Session Abstract

This panel provides a refreshingly energizing, historical consideration of the expressive cultures, networks, and public health attitudes that inspired individuals of Mexican descent across the U.S. Southwest to pursue asserting their sense of belonging, mobility, and rights across pivotal historical moments.  By focusing on the everyday influences, obstacles, and practices that paved the way for dynamic activist platforms, expressive cultures, and mobility that stretched across overlooked migrant corridors, destinations, industries, and venues, this panel advances our understanding of the creativity, risks, and trauma that empowered individuals of Mexican descent to move, stay in place, and/or express themselves and their beliefs in the face of alienating forms of racial exclusion, removal, and tradition. Propelled by their individual and/or collective resolve to exert their right to imaginings of community, faith, and rights that were compatible with their interests, each of the histories that comprise this panel elucidates the unexpected yet striking connections that informed the unwieldy subjectivities, performances, and mobility of individuals of Mexican descent.