This qualitative research utilizes a combination of ethnographic narrative and phenomenological approach. This study is guided by two research questions: 1) What issues are immigrants faced with when applying for citizenship in the United States under the current administration 2) What issues did the rescinding of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) pose for immigrant beneficiaries? Since there is insufficient data on the effects anti-immigrant policies have on immigrants when applying for citizenship, and a lack of research on the effects ending DACA had on its recipients hence, the importance and the need to develop this qualitative study. The field site for this study was the nonprofit organization servicing San Diego County- UURISE (Unitarian Universalist Refugee and Immigrant Services and Education). The target population in this study are immigrants in San Diego County. The target sample in this study are UURISE clients. My data was collected through field site observations and interaction with the clients of UURISE from the months of July to December of 2017. The findings suggest that qualified resident immigrants are fearful and hesitant to apply for citizenship. In addition, DACA recipients will no longer have a work permit thus, they will be forced to drop out of college or work several hours at low paying jobs.

This presentation examines emperor Nero’s use of food and dining practices as a way to invert social class in public and private life. Through an examination of accounts by the ancient authors, secondary scholarship, and archeological evidence of the Domus Aurea, it is evident that Nero had a complicated reign, but his actions related to dining practices and public life made an intentional effort to equalize Roman social class while including the common Romans in aspects of life to which they were not previously privy. The investigation is separated into three sections: the first examines the history and basis of the ancient authors with respect to their relationship with Nero; the second looks at the public spectacle and how that contributed to the change in public and private life; and finally the third demonstrates the scale of the gestures in which Nero partook, thus illustrating how he was courting the non-elite and simultaneously debasing the elite. Each section is supported with overlapping evidence; however, certain aspects are highlighted within each section. The first focuses primarily on examining the perspective of the elite authors with some support from secondary arguments. The second uses some archeological evidence but mostly uses secondary analysis with some support from the contemporary authors. Lastly, the third uses a combination of the three, but it mostly focuses on the Domus Aurea and the impact of this space. With these three clearly identified points of examination, the complex reign of Nero is emphasized while further discussing his intentional use of food and dining to promote his agenda. Nero worked to change public and private life in order to put himself forward as the sole ruler of Rome. Most important, all of his actions were intentional and calculated in order to create his new empire through food and dining.

A century of U.S. government-backed, anti-Asian discrimination culminated in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite U.S. government insistence that anyone with up to 1/16th Japanese blood had to be incarcerated, the existence of white-looking children in concentration camps presented a segregation crisis. Race was segregation’s litmus test: if white was assumed loyal, Japanese was assumed disloyal. My paper uses original archival research to study attempts to reconcile this monoracial logic with the multiracial reality that exposed it - the U.S. government’s Mixed Marriage Policy (MMP). The MMP permitted some multiracial Japanese Americans to escape or avoid mass incarceration. My project argued that U.S. treatment of multiracial Japanese Americans rewarded the disavowal of Japanese identity with “integration” to project an image of liberal inclusion whilst allowing a reality of surveillance and segregation. When attempts to quantify racial mixtures became impossible, the MMP attempted to strip the trait of race from multiracial subjects in a policy of institutional “colorblindness” by evaluating loyalty on “objective” criteria alone. Individuals eligible for integration became symbols for the U.S. government to project an image of inclusive humanitarianism and racial tolerance in the post-war empire. However, these seemingly neutral criteria upheld U.S. imperial practices of racial segregation. The perceived disavowal of the racism behind incarceration sanitized the image of the U.S. government while quietly reproducing racial hierarchies through new domestic surveillance policies. Shifting segregation policies to subtler forms of institutional colorblindness strengthened the United States as an empire of white supremacy. Racism was at its most intractable and pervasive when acknowledging the existence of race became taboo. As the title “It Must be Odd to be a Minority” (Spanish translation) alludes, this research is significant to Asian American Studies because the current literature rarely address inter-sectional struggles with the greater community of color.

My paper focuses on the life of Rose McGrory to address broader shifts in identities across the Atlantic and throughout the United States. From a British colonial subject to an American colonial settler, Rose McGrory’s life illustrates how individuals refashioned their identities to confront and exploit the contradictions of race, gender, religion, and nation, revealing how they simultaneously challenged and conformed to societal norms in the process. Rose was born in 1884 in desolate Dunree, Ireland. Though Ireland and Britain were theoretically equals after their unionization in 1800, Rose lived in Ireland as a British colonial subject. For centuries, the British had represented the Irish as racially backwards to justify their colonization. In the decades after the Great Famine, females like Rose gained greater access to educational opportunities, but their socioeconomic prospects did not improve likewise. In this historical context, Rose immigrated to Boston in February 1905. Here, racial and gendered hierarchies confined Irish women like Rose to abject jobs like domestic servants. Although many Irish on the East Coast succeeded in their crusade to become perceived and treated as white, in part by distancing themselves from black people, Rose found Boston restrictive. Rose moved to Hood River, Oregon in 1910. In the west, the Irish had already associated their racial identity with whiteness by leading the racialization of the Chinese and Japanese as non-white. In this new racial landscape, Irish immigrants could transform themselves into “settlers”, an identity associated with whiteness and increased socioeconomic opportunity for Rose and her family. Rose’s life reveals the intricacies of her various identities and the complexities of the Irish-American immigrant experience. Integrating primary sources like censuses and newspapers with various scholarly literatures, my paper unveils Rose’s arduous journey and provocative story.

My research began with a discovery of manuscripts in the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. These manuscripts were written at Fort Nisqually during the 1840s. A series of journals and ledgers detailing the arrival of Americans into the Oregon Country in 1845 have been missing for over 150 years. They were taken to Victoria, BC in 1865 to provide evidence for the claims of the Hudson’s Bay Company and Puget Sound Agricultural Company in the joint commission hearings between Great Britain and the United States. Through letter books and other writings detailing events around the same time of the missing journals, I am piecing together some of this early 1840s history by working with the curators at the BC Archives. While the journals are yet to be found, my research at the Royal BC Museum has uncovered new leads to follow. The discovery of the journals will reveal farming practices employed by the fort and add detail to what is already known and would answer the unending questions regarding breeds of cattle and sheep arriving at Fort Nisqually, as well as specific cultivars of potatoes, grain, and other food stuffs grown at the fort. The discovery is not the last step in writing Fort Nisqually and the Puget Sound Agricultural Company history. After locating, transcribing and publishing the journals comes the true historiography. These journals hold the keys to a lifetime of research. By uncovering these stories, a box of knowledge will be opened which local historians will dig through for the rest of time. These manuscripts will be the keys to that box, and give future generations a chance to fully understand a history lost for 152 years.

This project is an environmental and political analysis of the 1968 creation of Redwood National Park in northwestern California. As the most expensive public lands acquisition ever authorized by Congress, Redwood National Park represents a crucial point in the evolution of the American conservation movement. This paper examines the cause and nature of the conflict that arose between the Sierra Club and the Save the Redwoods League—two of California’s oldest and most influential conservation organizations—over the location and scope of a Redwood National Park; and what effect that conflict had upon the final iteration of the Park once it was signed into law on October 2, 1968. I examine the methods of political influence through which the Sierra Club and the Save the Redwoods League each fought for the Park that they believed to be most essential to the continued protection of the Sequoia sempervirens. This paper will scrutinize the successes and failures of the populist-driven approach of the Sierra Club and the elitist-driven approach of the Save the Redwoods League, and the ways in which those opposing approaches clashed. Finally, this paper delineates how the last remaining virgin redwood stands on Earth were held hostage to a political standoff and will highlight what can be lost when two organizations dedicated to the same cause refuse to compromise over the methods through which they seek to achieve their shared goal. Through the examination of political influence and environmental agency, this paper contributes to our understanding of the modern conservation movement in the United States.

Before the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, the Republic of Venice’s relations with the Ottoman Empire were tumultuous and tentative. As the most powerful Mediterranean maritime force in the 16th century, it was Venice’s mission to protect Christendom from Ottoman Islamic armies. To fight this maritime crusade Venice employed privateers and corsairs, individuals who, in exchange for payments, supplied their own vessels to police the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean in search of Ottoman vessels. Since Venice relied on trade for basic provisions, Venetian authorities approached naval aggression as a necessary defensive measure. Venice’s lack of self-sustainability meant that protecting its imperial holdings was critical to the longevity of the city itself. As Venice won the Battle of Lepanto, destroying the Ottoman fleet, Venetians regained their sense of naval supremacy. Although Venice lost the larger Ottoman-Venetian war, as in the three previous was, the Battle of Lepanto marked a pivotal moment in Mediterranean history, driving Venetians to recapture some of what they had lost and to rebuild their once vast merchant empire. Confident in their naval prowess, Venice’s merchant galleys spread far and wide across the Eastern Mediterranean to forge new trade relations with the Ottoman Empire. Through these relations, Venice portrayed themselves as the gateway to the East by supplying themselves and Western Europe with exotic goods. I argue that The Battle of Lepanto ushered in a new era of economic expansionism grounded in a Venetian sense of naval superiority that allowed Venice to end its reliance on privateering and corsairing to protect its empire.

Every nation state has its foundational stories and Afghanistan is no exception. Classical historiography and national myth contend that the Durrani Empire, founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, marked the beginning of the modern Afghan nation-state. As the fledgling polity subsumed all of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan in addition to parts of Iran and the Central Asian republics, it found itself the object of ‘The Great Game’ in which the expanding Russian and British empires sought to control the region. I assert that, while it is certain that 'The Great Game' and Ahmad Shah influenced the growth of Afghan nationalism, traditional historiography fails to account for the deliberate, ruler-driven work that went into the Afghan centralization project. Rather than playing pieces propelled through their early centuries on a vast geopolitical Great Game board, the Shahs of the Durrani Empire and the Emirs of the Emirate of Afghanistan determinedly enacted policies furthering their goals and visions for the state. Concurrently, British India, governed by the Council of India, sought to shape the Afghan state to suit its own needs vis-a-vis Russia and Persia. I also maintain that while the early stages of the nation building project were a response to the political and military needs of Ahmad Shah, the relative power of each state shaped the later phases. The Durrani Empire initially had a military advantage, but later British territorial annexations in India facilitated power projection further into Central Asia, thereby imposing their image of Afghanistan over its local population. I argue fundamentally that Afghan national identity was shaped through a shifting relationship with Britain as a consequence of successful as well as abortive policy decisions from both parties which, when combined with the framework established by early Durrani rulers, coalesced to give form to Afghan nationalism.

Rather than assuming the transhistorical existence of Kurdish nationalism, this paper identifies and explains the material motivations behind the formation of the short-lived Mahabad Republic in 1946. I argue both the tribal chiefs and urban elites of Kurdish society felt compelled to break from Tehran as they, along with the rest of Kurdish society, became more connected to a wider economy than ever before. Previous political movements within Kurdish society against unjust treatment from the Iranian central government had been led by the tribal chiefs whose hegemony over the rural areas had made them powerful forces to be reckoned with. In 1946, with the tribal chiefs undermined by anti-tribal policy from Tehran, and the urban population and wealth in Kurdish society growing at a rapid rate, the Mahabad separatist movement emerged as the first Kurdish rebellion to be directed and inspired by the urban elite. Yet the success of the movement still necessitated the cooperation of the landholding tribal elite, as they provided the military organization crucial for victory. Both groups, who held the bulk of power within Kurdish Iran, were motivated by adverse treatment associated with the Iranian state, including manifest corruption, cultural oppression, and economic recession. In that context, I argue, the landholding tribal chiefs and the emergent urban elite forged a secession movement away from Iran to establish the first successful Kurdish ethno-state.