In the United States, Black adolescent (10-19 years old) girls have the highest prevalence of pediatric obesity. Despite public attention and public health interventions on obesity, current research has yet to evaluate what weight management recommendations are prevalent in mediums most frequently used by Black adolescent girls. Previous scholars show that Black adolescents primarily consume content on Instagram and Tiktok compared to all other social media platforms. Our research seeks to compare the weight management recommendations present in Instagram and Tiktok with those of public health organization websites. Using the rhetorical themes identified, we move to assess the feasibility of health messaging from public policy organizations compared to social media platforms. Ultimately, we seek to evaluate the efficacy of the recommendations based on the availability of the infrastructure accessible to Black adolescents. We analyze weight management messaging on Instagram, Tik Tok, and public policy organization websites. These primary sources are excerpted through simple random sampling and coded for common weight management themes. We seek to determine the feasibility of such messaging as well as points of convergence and divergence between the platforms. We hypothesize that the weight management themes found in social media will not demonstrate consistency with the recommendations made by public health organizations. In addition, we predict that neither the social media nor public policy weight management recommendations will be attainable for Black adolescent girls when assessing their feasibility in relation to the environmental and socioeconomic resources available to them in the United States. In conclusion, there are insufficient resources for Black adolescent girls to make informed weight management decisions and available resources are not effectively communicated.

In the midst of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, a document known as the Plan de San Diego emerged in South Texas. Discovered by local police in January of 1915 in McAllen, Texas when they arrested a Mexican national, the Plan called for a total racial revolution against Anglo-Texan power. A few months later, raids in support of the Plan broke out. Historians have primarily disputed over whether the Plan was an authentic product of local Tejano radicalism, or part of a wartime master plan by German and Mexican conspirators. The mystery surrounding its authorship and the raids has contributed significantly to this lack of consensus. My research traces the roots of the Plan’s rhetoric and the movement around it through the history of Mexicanos in Texas. I argue that the racial logic of the Plan demonstrates a real grounding in local history, regardless of its authorship. Rather than focusing on the moment in itself, I follow the lineage of the “Mexican race” which it attempted to mobilize. To do so, I closely read the wording and differences across time and space in legal policy, court cases, proclamations, newspapers, and folk music. In particular, I read the operation and formation of social-political categories between the lines of these texts. This approach draws significantly on racial formation theory, which offers a means to understand how such a movement could come about. By incorporating this critical approach, I hope to make a step forward in critically analyzing history as an element in racial history and the development of the identity "la raza," which the Chicanx movement mobilized later in the 20th century.