2017 Grant Recipients

“Protecting Undocumented Communities in the Trump Era: Understanding Motivations to Welcome and to Reject Immigrant Communities.” Kristin Yarris, assistant professor, and K. Schmidt Murillo and Brenda Garcia Millan, graduate students, Department of International Studies; and community organization Centro LatinoAmericano.

“Developing a Disability Legal Consciousness: Racism and Ableism in Special Education Advocacy.”
Katie Warden, Department of Sociology. My dissertation is an ethnographic study of the intersection of gender, race, and disability. Through interviews and participant observation, I examine how Latina moms of kids with disabilities become advocates for themselves and their children in the special education system in Oregon. This research addresses two theoretical gaps in the disability studies literature. How is disability legal consciousness developed and acted upon by mothers of children with disabilities? How do race, gender, and immigration status intersect with disability to create unique experiences, identities and ways of knowing? This project examines both these issues through the lens of support groups for Latino parents of children with disabilities.

“Intergenerational Perceptions and Experiences Related to Acculturation among Latina/o High School Language Brokers in Oregon.”
Angel Dorantes, Department of Education Studies. This study explores intergenerational perceptions and experiences related to acculturation among Latina/o high school language brokers in Oregon. Scholars generally agree on the following intergenerational definitions: first generation is a foreign-born immigrant; the 1.5 generation is a foreign-born adolescent or child immigrant and; a US born child of at least one immigrant parent is a 2.0 generation (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001 & Suarez-Orozco & Suarez Orozco, 2001). Focusing on the intergenerational status of language brokers, the primary goals of this study are 1) to investigate their perceptions of assimilation/integration into US cultures and 2) to examine their language brokering experiences. To these ends, the study contains a purposive sample of 10 Latina/o high school students living in three geographical locations in the state of Oregon—namely the Portland metro, the Willamette Valley, and Southern Oregon.

“The Receptacle of Ellipsis and Fragmentation: the Plural Acts of Deference of Arantza Cazalis Shuey and Aurora de Albornoz.”
Nagore Sedano, Department of Romance Languages. Entitled “Gendered Gestures: Voices of Spanish and Basque Women-In-Exile in Latin America,” my dissertation uses a transatlantic approach to the memoirs of five Spanish and Basque women-in-exile—María Teresa León, Concha Méndez, Aurora Arnaiz, Aurora de Albornoz and Arantza Cazalis Shuey—in Latin America after the Spanish Civil War. Published between 1970 and 2011, some of these texts have received considerable scholarly attention as part of the Spanish Civil War “memory boom.” Critics, however, have favored the workings of trauma and exile at the expense of the contribution of these women-in-exile to “the transatlantic rhetoric of solidarity.” The tendency to treat these texts as outdated cultural products with regards to their gender politics mirrors the five authors’ struggle to: legitimize their accounts as part of Spain’s historical memory, and to advance their transnational feminist projects. My dissertation seeks to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the gender politics enclosed in these texts, by calling attention to the workings of race, ethnicity and class in their transatlantic politics of solidarity.