Borderless Narratives: Resisting Empire Through Memory, Movement, and Marginalized Spaces

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Speaking to this year’s conference themes of the end of the U.S. empire, this panel considers the stories of people and spaces that have persistently challenged U.S. exceptionalism while uncovering the vulnerabilities of imperial power. Together, we explore how culture, memory, economies, and environments resist the political and ideological borders of the United States. Drawing from american studies, history, ethnic studies, geography, and cultural studies, this work illustrates the people, places, and ecologies at the margins that have survived the violence of empire and borders. Dr. Plascencia’s work looks at how working-class communities shape Tijuana, Mexico, through their everyday actions and connections, offering a global sense of place. It also examines how ethnic studies methodologies offer a way to resist dominant narratives and challenge imperial frameworks by integrating personal memories and experiences that disrupt traditional academic approaches. Dr. Castro Sevilla explores how the memory and autoethnographic practices of diasporic Chinese Mexican women not only shape feminist methodology, but also how their intergenerational experiences, memories, and practices of self-archiving, intimate pláticas, and material culture transcend and collapse notions of borders, community, and diasporic identity. Dr. Brown-Bernstein explores how Latinx migrant entrepreneurs in Los Angeles built businesses in the swap meet industry, defying neoliberal economic policies through trans-Pacific supply networks. Her paper introduces the concept of “transgressive globalization” to describe how they subverted economic constraints to create livelihoods and communities. Islam interrogates how race, gender, class, and citizenship shape systemic violence in Stockton, California, using oral history and digital humanities to map the effects of exclusion and incarceration on black and brown communities. In the shadow of empires—in spaces across the U.S.-Mexico border, the Pacific, Canada, and Mexico—transnational familial memories, informal economies, and cultural practices persist despite the empire’s efforts to obscure or suppress them. These stories, centering community-based narratives found in oral histories and community memories, inspire us to reject fear and envision new possibilities outside the grasp of empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Tijuana es Historia de Familias: Oral Histories and Place Making in the 20th Century - Maria J Plascencia, University of San Diego

• Chinese Mexican Autoethnographies - Yareli Castro Sevilla, UCSD

• Transgressive Globalization in Los Angeles’ Informal Economies - Julia Brown-Bernstein, Yale

• Oral Histories of Violence, Exclusion and Resistance - SAEEDA ISLAM, Yale University

Chair

• Lucero Estrella, Lawrence University

Comment

• Natalie Santizo, San Diego State University

Biographical Information

Lucero Estrella

Lucero Estrella is a historian of Japanese migration to the Americas, focusing on diasporic communities in northeastern Mexico and south Texas. Her work explores the circuits of migration formed across two empires–Japan and the U.S.– and mediated by Mexico’s own nationalistic ambitions during the early twentieth century. Estrella’s work is based on archival research in Spanish, Japanese, and English in Mexico, Japan, and the U.S., and oral histories with Japanese communities living in Mexico and Texas. Oral histories uncover the stories, memories, and cultures of Japanese communities that formed in states like Coahuila, Nuevo León and Texas.

Natalie Santizo

Dr. Natalie Santizo is an interdisciplinary historian concerned with understanding how foodways—the production, consumption, and distribution of foods and food entrepreneurs over time—have shaped Latinx placemaking and survival in Southern California. Her research interests include suburban history, critical food studies, racial geographies, and public history. Her first book project, Mexican Foodways in the SGV, pieces together a social and cultural history of 20th century Mexican American communities in the San Gabriel Valley. Dr. Santizo was recently awarded a $300,000 grant for the project Unearthing the Chicana/o Movement in San Diego: Digitizing the Education Movimiento. She will lead a three-year digitization project alongside archivist Erika Esquivel.

MJ Plascencia

María José Plascencia is an interdisciplinary scholar who explores placemaking, social movements, and cultural production at the U.S.- Mexico border. Plascencia grew up in the Tijuana - Chula Vista border region, and her background informs her community-engaged methods. As a first-generation college graduate, fronteriza, and Chicana scholar, she is committed to mentoring students from diverse backgrounds.

Yareli Castro Sevilla

Yareli Castro Sevilla is a community-based, interdisciplinary scholar bridging the fields of Ethnic Studies, Asian Studies, and Latin American Studies. Her current research explores the hi/stories, experiences, cultural productions, and local social movements of diasporic Chinese Mexicans throughout the Americas. As a formerly undocumented immigrant and a descendant of Sinaloense Chinese Mexicans, immigration is an integral part of her story and a guiding factor for her scholarship and approaches to research and teaching.

Julia Brown-Bernstein

Julia Brown-Bernstein is the Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University. Her research focuses on the effects of late-stage global capitalism on migrant and working-class communities throughout urban settings of the U.S. West and U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. Julia’s current book project examines how residents of California’s San Fernando Valley adapted to regional deindustrialization and the privatization of social services from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Before pursuing her doctorate Julia taught 8th-grade U.S. history in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. She also holds an M.Ed. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College.

Saeeda Islam

Saeeda Islam is a third year PhD student in American studies at Yale University. She holds a BA and MA in history from CSU Sacramento. Islam’s research interests include the intersection of immigration history, carceral history and medical history. She studies the incarceration of Latinx women and other minorities (such as Punjabi and Afghan refugees) at the southwest borderlands in the US. Of Mexican and Pakistani heritage, Islam was born and raised in Stockton, California.