach a mutually acceptable compromise. After decades of conflicts with priests over property that belonged to local confraternities, or lay brotherhoods, parishioners rebelled in the mid 1850s and allied with Lozada, who promised to restore their lands. Meanwhile, faced with a radical Liberal government in power in Mexico City and an expanding insurrection in its own diocese, the Guadalajara See compromised with rebels. Lozada sought and received a number of important concessions for his followers, including restored communal lands, resident clergy for the remote rural areas under his control, and a de facto parish based in his hometown.The second rebellion took place in Querétaro, but had a much broader national impact. Invaluable during the first war from 1858 to 1861, Tomás Mejía and his troops from the Sierra Gorda rose even further to become the Conservative point men during the Second Empire from 1862 to 1867. Whereas rebels in Nayarit negotiated with the Church, in Querétaro the Church's alliance with militant Conservatism was an internal affair. Throughout the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, priests had developed close ties with sierra communities by lending money, erecting schools, and serving in politics. Local caciques, in turn, supported the priesthood with their own family members, sending men and women to join the clergy across urban and rural Querétaro. Rebels were fighting for their families as much as the institutional Church. And unlike in Nayarit, clergy in the Sierra Gorda explicitly supported rebellion. As a result, Mejía's rebellion left the Sierra and entered the national sphere. Fighters were not simply defending local religious practice, but…

Advisors/Committee Members: Smith, Benjamin T, Beattie, Peter M, Murphy, Edward, Valdés, Dionicio N, Butler, Matthew J B.

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Thesis Ph. D. Michigan State University. Hispanic Cultural Studies 2014.

Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal's exteriorista brand of verse is devoid of abstract metaphors. The objective tone of his poetry obscures underlying subjective inclinations. This dissertation analyzes Cardenal's exteriorista poetic landscapes to decode the subjectivity of place embedded within them. The study begins with Alexandra Kogl's equation "place = space + meaning," which invites interpretation of place both from the perspective of cultural studies, with a focus on the culturally contested terrain of meaning, as well as from an ecocritical vantage point as it pertains to physical space and how human relationships and interactions with the natural environment can influence identities of place. Kogl's equation is modified to show that Cardenal's landscapes are not static, monolithic, or biblical backdrops, but rather are in dialogue with historical and autobiographical moments as well as with competing narratives that contest meanings of place. Meaning and space are not mutually exclusive addends. Meaning in Cardenal's poetry is influenced by material spaces as well as by activities themselves that alter space. That is to say, Cardenal also responds to the space addend, to the narrative that imperialist incursions and exploits have physically "written" over the land and the bodies of its inhabitants. Cardenal's poetry is considered chronologically across four periods based upon "ruptures" found in his memoirs and in historiographical accounts. Chapter 1 (1950-1970) focuses on the poems "Con Walker en Nicaragua" and "Hora 0." The analysis highlights a trend in his verse which leads from "transcultural identity conflict" regarding U.S.-Nicaraguan relations towards a more sharply defined polarization of identities, linking changes in landscape representation to the heating up of the Cold War in the 1950s. Chapter 2 (1970-1977) locates linkages between Cardenal's "Canto nacional," "Oráculo sobre Managua," and "Viaje a Nueva York," historical events, and competing narratives prevalent at the time. It is shown how the poet depicts nation as a natural habitat of organisms which form synergetic webs of life, support, and self-defense. The focus on the first-person lyrical voice is amplified as the need for self-realization and self-preservation become increasingly intertwined with national renewal in a time of upheaval. Chapter 3 (1977-1990) considers the collections Vuelos de victoria and Cántico cósmico, written in the midst of revolution, Sandinista rule, and the Contra War. Landscape representations shift from the euphoria of national renewal towards the "starscapes" of exile. The poet retools landscapes on the scale of the cosmos and enters into competitive dialogue both with narratives emanating from U.S. empire as well as with the autobiographical and historical events that challenge the poet to reframe his nationalist vision. Chapter 4 (1990-2014) explores how the poet wrestles with the…

Advisors/Committee Members: Sanchez-Blake, Elvira E, Murphy, Edward L, Mendez, Danny, Weldt-Basson, Helene C.