Gannon, Benjamin Mark William (2018) From “La lucha está aquí!” to “we’re natural diplomats”: Generational change and Hispanic elite engagement with US foreign policy. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The Hispanic population is the largest ethnic minority group in the United States and is projected to make up nearly one in three Americans by 2050. While the consequences of this demographic shift continue to be a growing area of interest for researchers of domestic politics, the potential implications for US foreign policy remain relatively overlooked. This paucity of attention is due in part to an assumption that Latino elites are almost exclusively focused on domestic concerns at the expense of foreign policy, evidenced by a lack of observable attempts by Hispanic elites to lobby the US government to influence foreign policy outcomes.

This thesis argues that this assumption is misguided as it fails to appreciate the extent to which Hispanic elites engage with US foreign policy where it highlights, advances or compliments their domestic agenda. To demonstrate this point, the thesis examines case studies of foreign policy engagement by three political generations of Hispanic American elites: The Chicano generation in the 1960s and early 1970s, the Exile generation during the 1980s, and the pan-ethnic Latino generation from the 1990s to the present day. Drawing on extensive interviews with foreign diplomats, Latino advocacy organisations and Hispanic Americans working within foreign policy-related careers in the federal government, the thesis demonstrates that when the scope of foreign policy engagement is sufficiently broadened, a history of sophisticated discourse and policy engagement is revealed. The thesis findings therefore offer an original contribution to knowledge through the novelty of its central claim, the inclusion of new empirical evidence, as well as through the presentation of a new analytical framework – that of the political generation as a unit of analysis – with which to study ethnic minority group engagement with US foreign policy.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	E History America > E151 United States (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General) J Political Science > JZ International relations
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	United States -- Foreign relations, Hispanic Americans, National characteristics, American
Official Date:	September 2018
Dates:	Date Event September 2018 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Politics and International Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	McCrisken, Trevor, 1968- ; Kettell, Steven
Sponsors:	Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain)
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	iii, 273 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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