Past guests:
Marla A. Ramírez, 2026
Professor Ramírez discussed her recent work Banished Citizens: A History of the Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation (Harvard University Press, 2025). From 1921 to 1944, approximately one million ethnic Mexicans living in the United States were removed across the border to Mexico. What officials on both sides of the US-Mexico border called “repatriation” was in fact banishment: 60 percent of those expelled were US citizens, mainly working-class women and children whose husbands and fathers were Mexican immigrants. Mexicans, regardless of legal status, were scapegoated for stealing American jobs and overburdening relief rolls. US officials in collaboration with Mexican officials orchestrated mass removal raids. Though their initial goal was to remove Mexican immigrants, these removals became an avenue for the coerced displacement of working-class Mexican American women and children in the name of economic recovery. The likely to become public charge (LPC) clause of the 1917 Immigration Act and a relic of coverture doctrine, which linked husband and wife into one legal identity in marriage, were used for the mass removals. Relief and employment systems in the US positioned men as wage earners and women as economic dependents, which increased the dependency logic of coverture. As such, Mexican American women and children were systematically at greater risk of removal, given their presumed economic dependency on their Mexican immigrant husbands and fathers. Drawing on oral histories, transnational archival sources, and private collections, Banished Citizens illuminates the lasting effects of coerced mass removal on three generations of ethnic Mexicans.
Marla A. Ramírez, is an assistant professor of history and Chicanx/e & Latinx/e studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Angelica Waner, 2025
Waner's talk provided a brief overview of her current book project. Through interdisciplinary methods of close reading, archival research, and Indigenous Theory, Dr. Waner argues that Zapotec literary magazines published in Mexico City and Oaxaca across the 20th century can be read as sites of autonomy for Isthmus Zapotec intellectuals. Through the publication and dissemination of these magazines, the intellectuals enact Zapotec futurities. The talk then connected these magazines to preliminary research on zines published in California by Oaxacan youth and students, exploring the thematic connections that cross borders and time.
Angelica Waner is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Richard T. Rodriguez, 2024
In this talk, Richard T. Rodríguez discussed his recent book A Kiss Across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad and its reception since publication. Published by Duke University Press, the book explores the relationship between British post-punk musicians and their Latine audiences in the United States since the 1980s. Melding memoir with cultural criticism, Rodríguez spotlights a host of influential bands and performers whose music and styles hold significant sway on generations of fans enthused by their matchlessly pleasurable and political reverberations.
Richard T. Rodríguez is professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Beginning fall 2025, he’ll join the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles as professor of Chicana/o and Central American studies. He is the author of Next of Kin: The Family in Chicano/a Cultural Politics (2009) and A Kiss across the Ocean: Transatlantic Intimacies of British Post-Punk and US Latinidad (2022), both published by Duke University Press. The author of numerous articles about Latine cultural expression and politics, he is currently finishing a book of poems about his time living in Chicago titled Exemplars and Accomplices.
Floridalma Boj Lopez, 2024
In her talk, Dr. Floridalma Boj Lopez discussed the origins of Mobile Archives of Indigeneity (MAI) as an analytic that emerged from an engagement with Critical Indigenous Studies and her personal lived experience as a member of the Maya diaspora from Guatemala. She will also discuss the ways that MAI requires flexible methods that prioritize community centered projects and discuss how MAI is applied in her upcoming monograph. She will specifically examine how Maya textiles act as a Mobile Archive of Indigeneity in the diaspora and consider the layered gender, historical, political, and economic context of the textiles.
Floridalma Boj Lopez is an assistant Professor in Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Dr. Boj Lopez’s work uses a community centered approach to analyze the experiences of Maya migrants as they cross settler colonial borders and encounter distinct racial hierarchies in the United States. Her research examines cultural production among the Guatemalan Maya diaspora with a particular emphasis on how Maya communities respond to structures of state violence and understand their relationship to Indigeneity in diaspora. She is connected to her K’iche’ community in Xela (Quetzaltenango) and works to share her research and resources across borders.