Graduate Student Fellowship in Latino Studies

Magdalena Mieri

                   Vol.4, No. 1, April 1996                   

The Center for Museum Studies continues to support excellence in research in the social sciences with a new fellowship program, the Graduate Student Fellowship in Latino Studies, funded by the Smithsonian Institution's Latino Initiative Pool. The goal of the program is to support the scholarly development and research interests of Latino graduate students, to expose them to the resources available at the Smithsonian and to museum work.

The program emerged as a need to follow up on issues raised during the Latino Graduate Training Seminar "Interpreting Latino Cultures: Research and Museums," which completed its second year in 1995. The seminar is a partnership program with the Inter University Program for Latino Research. It brings together a group of fifteen Latino/a doctoral candidates in the humanities, and faculty from several U.S. universities and from the Smithsonian Institution to discuss issues of Latino cultural representation.

Five outstanding Latino/a Ph.D. candidates were selected as the 1995 Fellows. The selection was based on the quality of their proposal, the evidence of the student's ability to perform the project, the significance of the research topic and the potential advantage to Smithsonian collections.

1995-1996 Appointments:

M. Loren Chambers, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan Department of History, will explore the gender representations of the body in visual images that targeted the Mexican communities in the United States between 1919 to 1945. Ms. Chambers dissertation topic examines the role of consumer culture as depicted in advertising, moving pictures and professional and personal photograph. Some of the questions she will elucidate while developing the research are: How were sexuality and the body gender in national cultural narratives? How did these images differ between mainstream publications and those produced by and for the Mexican communities throughout the United States? What role did ethnicity and gender play in the advertising techniques of national companies? Fath Ruffins, Historian at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, and Marvette Perez, Curator at the same museum will serve as Ms. Chambers' sponsors.

Alicia M. Gamez is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University's Department of Modern Thought and Literature. Ms. Gamez will investigate how the 19th century American conception of race changes through the lenses of both textual and visual discourses. She argues that there is a much more complicated racial spectrum than is evident in current discussions of race in the 19th century which is explicitly evident in scientific texts and implicitly present in fiction of the period. She contends that photographic means of representation were crucial in simplifying a racial spectrum into the binary of the latter 20th century. Linda Tucker, curator in the department of Biological Sciences at the National Museum of American History along with Fath Ruffins and Marvette Perez will serve as Ms. Gamez's sponsors.

John McKiernan Gonzalez, graduate student at the Department of History, University of Michigan, will use archival collections to compare the conflicts over public health, medical care and modernization in El Paso and Puerto Rico between 1880 and 1940. Mr. McKiernan Gonzalez will concentrate on medical advertising in local Spanish language papers, on folk medicine in Puerto Rico and Texas and on Immigration and Naturalization Service records on the El Paso border station. Based on these sources, he will begin to trace a debate over curanderismo, clinic medicine and the meaning of modernization. He argues that through such records and the writings of folklorists, curanderos and parterres can be included within the changing repertoire of medical possibility for Mexicans and Puertoricans moving between rural and urban workplaces, residences and public spaces. Dr. Ramunas Kondratas, curator, Division of Science, Medicine and Society at the National Museum of American History will serve as Mr. McKiernan Gonzalez's sponsor.

Aurora Santillan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. Ms. Santillan will chronicle the history of Mexican and Chicana workers in Los Angeles during the period between 1900 and WWII. Her work brings together the study of labor, gender and ethnicity to examine the ways in which female class consciousness was shaped and informed by the ethnic group consciousness of pre-WWII Mexican Los Angeles. She will study the working lives of Mexicana and Chicana women by charting their aspirations and their adaptive strategies in the Los Angeles urban environment and the ways they shaped a women's culture beyond the spheres of home, community and work. Dr. Spencer Crew, director of the National Museum of American History will serve as Ms. Santillan's sponsor.

Jonathan Yorba, doctoral student at University of California at Berkeley, Department of Ethnic Studies, will research American paintings depicting mestizo/a imagery from 1848 to 1967 - during the time between the signing of the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo, when the Chicano/a identity was created, and the repeal of the last antimiscegenation laws in the United States. He will attempt to understand the artists' intentionally for creating multiracial imagery by analyzing the context in which the paintings were created and exhibited. Mr. Yorba will try to show the relationship between the cultural production and dissemination of paintings containing mestizo/a imagery and the social construction of miscegenation. Andrew Connors, Associate Curator at the National Museum of American Art will serve as Mr. Yorba's sponsor.