Fiscal Year 2006 Annual Report on the Operations and Accomplishments of the Office of the General Counsel

[Excerpt] The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) to give litigation authority to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and provide for a General Counsel, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate for 4-year term, with responsibility for conducting the Commission\u27s litigation program. Following transfer of enforcement functions from the U.S. Department of Labor to the Commission under a 1978 Presidential Reorganization Plan, the General Counsel became responsible for conducting Commission litigation under the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA) and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA). With the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the General Counsel became responsible for conducting Commission litigation under the employment provisions of that statute (Title I; effective July 1992). The mission of EEOC’s Office of General Counsel (OGC) is to conduct litigation on behalf of the Commission to obtain relief for victims of employment discrimination and ensure compliance with the statutes that EEOC is charged with enforcing. Under Title VII and the ADA, the Commission can sue nongovernmental employers with 15 or more employees. The Commission’s suit authority under the ADEA (20 or more employees) and the EPA (no employee minimum) includes state and local governmental employers as well as private employers. Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA also cover labor organizations and employment agencies, and the EPA prohibits labor organizations from attempting to cause an employer to violate that statute. OGC also represents the Commission on administrative claims and litigation brought by agency applicants and employees, and provides legal advice to the agency on employment-related matters

Disordering the Border: Harryette Mullen's Transaborder Poetics in Muse & Drudge

This essay reads Harryette Mullen's epic poem, Muse & Drudge, as an innovative text of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands by focusing on her literal and figurtive transactions between multiple discourses, including Spanish, and the corresponding sets of material conditions these discourses conjure to understand how Muse & Drudge reveals the ongoing racialization and exploitation of African American women and Latinas. I indentify a "transaborder politics" in Muse Drudge where the shared colonial histories unite Afro-Caribbean diasporic and borderlands subjects, and in the literal and figurative transactions between multiple discourses and the corresponding sets of lived, material conditions these discourses conjure. As part of her poetics, themes of separation, definition, and regulation are racialized concepts, deeply embedded in the violent histories of racial mixing and mestizaje that are both named outright and also alluded to metaphorically through Mullen's hybridized language

Making Maya Linguistics, Making Maya Linguists: The Production Of Maya Scientific Expertise And Models Of Personhood In The Yucatan Today

In this dissertation, I explore what it means to be Maya in the Yucatan today. I focus my research on a higher education program in Maya linguistics where Maya is used as a language of instruction. To do this, faculty and students are creating the words and concepts with which to talk about linguistics ich maaya ‘in the Maya language’, something previously only done in other languages, like Spanish. This is about expanding the conceptual work that can be done in the Maya language, but it also about creating new scientific objects—new linguistics terminology; new categorizations of the language; and a new category of persons, native-Maya-speaking linguists. Through an eighteen-month ethnography, I follow linguists and their students to show how disciplinary linguistics knowledge is being created in the Maya language and how its creation produces and contests categories of Maya personhood. I begin broadly by exploring what it means to be Maya in Yucatan today through an analysis of diacritics of Maya personhood. I show how certain behaviors are linked to ideas about who Maya people are. For example, participation in advanced formal education is not widely associated with models of Maya personhood, thus when individuals pursue higher education, it can call their Mayaness into question. In light of this, some Maya individuals engage in practices to re-associate themselves with widely circulating diacritics of Maya personhood, such as speaking Maya in a way that is perceived to be more authentic. This brings me to interrogate a register of the Maya language, jach maaya, that many highly educated Maya individuals use. I then focus my attention on the creation of linguistics ich maaya, discussing its practice in the classroom and the one text published in Maya on a linguistics topic. Finally, I turn my attention to the creation of Maya linguists to look at the important identity work participation in higher education in the Maya language is affording students. Throughout, I take up notions of linguistic purism, language ideologies, and processes of social identification. I also situate the creation of linguistics ich maaya within broader discourses about indigeneity and modernity