| This dissertation explores how the emergence of a critical consciousness regarding the advantageous racial mutability and hybridity of social agents positioned throughout an intellectual formation of U.S. Latina/os may be entropically destabilizing their social collective's longstanding beliefs about race that ultimately undergird the microcosmic and macrocosmic systems of power. Although the racialization of Latina/os was not a focus of Bourdieu's inquiries, recent Latina/o-oriented investigations, particularly Rojas' 2003 investigation of Latinas' representations and self-perceptions, occurring throughout Multicultural Media Studies, an emergent area of inquiry where Cultural Studies, Media Studies, and Reflexive Sociology collide, have utilized components of his theoretical framework to interpret phenomena occurring within subsectors of the multidimensional Latina/o social collective. In this Multicultural Media Studies investigation, Bourdieu's theories are not only utilized to explore how this recent generation of the educated vanguard of Latina/o agents born after 1975 resist and reinforce the 'fields of race' and the 'field of power' through their efficient amassment as well as conversion of 'multiform' capital in dominant modes, but are also applied to a discussion of their social trajectories when configured as a 'quasiracial' White Latina/o, 'monoracial' Latina/o, and 'polyracial' Latina/o (i.e., what the author identifies as Raza Mezclada) intelligentsia.;Through statistical analyses of their responses to a calibrated on-line survey that was launched throughout Texas during the fall of 2005, this investigation of an intellectual formation comprised of Latina/o undergraduate (i.e., bachelor of arts/science) and graduate (i.e., master of arts/science, professional, and doctoral) degree seekers attempts to determine how these social agents perceive their individual and collective capacities to preserve, alter, or dissolve the current system of racial classification (i.e., social stratification through racial differentiation) through the recovery of agency derived from their racial mutability and/or hybridity. Although the author and multiple participants perceive the current era to be one of increasing resistance to the conventional American logics, schemes, and representations of race, and thus to the race-based 'habitus' that preserve the field of power, the conclusions of this investigation suggest that multiple sectors of this intellectual vanguard possess distinct social advantages through their embracement of their racial mutability and hybridity. |
