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- All Subjects: Settler colonialism
- Creators: Cheng, Wendy
- Creators: Clark, Jerome
- Creators: Franks, Travis B
Description
Low-income communities of color in the U.S. today are often vulnerable to displacement, forced relocation away from the places they call home. Displacement takes many forms, including immigration enforcement, mass incarceration, gentrification, and unwanted development. This dissertation juxtaposes two different examples of displacement, emphasizing similarities in lived experiences. Mixed methods including document-based research, map-making, visual ethnography, participant observation, and interviews were used to examine two case studies in Phoenix, Arizona: (1) workplace immigration raids, which overwhelmingly target Latino migrant workers; and (2) the Loop 202 freeway, which would disproportionately impact Akimel O'odham land. Drawing on critical geography, critical ethnic studies, feminist theory, carceral studies, and decolonial theory, this research considers: the social, economic, and political causes of displacement, its impact on the cultural and social meanings of space, the everyday practices that allow people to survive economically and emotionally, and the strategies used to organize against relocation.
Although raids are often represented as momentary spectacles of danger and containment, from a worker's perspective, raids are long trajectories through multiple sites of domination. Raids' racial geographies reinforce urban segregation, while traumatization in carceral space reduces the power of Latino migrants in the workplace. Expressions of care among raided workers and others in jail and detention make carceral spaces more livable, and contribute to movement building and abolitionist sentiments outside detention.
The Loop 202 would result in a loss of native land and sovereignty, including clean air and a mountain sacred to O'odham people. While the proposal originated with corporate desire for a transnational trade corridor, it has been sustained by local industry, the perceived inevitability of development, and colonial narratives about native people and land. O'odham artists, mothers, and elders counter the freeway's colonial logics through stories that emphasize balance, collective care over individual profit, and historical consciousness.
Both raids and the freeway have been contested by local grassroots movements. Through political education, base-building, advocacy, lawsuits, and protest strategies, community organizations have achieved changes in state practice. These movements have also worked to create alternative spaces of safety and home, rooted in interpersonal care and Latino and O'odham culture.
Although raids are often represented as momentary spectacles of danger and containment, from a worker's perspective, raids are long trajectories through multiple sites of domination. Raids' racial geographies reinforce urban segregation, while traumatization in carceral space reduces the power of Latino migrants in the workplace. Expressions of care among raided workers and others in jail and detention make carceral spaces more livable, and contribute to movement building and abolitionist sentiments outside detention.
The Loop 202 would result in a loss of native land and sovereignty, including clean air and a mountain sacred to O'odham people. While the proposal originated with corporate desire for a transnational trade corridor, it has been sustained by local industry, the perceived inevitability of development, and colonial narratives about native people and land. O'odham artists, mothers, and elders counter the freeway's colonial logics through stories that emphasize balance, collective care over individual profit, and historical consciousness.
Both raids and the freeway have been contested by local grassroots movements. Through political education, base-building, advocacy, lawsuits, and protest strategies, community organizations have achieved changes in state practice. These movements have also worked to create alternative spaces of safety and home, rooted in interpersonal care and Latino and O'odham culture.
ContributorsDiddams, Margaret (Author) / Bolin, Bob (Thesis advisor) / Fonow, Mary Margaret (Committee member) / Cheng, Wendy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Non-Natives and Nativists is a relational analysis of contemporary multiethnic literatures in two countries formed by settler colonialism, the process of nation-building by which colonizers attempt to permanently invade Indigenous lands and develop their own beliefs and practices as governing principles. This dissertation focuses on narratives that establish and sustain settlers’ claims to belonging in the US and Australia and counter-narratives that problematize, subvert, and disavow such claims. The primary focus of my critique is on settler-authored works and the ways they engage with, perpetuate, and occasionally challenge normalized conditions of belonging in the US and Australia; however, every chapter discusses works by Indigenous writers or non-Indigenous writers of color that put forward alternative, overlapping, and often competing claims to belonging. Naming settler narrative strategies and juxtaposing them against those of Indigenous and arrivant populations is meant to unsettle the common sense logic of settler belonging. In other words, the specific features of settler colonialism promulgate and govern a range of devices and motifs through which settler storytellers in both nations respond to related desires, anxieties, and perceived crises. Narrative devices such as author-perpetrated identity hoax, settings imbued with uncanny hauntings, and plots driven by fear of invasion recur to the point of becoming recognizable tropes. Their perpetuation supports the notion that the logics underwriting settler colonialism persist beyond periods of initial colonization and historical frontier violence. These logics—elimination and possession—still shape present-day societies in settler nations, and literature is one of the primary vehicles by which they are operationalized.
ContributorsFranks, Travis B (Author) / Bebout, Lee (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen (Committee member) / Free, Melissa (Committee member) / Whyte, Kyle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Nohokáá Dine’é Diyinii’s (Empowered Earth Surface People, Diné People) story begins with the origin of the cosmos as detailed in Diné emergence narratives, and continues in Diné ceremonial songs, film, and poetry. Diné people’s emergence narratives describe how life moved through the four worlds and how Changing Woman brought Diné people into existence. In the present, Diné people often tell stories against violent colonial domination that aims to unsettle the hope and safety that undergirds their life and prosperity. Through their stories, Diné people bring their past and present together to make futures where Diné life can flourish. Each dissertation chapter explores the contours of storytelling as imagination, power, and future-making through selected Diné stories. Chapter 1 draws from the story of Gus Bighorse as set forth in his as-told-to autobiography (1990). The chapter describes how this Diné warrior, who survived the 1860s forced removal of Diné people, spoke from the heart to tell of a future beyond the US Cavalry’s violence. Such future-focused storying illustrates how Diné people apply elements of Sa’ah’ Naghai Bike’ Hózhǫ (SNBH) in the present to encourage the people to live. SNBH is a philosophy, worldview, and organizing principle for the underlying power through and by which Diné people imagine, create, remake, and renew our reality to realize hózhǫ, beauty. Chapter 2 examines the critical discourse within and around the 2014 Navajo election language fluency controversy that led to Christopher L. Clark Deschene’s removal from the general election ballot. Chapter 3 analyzes the hooghan and the Treaty of 1868 to show how construction in the United States always has sustained and marked the permanence of settler colonialism as white colonizers usurped Diné people’s lands and destroyed their homes. Chapter 4 employs the concept of feminist rehearsal to map the production of life and death in the border town of Gallup. This chapter interweaves the author’s family’s border town experience, the Nááhwíiłbįįhí Story, and Sydney Freeland’s feature film Drunktown’s Finest (2014). Chapter 5, an examination of Diné narratives of catastrophe and emergence, establishes a Diné-based approach to the threat of removal that climate change imposes.
ContributorsClark, Jerome (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Bebout, Lee (Committee member) / Fonseca-Chávez, Vaness (Committee member) / Yazzie, Melanie K. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021