Interesting Talk on Tuesday (Jan 29)

I'm planning to attend this and thought others might be interested too (history job talk):

Widows and the Politics of Mourning: Methods for Writing Histories of Violence

 

Monica Muñoz Martinez

Tuesday, January 29th, 2013

2:00 PM

Humanities 1, 520

Martinez examines the massacre of fifteen ethnic Mexican men in the rural farming community of Porvenir, Texas in 1918. This research shows how surviving widows transcended traditional gender roles to reclaim political and social rights by seeking the aid of local lawyers and Mexican consulates to file claims against the assailants in both domestic and international courts. Martinez outlines these efforts while also exposing the limits of judicial apparatuses for reckoning with systemic state sanctioned violence in this period. Using both archival and ethnographic research methods, this presentation traces the cross-generational effort of survivors to cope with these memories throughout the twentieth century. It engages how these violent histories impacted and mobilized later generations to document their family histories. Martinez argues that due to a public amnesia regarding the history of anti-Mexican violence in the early twentieth century, local residents in Texas, and women in particular, have borne the burden of sustaining alternative histories and demanding a public reckoning with legacies of racialized and gendered forms of terror on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Monica Muñoz Martinez is the Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. She received her PhD in American Studies at Yale University where she focused on Latino/a history, women and gender history, ethnic studies, and the public humanities. While at Yale she co-founded the Public Humanities Initiative in American Studies. Her work to institutionalize this initiative came from an investment as a Latina historian in bridging divides between academic and public centers of knowledge. As a current postdoctoral fellow, Martinez is developing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, “‘Inherited Loss’: Tejanas and Tejanos Contesting State Violence and Revising Public Memory, 1910-Present,” which examines how state-sanctioned racial violence in the early twentieth century continues to influence social relations in southwest Texas.