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This dissertation explores the process by which U.S. expansionism transformed northwest Mexico between 1853 and 1934. By focusing on the stories of farmers and religious groups seeking cheap land, mine prospectors looking for rich ores, and U.S. capitalists pursuing profit through land speculation, this study examines the ways they redirected the land market and U.S. immigration south of the border. It argues that this phenomenon created a spatial legacy in the borderlands as eighteen U.S. colonies emerged within the states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Sinaloa, and the Territory of Baja California. Building on the existing historiography and drawing from a vast corpus of documents, including diaries, memoirs, letters, reports, promotional pamphlets, maps, and newspapers located in twenty archives in the U.S and Mexico, this study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the U.S. colonies in northwest Mexico. Also, it advances borderlands history in two ways. First, it uncovers silenced voices of prospectors, land speculators, and migrant families from the historic record. Secondly, by emphasizing their narratives, it shows the feelings and motivations of their trajectories, which complicates existing interpretations that privileged the influx of U.S. capital and obscured U.S. immigration into Mexico. This story of encounters and transformations has two parts. The first part traces the patterns of land speculation practices that prompted U.S. settlement in northwestern Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century to the Mexican Revolution. Chapter One presents how American mapmakers and surveyors systematically explored and collected valuable information on the northwest’s geography and natural resources because they foresaw its potential richness for mining and agriculture. Chapter Two shows how the U.S.-based land companies fulfilled plans for land control by displacing indigenous peoples and contracting with Mexican officials’ under the 1883 colonization law, which granted

A volcano grew out of a cornfield in Michoacán, Mexico in 1943, completely transforming the landscape and local people’s lives. Immediately following the news of this new volcano named Parícutin, observers flocked to the area. Within the first two years of activity, the volcano grew to about 1,400 feet, covered two villages with lava, and blanketed three villages with ash. The volcano gained attention because of its sudden appearance and mild eruptions that observers could closely watch, making it the first volcano in modern times that scientists could study from its birth. Different groups including locals, scientists, artists, journalists, and tourists, had distinct interactions with the volcano that reflect a profound national cultural examination. This study focuses on how visitors and locals interpreted and experienced the volcano. Recorded in written and visual documents, these various perceptions turned Parícutin into a symbol of national identity, or mexicanidad. The inhabitants of the area, who were mainly of Purépecha descent, rationalized it as a punishment for sinful behavior. Meanwhile, the national government exploited it as a scientific phenomenon and an opportunity to insert their idea of mexicanidad into the socially isolated Purépecha highlands. In their accounts of Parícutin, outsiders gave voice to popular ideas about the volcano, but silenced the role of villagers outside of the initial eruption and evacuation stories. Visual sources including photographs and artwork reveal a more comprehensive history of the volcano, one that incorporates people excluded from the written record. This research not only contributes to the scholarship on Mexican national identity, but it also acts as a microhistory for how a community reacts to changes in landscape. In a world with increasing environmental uncertainty, that is most harmful for marginalized communities, this work looks at how culture influences reactions to natural disasters and vice-versa.

This dissertation evaluates Spanish and Nahuatl (an indigenous language spoken by the Nahuas of Mexico) sources to probe tiçiyotl (Nahua healing knowledge) in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Central Mexico. My study covers a 150-mile area surrounding Mexico City and begins in 1538, when Juan de Zumárraga, the bishop of Mexico, oversaw the first trial against titiçih (healing ritual specialists). The temporal scope of my dissertation ends in 1656, when Jacinto de la Serna (rector of the University of Mexico) wrote a manual for priests who ministered to indigenous people, which was the last source to use the term tiçitl (sing. titiçih). Other notable sources and contributions include the investigation of ecclesiastical trials against titiçih in Central Mexico. These trials include biographical information, and in-depth information on ritual practices that add humanness to the abstract descriptions included in European treatises, manuals, and encyclopedias. By unpacking the history of Nahua healing knowledge in a colonial context, this study not only explores Nahua people, it also examines how Europeans processed and interpreted indigenous knowledge, materials, and practitioners. Starting in the late sixteenth-century, the Catholic Church systematically attacked Nahua healers in Central Mexico, particularly women, while Spanish physicians absorbed indigenous knowledge and discarded ritual practices and its practitioners. This has made women invisible in academic discussions of tiçiyotl. By employing non-European sources this study includes the perspectives and views of the “colonized,” that is, the indigenous peoples of Central Mexico. Lastly, this dissertation demonstrates that women were integral to the preservation of healing practices and ritual customs among Nahua people in the seventeenth century, and that women led the resistance against Spanish colonialism, and bore the brunt of its wrath.

This dissertation analyzes working-class resistance to government housing modernization programs in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito during the mid-twentieth century. As Mexico experienced decades of rapid urban growth and industrialization after 1940, influential cultural and political actors worked to redefine and homogenize the cultural identities of their constituents. Once the national population became predominately urban, large urban areas served as cultural showcases to experiment with transforming various local identities into a unified national culture. In the case of Mexico, cultural and political elites used the capital city, which absorbed the bulk of mid-twentieth century urbanization, as ground zero for a unifying aesthetic transformation targeting the materials lives of the City center's poor residents. New housing programs and interior design initiatives based on Modernist architectural principles not only failed to initiate a significant cultural transformation in how the urban poor residents used private and domestic space, but also strengthened neighborhood identities based on resistance to these programs. In Tepito, the residents closed ranks to resist government attempts to destroy the vecindad-style tenement. Tepiteños considered the vecindad, despite deteriorating living conditions, a symbolic representation of their own resistance to urban modernization programs that did not include local residents in the planning process. The tenements provided a spatial site of resistance and identity formation.

At least 50,000 working-class laborers from the West Indies, many of them poor and unemployed, remained with their families in central Panama after the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914. Over the next thirty years, along with a small number of West Indian professionals, religious leaders, and business owners, they established ways to sustain themselves in locales, both in Panama and the American-controlled Canal Zone, where they faced challenges and opposition. Their sizable presence interrupted ideals of elite politicians in Panama to Hispanicize the population. Nationalist Panamanians stigmatized them as culturally different competitors for canal maintenance jobs, and lacking in loyalty to the state because they clung to English and their British colonial citizenship. In the Canal Zone, they faced racial segregation and second-class status. This dissertation examines critical physical and cultural spaces the immigrants created to foster community, provide social and economic security, educate their children, and as a corollary, develop new identities. Using archival material, land records, interviews and historical newspapers from Panama and the United States, and informed by a wide range of secondary sources, the chapters examine the activism of West Indians, in the context of Panamanian historical trends. The case studies analyze involvement of the immigrants in three particular settings: as members of voluntary associations called lodges, as renters and residents of neighborhoods, and as shapers of education for their children, who were born into citizenship in Panama. West Indians had come to Panama from different island cultures and maintained many differences, yet in these settings they developed commonalities and shared experiences as West Indian Panamanians. In the process, West Indian immigrants influenced Panama's development in ways little acknowledged in Panamanian or American national, social or economic history.

The Yucatán, sixteenth-century Spaniards declared, was tierra enferma (infirmed land) as the destruction of diseases regularly consumed the region. Spaniards, Mayas, Africans, and people of mixed ancestry all fell victim to the cycles of disaster. The shared experiences of disease provided a context for deep lived connections for all. This dissertation examines the beliefs, practices, and relationships related to sickness and healing in the Yucatán from the late-sixteenth century to the late-eighteenth century. At the core of this project are questions about the production and circulation of medical knowledge. How, for instance, did ideas of the natural and supernatural world migrate between supposedly distinct social groups? Why did magical remedies related to the social body whither while unorthodox practices related to the physical body thrive? And how did healing breakdown colonial barriers of ethnicity and status? By exploring matters related to the body, sickness, and healing, this project unveils the complex everyday interactions of a society constantly threatened by disaster. The practices of healing represented the everyday modes of cooperation that operated in direct contrast to the idealized structures of colonial life. Dealing with the intimate relations of healing positions, this work bridges the distinct sub disciplines of cultural and intellectual history. Revealed here are the fundamental limitations of socially-constructed notions of distinction and authority, such as colonial visions of calidad (color), clase (class), and costumbre (culture). The interwoven ideas of status, race, and culture reinforced colonial divisions that tied directly into institutions of exploitation, such as the systems of slavery, tribute, and religious instruction. Nevertheless, my analysis illustrates that on the day-to-day level inhabitants of the Yucatán frequently drew deep connections that cut across idealized divides. Instead of being separated by race, they were uni

For the past three decades, policy-makers in Santiago, Chile, have pushed laissez-faire free-market reforms on most sectors of the Chilean economy. On the Archipelago of Chiloe in southern Chile, these reforms have had the effect of introducing wage labor, on a massive scale, to communities that once relied primarily on collective practices of unpaid, reciprocal labor (mingas). My research examines the role of these changing labor practices and livelihoods in the shaping of local identities. I argue that while the Chilean government's neoliberal policies have brought increased commerce to Chiloe through the introduction of export-oriented fishing and aquaculture industries, the accompanying erosion of mingas and rural livelihoods has triggered a pronounced intergenerational shift in collective identity: whereas older islanders today bemoan the disappearance of an ethos of reciprocity, solidarity, and mutual assistance, younger islanders express an explicitly critical view of Chilote history while upholding select values of old.