AHA Session 121
Conference on Latin American History 26
Conference on Latin American History 26
Friday, January 8, 2027: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom C1 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Fernando Pérez Montesinos, University of California, Los Angeles
Papers:
Comment:
Fernando Pérez Montesinos, University of California, Los Angeles
Session Abstract
This panel examines how Indigenous descended women and their families employed gendered identities to not defeat, but sidestep the colonial and modern Mexican state towards their own political goals. Together, the panelists explore how state discourses of race, gender, and class created violent correctional institutions, exclusionary ejidos, the militarized Sonoran borderlands, and the divisive Región Sierra of Guerrero which continues to shape Mexican geopolitics. With attention to cases from Guerrero, Sonora, Veracruz, and Mexico City, the papers explain how Mexican state projects aimed at rehabilitation, re-acculturation, and integration were disguised under promises of welfare and public safety, material provisions, and land rights. In this panel we analyze how criolla women, Indigenous women and their families, and peasant organizers navigated geographies of gendered power both miniscule and expansive, from the Región Sierra to the capilla de las recogidas. Through a gendered lens we explore how legal frameworks, racial discourses, and women’s negotiations with the state helped constitute new geographies for Mexican women and their families. By working to understand how reclusas, ejidatarias, Yaqui women, and gomeras used, and were used by, the state’s spatial impositions, the panel joins historians of citizenship (Earle 2007; Kay Vaughn 1997; Mikki 2018) and state building projects (Craib 2003; Rosemblatt 2018; Smith 2009; Osten 2018; Garfield 2001; Beattie 2001) in Mexico that emphasize gender as key to understanding the cemented, yet fictitious, social and cultural landscapes of Mexico, both past and present. Likewise, following the lead of scholars of race and gender in Mexico, the panelists explore how colonial and modern state projects sought to create order out of social disorder by employing spatial tactics of containment, displacement, and the construction of new borders to create a vision of order and progress (Gonzalbo 1998; Arrom 2000; Blum 2009; Lamas 1997; Soto Laveaga 2007). Together, the panel proposes that through a look at space across time we will gain a greater understanding of both the Mexican state and the inhabitants who built and undermined the colonial and modern state authorities.
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