Not Plato's Closet: The Dialectic Of Embodied Counterstory Through Fashion On The US/Mexico Border

This dissertation is best understood as a journey about identity that took place over more than eight years. The journey was an exploration that began in one frame of mind and ended in a very different place. I fully anticipated this research to reflect the racial tensions surrounding my participants who are predominantly Latine students at UTEP, a "Hispanic serving" institution on the US/Mexico border, but we ended up a place more deeply personal to them. From a sample of 2000 FYC students and their instructors, 65 participants engaged in taking a survey about their dress practices, and 4 of them further participated in focus groups. The significance in the survey portion reveals that factors such as weather, practicality, and the prioritizing of the self over media influences and even sometimes over family and culture was noteworthy as both a factor of self-determination and as a "site of resistance" and belied the preeminence of such considerations as aesthetics. It also revealed, however, that being perceived as "fashionable" was important to them, in terms of both perceived upward mobility, and happiness and well-being. The focus group portion showed a strong emphasis on family, friends/coworkers, and revealed even more considerations for dress choice, including body dysmorphia, mental health, weather, domicile instability/mobility, how school uniforms play a role, and mixed feelings about second-hand/thrifted apparel. Overall, participants expressed a clear desire for their dress to convey positive messages about their identity to others. While participants of this study did feel an onus to dress professionally and in accordance with the influences of fashion to achieve a sense of empowerment, they did not seem to correlate that specifically with "representing for the race" (Manthey, 2015, Dress Profesh). To sum up what I see in dress as a modality for individual storytelling on the Border, I draw on Anzaldua's (2015) description of how one tells the story of one's life through what I would call resilience, and what she calls the "fifth space" (p. 130). In this way, the story of dress on the Border, as elsewhere, can be seen not only as a practice of resistance, but also a practice in resilience.