Senior Honors Theses
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/4110
This collection gathers theses produced by students in the UH Honors College
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Browsing Senior Honors Theses by Subject "Activism"
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Item Finding Home in the Sunbelt: A Study Of Salvadoran Activism In Houston 1980-1999.(2020-05) Martinez Alvarenga, ManuelThe decade of the 1980s witnessed an unprecedented migration wave from Central America to the United States. Migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala made their way north, seeking to escape the worsening living conditions in their war-torn countries and settled in cities like Houston creating far-reaching demographic changes. This Honors Thesis centers the activism of the Salvadoran migrant community in Houston during the decades of the 1980s and 1990s to explore the deep connection shared between Houston based religious groups and Central American migrant activists. By analyzing Oral histories from Salvadoran migrants that lived in Houston in the 1980s, media portrayals of migrant groups and organizations in Houston, and archived documents from the Rothko Chapel, I highlight the narratives surrounding the unlikely cooperation between Houston based religious organizations and Dominque de Menil with Central American aid groups and individuals that were connected to leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. In so doing, this work presents a new perspective regarding Houston’s history of migrant communal and political activism, along with the formation of the sanctuary movement and the larger Central American diaspora in the United States.Item Freeway Architectures Of Biopolitical Disobedience(2020-05) Polkinghorne, Katherine H.IH-45 is an inconceivably large ribbon of infrastructure that acts as a border between political and geographic communities. IH-45’s margin shelters socio-politically marginal architectural programming. If we take space to be a material reiteration of power, then the contested and marginal territory of the NHHIP is a critical site for architectural consideration and engagement. Through non-hegemonic site analysis and the imagining of counter-futures at four sites along the NHHIP’s extent, this thesis re-conceives of the freeway’s marginal territory as site for liberatory praxis and theorizes modalities of activist engagement with megastructures and megaprojects.