Please join the Institute for the Study of Los Angeles and the Center for Community Based Learning as we host events curated by Visiting Scholar Vicki Ruiz.
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, PhD, is the author of Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Using more than 300 letters exchanged among family members across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the 1960s, this talk explores the financial, emotional, and personal longing of young Mexican migrant males. Focusing on the experiences of Rogelio Martínez Serna and that of his male peers in Mexico and the United States, this essay explores his repeated yet often failed attempts to achieve an economically, physically, and emotionally stable family life.
Rogelio never lost sight of his aims, however, especially with peers providing practical, emotional, and economic support for how to lead the life of a successful male Mexican migrant with his masculinity in tact. As Rogelio’s experiences and that of his peers make clear, migrants relied on each other and on the broader social networks to achieve lawful migration, employment, housing and transportation as well as entertainment and companionship, facilitating their settlement in and transition to the new environment.
Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara and holds affiliate status in the Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Feminist Studies. She is also Faculty Director of Graduate Diversity Initiatives in the Graduate Division. Miroslava is author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona Press, 2004) and States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (University of California Press, 2012). Her most recent book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, is a history of migration, courtship, and identity as told through more than 300 personal letters exchanged among family members in the 1960s and 1970s. The book appears in the David J. Weber series in New Borderlands History from the University of North Carolina Press. Miroslava has also published numerous articles on related topics of migration, juvenile justice, and Chicana history as well as on mentoring young scholars of color in academia.
Most recently, Miroslava has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, Ford Foundation for Diversity, and Organization of American History (OAH) and the Committee for the Germany Residency Program, which awarded her a residency at the University of Tübingen in 2016. Most recently, the Western Association of Women’s Historians awarded her the Judith Lee Ridge prize for the best article by any member of the organization for "Migrant Longing, Courtship, and Gendered Identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," published by the Western History Quarterly in Summer 2016. In November 2017, that same essay received the Bolton-Cutter Award from the Western History Association for the best article on Spanish Borderlands history.
For more information please contact us at isla@oxy.edu
Additional support provided by: the Center for Community Based Learning, the Mellon Arts & Urban Experience Grant, Howard & Roberta Ahmanson, Latino/a & Latin American Studies History Department
