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In January of 1847, in the northern New Mexico town of Taos, a combined force of Pueblos and Nuevomexicanos assassinated the U.S. territorial governor and marched on Santa Fe to contest the U.S. occupation. The U.S. Army eventually put down most of the resistance, and U.S. officials controversially held treason trials to condemn some of the revolt’s leaders. This paper asks how U.S. soldiers and officials made sense of their occupation of New Mexico during the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848), particularly in the wake of the Taos “Revolt” of 1847. It argues that U.S. soldiers and officials ultimately understood the Taos Revolt as a “revolt.” In doing so, they attempted to affirm U.S. sovereignty in New Mexico and to conceive of conquest as a single moment in time rather than as a process—though this understanding was far from stable or uncontested, even within U.S. ranks. Performance, whether in the form of stage plays or treason trials, was critical for constructing U.S. understandings of the occupation both before and after the revolt. This paper therefore asserts that performance was integral to the everyday mechanisms of empire. First, this paper analyzes the conquest-themed plays U.S. soldiers performed in Santa Fe on the eve of the revolt to understand how they grappled with the meanings of occupation and conquest. Then it turns to the Taos Revolt and the subsequent treason trials, in which U.S. officials tried Mexican citizens for treason against the United States. It argues that the trials were intended to act as performances of conquest and to produce a colonial history, but ultimately they underscored the instability and incoherence of “conquest.”

Powerful semiotic signs like the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall served significant communicative functions. The modern culture of nation state wall building continues despite the fact that the security fences are obsolete. Wall advocates argue that security fences deter undocumented immigrants from trying to cross the border illegally. The walls also function to stop terrorism or other criminal threats. This paper applies semiotic and hermeneutic methods to examine and compare the communication functions of South African apartheid with the U.S. Mexico border wall. Structuration Theory (ST),and Dissociation and Dimensional Accrual (DAD) are applied to discuss the consequences to communication from such barriers.

This thesis explores Chicano involvement in and protest against the Vietnam war through a lens of cultural production, particularly song lyrics. It identifies a tension between the fact that Chicanos had proportionally even more to lose from the war than did Anglos, and the fact that Chicano-authored antiwar song is unknown while Anglo-authored protest song is inextricable from the era in the popular imaginary. The study finds that Chicano antiwar song was scarce, and less explicit in tone than that composed by Anglos, and argues that this distinction was caused by a combination of assimilationist pressures and the dictates of the corrido genre. However, Chicanos did create powerfully oppositional discourses using other musical genres or other creative forms. Those discourses challenged assimilationist rhetoric, forged connections between the war overseas and Chicano civil rights/ liberation struggles in the Southwest, and were anchored in sentiments of transnational affiliation with the people of Vietnam. Engaging critical regionalist methodology, the paper argues that in their transnational antiwar discourse and civil rights advocacy, Chicano artists and activists "twinned" Vietnam and the Southwest, constructing an "assemblage" of transnational affiliation comprised of skin color economic oppression colonial subjugation military/police violence, and ties to the land. Through invoking these parallels within the songs and other expressive forms scrutinized here, as well as within wider Chicano Movement discourse, these artists and activists were able to effectively articulate a poetics of resistance to both their own colonization and the colonization of the Vietnamese. The study has a broader aim of demanding a reconceptualization of the civil rights and antiwar movements this it does in two ways. First, it foregrounds Chicanos and their discourse of transnational affiliation with the Vietnamese within the antiwar movement, which is commonly perceived as an Anglo student movement. Second, it challenges the assumption that the Chicano Movement was modeled after the Black Civil Rights Movement, situating it instead within a decolonial framework.

Pre-modern conceptualization of shifting borderlands and territories rather than fixed boundaries often allowed for the dynamic flow of peoples between polities. Until the late 1800s and the colonization of Burma in 1886 by the British Empire, this permeability of the borders of its territory was how Siam (currently Thailand) viewed its geo-political sphere (Thomson 1995:272). Britain extended the boundaries of its empire beyond India to guarantee the economic interests of the British Empire. With this push eastward, Siam abutted a polity that rejected the idea of shifting borderlands. The British ascribed to the modern concept of non-permeability of borders. This concept brought with it a rigidity of perception that extended beyond geographical frameworks to also psychologically limit the interpersonal connections of Siam's multi-ethnic minority populations and the Tai ethnic majority (Keyes 1979:54, Marlowe 1979:203, Thomson 1995:281). Ancient residents of what was once the borderland area, the Karen, lost their status as a valuable part of a symbiotic relationship with the dominant Thai polity and were placed within a discourse of opposing binary factions. The Karen, once respected as stewards of the remote forestlands, became part of a larger group of peoples all of which have been labeled as the "hill tribes" (Trakarnsuphakorn 1997:218). This paper addresses how globalization and these social and political changes have resulted in marginalizing a group of diverse peoples who are now viewed as a threat to the security of the nation-states in which they reside. The discussion continues with a look at how the narrative about the Karen has changed and introduces a proposal for constructing a new empowering for the Karen.