Oral History & Mexican America

Frequently, oral histories are attached to a memory of a place, with the assumption that the people providing the oral history have been continuously connected to this place. As people who practice oral history, the many displacements and migrations that people in communities of color have experienced and undertaken offer challenges to the process of oral history. The Center for the Study of the Southwest and Centro will host a roundtable with scholars and participants who are wrestling with deportations, paved-over neighborhoods and the place of migrant work in place-rooted oral histories.

Marla A. Ramírez Tahuado is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands with specialization in Mexican American banishment, Mexican repatriation, oral history, and gendered migrations. She is an Assistant Professor of History and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Ramírez completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Chicana and Chicano Studies with a concentration in US history and a doctoral emphasis on feminist studies. For the 2018-19 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. She previously held an Assistant Professor position at San Francisco State University and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Ramírez’s has published articles in the journal of Latino Studies, New Political Science, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Education at UW-Madison, and the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant. Her book, Banished Women: A Hidden History of Mexican Repatriation is under contract with Harvard University Press.