Welcome! The McDermott Library is proud to host the Scholars Hangar Institutional Repository (IR), which is an online showcase of research, scholarship, and creativity from the USAFA community. Scholars Hangar is a digital repository for capturing, archiving and, disseminating the research, creative, and scholarly output of the United States Air Force Academy community.
Recent Submissions
Item Marchando al Futuro: Latino Immigrant Rights Leadership in Chicago(University of Illinois Press, 2010)According to an editorial in the Latino newspaper La Raza, the July 1, 2005, immigrant rights march in the Back of the Yards, a predominantly Mexican neighborhood, occurred because the Latino immigrant community was “fed up with so much abuse of [its] rights” (“Leadership Vacuum” 2005). Community discontent, not the encouragement of leaders or organizations, was responsible for the marches’ success.Item Aztlan for the Middle Class: Chicano Literary Activism(Cambridge University Press, 2022-05-26)This chapter examines the relationship between Mexican American literature and the strand of Chicano activism focused on the needs of the working class. By offering literary case studies, including Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel Heart of Aztlan (1976), Arellano identifies how literary activism has diverged from these needs. Although literature could aid the plight of workers by enabling a group to recognize its solidarity, Arellano argues, the identity that Chicano literature consolidates is ultimately distinct from the working class as such. So even as Chicano literary activism tends to be presented as the cultural arm of a labor movement, such activism has instead operated as the psychic support for a growing Mexican American middle class. While it may seem as if the interests of this growing class are unified with the needs of Mexican American workers, a shared Chicano culture has not been able to address the economic problems that each class faces. It remains necessary to identify continually the difference between literary activism benefiting the middle class and a labor movement benefiting workers.Item Here’s to Chicanos in the Middle Class!(Cambridge University Press, 2024-11-02)This chapter explains why the topic of Mexican American culture became especially urgent during the 1960s and 1970s, and shows why this emphasis on culture came under question during the 1980s. Arellano describes how the Chicano literary intervention was crucial for exposing reductive caricatures by providing more nuanced characterizations of Mexican Americans. This focus on nuanced characterization, however, ultimately risked obfuscating the damaging effects of class struggle. Referencing the competing visions of Tomás Rivera and Richard Rodriguez, concerning the value of culture, Arellano analyzes literary case studies by José Antonio Villarreal and Arturo Islas, showing how their emphasis on a shared ethnic identity occluded class inequality. Arellano concludes by analyzing Rolando Hinojosa’s novel We Happy Few, which reconsiders the legacy of Chicano activism, demonstrating how Hinojosa disarticulates the novel’s meaning from cultural unity and reconnects it to the needs of workers. The novel thus highlights a view of literature that takes Mexican American humanity as a given and directs readers’ critical attention toward the problems that arise from a society organized by class.Item Repeaters for use in a hostile environment(US Patent, 2023-12-05)A repeater for maintaining wireless line of sight communications. The repeater is autonomously repositional in both absolute location and azimuthal orientation. The repeater has at least two vibratory motors, or other vibration sources, which provide oscillations to depending legs against a support surface. By selectively operating one or more of the vibration sources together or independently, the repeater may be moved as helpful to maintain line of sight communication with another repeater or other operational hardware. A command signal from a remote base station controls the locomotion of the repeater to provide both a change in absolute position relative to the surroundings and a rotational change in azimuthal orientation as necessary to maintain communication under dynamic conditions.Item Plural relay sensor method of delivery(US Patent, 2024-10-08)A method of establishing a system for gathering surveillance data in a hostile environment. The method comprises the steps of providing a movable tractor for ground hauling a trailer, and providing a drone which can be operated independently from the tractor. The trailer has a floor pan for supporting a relay sensor dispensing mechanism and a platform above the floor pan, with a hole for dispensing relay sensors therethrough. The relay sensor dispensing mechanism has an elevator for holding a stockpile of relay sensors, and elevating the relay sensors through the hole. The method comprises disposing at least one relay sensor in the elevator, elevating the relay sensor to a pickup position at or above the platform and retrieving the relay sensor with a drone for subsequent deposition in the hostile environment. The relay sensor then gathers and transceives surveillance data for use and interpretation by an operator. Optional a conveyor chute may replenish the elevator when it is depleted of relay sensors.
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