I am a labor historian who is interested in the relationship between civil society and the state in Latin America. More specifically, my research centers on the interactions between the government, campesinos, and the landed elites in southern Chiapas, Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution and the post-Revolutionary era. I am interested in how the national, state, and local governments attempted to create a national identity among rural workers and peasants who often did not identify themselves as Mexicans. The Soconusco, the coffee-producing zone in southern Chiapas that borders with Guatemala, had an ambiguous national identity historically. The vast bulk of the population immigrated to the region: the wealthy elite generally came from Germany, while the predominantly indigenous rural workers came from either the highlands of Chiapas or from Guatemala. Following the Mexican Revolution, the government of
Lázaro Cárdenas attempted to incorporate the Soconusco more thoroughly into Mexico through a massive agrarian and educational reform program. In the process of these reforms, the various social groups had to grapple with fundamental questions of citizenship. What did it mean to be a Mexican? How did various interest groups attempt to shape the post-Revolutionary Mexican state to meet their own needs? Currently, I am in the process of revising my dissertation into a book tentatively titled "Negotiating Revolution: Labor Organizing and Identity in Southern Chiapas, 1880-1950. "
I also have two other projects percolating. One is an article on the labor history of banana workers in the Soconusco. The banana industry in southern Chiapas did not develop until after the Mexican Revolution and the implementation of major agrarian reform programs. Did the banana industry become a "model revolutionary industry" as the workers optimistically hoped? How did the restrictions of an export-oriented industry shape the banana ejidos? The preliminary draft of an article on this project will hopefully be finished by the fall of 2002.
The second project has developed out of the 2002 Conference on Latin American History meeting. After a very fruitful panel on state formation in modern Latin America, several panel participants are working on an edited book project that will explore regional variations in the relationship between the state and civil society. We are collecting several articles on state formation that would be suitable for use at the undergraduate level, including contributions from Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Bill Skuban, and Brett Troyan. I am co-editing the project with Dr. Patrick Barr-Melej of Iowa State University.
Finally, the next major (i.e. long-term) research project will explore women workers in southern Mexico and the expansion of weaving/textile production for the tourist market. I am interested in how gender roles changed as women's work became oriented towards the national and international market. As women became increasingly tied to producing crafts for profit, what impact did this type of work have on their families, communities, and women's relationship to the state? This is in the very early stages--I've done some preliminary document searching in San Cristóbal, Chiapas and in Mérida, Yucatán.