University of Missouri - St. Louis

Faculty Member, History

About

How are social inequalities gendered? How are they racialized, sexualized, and classed? And how do these processes configure subjectivity and agency, citizenship and political culture in the United States and Mexico at different historical moments? I turn a historian's eye toward answering these questions, incorporating an array of kinds of evidence—archival, oral historical, ethnographic, literary and filmic—and deploying a variety of analytical approaches–feminist, queer, post-colonial, and critical race theory. My use of interdisciplinary methodology comes out of my graduate training at a university largely unconcerned about disciplinary boundaries. The methods also reflect the overarching priorities of gender, critical race, postcolonial, and queer theory. What emerges from my approach and subjects, then, is not only a historical narrative but a set of theoretical arguments and approaches that makes my work of interest to a wide academic audience.

Each of my projects broadly maps out these questions: from how Mexican migration produces a particular kind of subject imperfectly aligned with the nation (Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Postwar United States and Mexico); to the dialectical processes through which actors are constituted vis-à-vis their participation in movements and political projects, along with the legacies of those processes (Beyond '68: The Gendering of Political Culture in the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and Its Legacies); and the analysis of social movements as sites of profound transformations in practices of and thinking about gender and sexuality on a global scale (Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination). In addition, I have two book projects now in their early stages. The first shifts these questions to the ways that sexual practices and subjectivities become sites of struggle over and symbolic of national and transnational belonging and their affective components (Sex and Betrayal). The second explores how race and desire become constituent of broad political projects (The Racialized Erotics of Banditry: ).

Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Postwar United States and Mexico)

In Braceros, forthcoming fall of 2010 with University of North Carolina press, I explore how subjectivity, agency, and the sentiments surrounding national belonging played out for an array of state and non-state actors: farmworker migrants, U.S. and Mexican state actors, agricultural business owners, and U.S. domestic farmworkers. I look at the period 1942-1964, in which Mexico and the United States officials co-coordinated a program that brought Mexican migrants to work in U.S. agricultural fields. Specifically, the book examines the fashioning of a U.S.-Mexican transnational world and its constituent members—transnational subjects—created relationally through the interactions, negotiations, and struggles of these state and non-state protagonists. Transnational, as I use it, connotes a mutually constitutive process, not merely a relationship that extends beyond the nation. Transnational subject, then, refers to a particular kind of political and social person with ties to, claims on, and self-understanding beyond the nation.

Braceros explores state- and global-level actors and processes, even as it prioritizes those ostensibly lowest on the economic ladder: the labor migrants or braceros, as they were called, who participated in the Bracero program, the series of Mexico-U.S. labor agreements that brought men to work temporarily in U.S. agricultural fields. It applies a broad cultural approach to analyze the political economy of labor migration, the rise of large-scale corporate agriculture, and state-to-state relations, showing how the World-War-II and post-war periods laid the groundwork for current debates over immigration and globalization. Although all primary actors—the Mexican and U.S. states, growers, domestic farmworkers, and union leaders—were transformed through the program, braceros alone came to be seen as problematically and perpetually transnational. Examining the social world emerging through the negotiation of competing interests makes vivid the issues of exploitation, development, the rise of consumer cultures, gendered class and race formation, and the production of transnational subjects–those both national and supranational, simultaneously exceeding or misaligned with these affective political bodies.

Beyond '68: The Gendering of Political Culture in the 1968 Mexican Student Movement and Its Legacies

While Braceros channeled my intellectual concerns towards the transformations in subjectivity brought about in a transnational arena, my second book project, a co-authored manuscript with Lessie Jo Frazier, analyzes the profound rearrangements—political, social, cultural, and individual—that occurred nationally, during and after the Mexican 1968 student movement. The project, Beyond '68, situates the political and cultural projects of the 1960s-70s that culminated in massive state violence in a longer historical context.

Beyond '68 explores the legacies of student activism, changing political cultures, and socio-cultural transformations that occurred in the lead up to and wake of 1968 in Mexico. It contends that the impact of this student movement must be sought beyond the realm of formal politics, in the changing practices of gender and sexuality, which began even before the movement emerged and made possible the movement involvement of a host of new political actors. A focus on the formal realm not only obscures the seismic transformations that '68 brought to the fore; it also belies the many (counter)cultural challenges that the movement posed to established politics, challenges which the movement defined as intrinsic to political contestation itself. Using gender, sex, and sexuality as analytic lenses questions the divide between formal and (counter)cultural arenas, even as it reveals the intrinsic and intimate connections between them. That is, these lenses bridge the personal and the political to offer a window onto the deep changes that the long sixties –the period from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s– had on agency, and on the reconfiguration of political culture and participation. Beyond '68 examines gendered political agency, first, by situating the participation of women (a large component of the new activists) in larger historical shifts and key prior and subsequent social movements; and second, by tracking their participation and involvement across the life cycle and in the context of their family histories. In so doing, the book unites what have too often been distinct scholarly conversations on women's roles in different kinds of social movements, the formation of activist identities, the gendering of political cultures, and Mexican nation-state formation. Beyond '68 is the culmination of our oral history, archival, and participant-observation research spanning two decades, analyzing the relationship between gender, political subjectivity, and national identity in Mexico while it still speaks to the comparative dimensions. It is under contract at University of Illinois Press.

In the process of researching Beyond 68, we sought out comparative works on gender and sexuality in the sixties and found a marked dearth of scholarly writing. Thus, we decided to co-edit Gender and Sexuality in 1968: Transformative Politics in the Cultural Imagination (forthcoming October 2009 with Palgrave Macmillan). This volume brings together literary and film critics, historians, and anthropologists working on sites in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, whose focus on gender and sexuality offer new understandings of 1968. The new understandings include: patriarchal state investment in youthful masculinities (Mexico), the ways in which the youthful male martyr took on symbolic importance on a global scale (the Czech Jan Palach), incommensurable politics of desire between some movements (French students and feminists); the possibilities and limitations for political agency (Mexican students, Cuban filmmakers), and the organic relationships between other movements usually thought of as disparate (French and U.S. anti-war and gay rights), complete with our introduction to contextualize the major social movements and argue for '68 as transformative in a multiple array of arenas. In sum, the volume demonstrates that gender and sexuality illuminate questions of subjectivity, agency, memory, political cultures of the state and social movements, and the ways in which the personal was, and still remains, political, to explain the place of '68 as a pivotal year on a global scale.

Sex and Betrayal: Migration and Sentiment in the Making of a Transnational U.S.-Mexico Community

Like my work on 1968, my new solo authored book-length project moves to examine sexual practices more centrally than did my first. It comes out of a question around Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities and postcolonial feminist critiques of Anderson's framing, alongside ideas of emotion (Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stewart as examples). Specifically, it asks: What happens when you incorporate sexual practices as an axis around which national affinities are made and marked? Looking at the arc of the 1950s-2000s and anchored in the relations that migration between Mexico and the United States nurtures, weakens, and severs, this manuscript examines the changing rhetoric around sexual practice, as well as the changes in the practices themselves, as ways through which people enacted their membership in families and larger kin groups, and tied themselves to regions, nations, and transnational communities. As it will show, this rhetoric, which changed throughout this period, was used to demarcate the boundaries of belonging and the roles, responsibilities, and unevenly accorded rights and privileges of these community members, from state actors and citizens, to husbands, wives, and community leaders. It examines how, in the United States, this rhetoric about practices, like the practices themselves, were used to substantiate and mark Mexican racial difference, while within Mexico itself, the same denoted class, region, rurality, and backwardness.

The Racialized Erotics of Banditry: Zorro, Transnational Political Imaginaries, and Grounding Myths of California

I return to draw heavily on race and class, the frames of analysis used in my first solo book (Braceros), in The Racialized Erotics of Banditry, another co-authored book project with Dr. Frazier. This project uses these frames, along with gender, sexuality, and political culture, to explore the transnational (United States, Mexico, Italy) history of (primarily filmic) renditions of Zorro as a window onto shifting imaginaries of political order and socio-economic justice since the early twentieth century. The many (over seventy) Zorro films spanning a hundred years allow us to think historically and comparatively about the relationship between cultural artifact and socio-political context. As the genesis of the masked avenging hero who crosses classed and racialized boundaries to defy unjust authority on the spatial and temporal borders of empires, Zorro offers delectable material for feminist analysis of the gendering and sexualizing of political cultures and their particular imaginaries vis-à-vis social justice.

In sum, my publications and current and future research both bridge socio-political (especially in the sense of institutions, actors, and economies) and cultural (in the sense of both explicitly cultural terrains and worldviews/practices) approaches; and bring to this socio-political and cultural approaches analytic insights emergent from particular contexts and which attend to historical and cultural specificity. In spanning these two conceptual divides, my work is of interest to a broad audience, from historians and anthropologists to historical sociologists and scholars in ethnic, gender, and cultural studies.

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