Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Department

History

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Abstract

This work examines the transnational connections of Dodge City’s Mexican immigrants and their celebration of the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe and how their cross-border activity were parts of larger systems like globalization, identity, and collective memory. With migration into Southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma panhandle increasing intensely in the 1980s, because of the economic opportunities that the livestock and meat manufacturing industries offered, Dodge City’s Mexican population reached unprecedented heights. These migration waves mark the starting point of this thesis.

The incoming Mexican population flooded the city’s Catholic facilities, which prompted the community and the local diocese to respond to these visible changes. The Diocese of Dodge City enlisted the services of religious orders based in Mexico to help accommodate these new migrants. Additionally, they constructed a larger cathedral and pursued a general policy of pluralism to aid new populations of all sorts in feeling welcomed. On the community side, Mexican residents began to carve out spaces for the customs they practiced in their places of origin. 1998 saw the establishment of both Grupo Arcoíris and Danza Tepeyac, which held massive implications for the future of how Catholicism would be practiced in the coming decades. Both the community and the Diocese utilized transnational connections to response to the major ethnic changes of the 1980s and carried this momentum into the 2000s and 2010s.

As the community continued to practice their newly established customs, which was modeled on their lived experiences in Mexico, they began to mature and displayed increasingly complicated identities. In Dodge City’s Carrera Guadalupana, which started in 2005, partipants exhibited broad transnational and hybridized identities, as they celebrated their Catholic faith, ii Mexican heritage, and Estadounidense affinities. Within the custom of danza, small groups began to illustrate their intersectional identities, as they celebrated their gender and region. This combined transnational ways of being and belonging and led to a celebration that coopted practical cross-border activity with feelings of belonging to a variety of groups.

Finally, Danza Tepeyac added an element of collective memory and invented tradition after 2020. They viewed themselves as the successors of an Indigenous past and underwent transnational activity to properly continue their danza tradition. With each year, the members of Danza Tepeyac lived the continuity, drawing on themes of sacrifice, hard work, and labor to succeed the initial generations of danzantes in their interpretation of the past.

Keywords

Transnationalism, Migration, Mexican, Catholicism, Acculturation

Advisor

Dr. Marco Macias

Date of Award

Summer 2026

Document Type

Thesis

Rights

© The Author

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