Immigrants in a Chinese ethnoburb of San Gabriel Valley are selected to study the prevalence of traditional Chinese medicine use and routine health behaviors that keep them healthy and living long lives. With a community replicating that of an authentic “Chinatown”, there is a greater likelihood of household health behaviors that can be studied in order to fill a gap in knowledge on health practices that promote and preserve one’s health. Through a series of structured and unstructured interviews, as well as participant observation, a better understanding of the role of traditional Chinese medicine and individual/familial health practices in immigrant health will be gained, centering the home as a site for health promotion.

The discourse on immigration in the United States has evolved since September 11th, 2001 by notably intensifying the subjugation of undocumented migrants. This paper delves into public narratives about migrants, that place worth on whether they are law-abiding citizens, hard workers, and civic-minded. Public narratives have been socially constructed and further legitimize the ‘illegality’ of migrants, criminalizing human movement out of people’s need for survival and safety. This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion on immigration, by contextualizing the contemporary through past scholarship, with the hope of moving closer to understanding how to achieve justice for all migrants. This research will look at migrant rights organizations, like United We Dream and Unión del Barrio, and their response to post-9/11 draconian policies, and their current analyses and approaches to the contemporary struggle for migrant rights. Critical discourse analysis, which focuses on power relations and the ways in which inequality is produced and sustained by text and language all within social and political context (Van Dijk, 2015), will be used to analyze the United States’ hegemony over immigration; and its construction and framing of illegal immigration that has led to the public’s common sense of understanding that those who are undocumented should be subject to deportation and punishment for committing a crime. This analysis seeks to provide insights into immigration discourse, and how structural causes of migration that are created and maintained through racism, xenophobia, labor exploitation, state violence, and criminalization, to offer a new understanding of contemporary immigration issues.

What could Katie Britt’s public contention with Scarlett Johansson, Nikki Haley’s comparison of Joe Biden to an ostrich, and Lauren Boebert vaping during ‘Beetlejuice’ all have in common? It becomes evident through the use of Lloyd Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation” as a mode for rhetorical critique that each Republican politician uses her respective proximity to whiteness and femininity in order to advance her pursuit of power, oftentimes taking advantage of the possibility of virality to ensure their agenda becomes mainstream. Previous scholarship exploring conservative women has been on understanding how alt-right spheres functioned and women’s role in that space, but lacked in exploring how social structures were manipulated by women to gain power that transcends politics– a concept that can be best defined as “weaponized white femininity.” In this rhetorical analysis of Katie Britt, Nikki Haley, and Lauren Boebert (all prominent, female, American, alt-right politicians in office)’s three rhetorical artifacts with a wide-scale socio-political impact, I first develop and explore how weaponized white femininity manifests in the language each female rhetor utilizes. Although each speaker shares several things in common with the other, they adopt unique levels of femininity and whiteness to advance the same agenda. I also explore how each speaker’s individual proximity and engagement with whiteness may be reflected in motifs displayed in their individual critiques of Joe Biden’s presidency.