Catherine Nolan-Ferrell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, History
Contact
- MH 4.04.34
- Catherine.Ferrell@utsa.edu
- Curriculum Vitae
Bio
Office Hours: Tuesdays noon to 1:00pm, Thursdays 4:00pm to 5:30pm and by appointment.
Catherine Nolan-Ferrell, Associate Professor of History, is a social historian of modern Latin America. Her research interests are in migration, citizenship, and national identity in Modern Mexico and Guatemala. Her first book, Constructing Citizenship: Transnational Workers and Revolution on the Mexico-Guatemala Border, 1880-1950, Univ of AZ Press, 2012 (translated as La construcción de ciudadanía: los trabajadores transnacionales y la Revolución en la frontera México-Guatemala, 1880-1950. UNAM/CIMSUR, 2018), focuses on how laborers who worked in the coffee industry along the Guatemalan/Mexican border developed an understanding of nationality, particularly after the implementation of agrarian reforms in the late 1930s.
Her current book project, Migrants or Refugees? Violence and Forced Migration in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, 1950–2000, examines the experiences of impoverished Guatemalan Maya communities who migrated to southern Chiapas, Mexico, to harvest coffee for export, and who later sought protection from the Guatemalan genocide. The project investigates how poverty, labor migration, and political violence shaped migration decisions and blurred distinctions between voluntary economic migration and forced displacement. It argues that government officials and elites maintained categories of voluntary and forced migration because they helped define the boundaries of citizenship—determining who belonged within the nation and who could be excluded from it.
At the same time, the book explores how Maya migrant laborers and refugees advanced their own understandings of citizenship and national belonging. For many, exile in Mexico represented not a rejection of Guatemala but a commitment to a more just and inclusive vision of the nation. By centering indigenous Maya perspectives, the project argues that ordinary Guatemalans reshaped the meanings of citizenship and belonging, revealing how poverty, exclusion, and political violence blurred the boundaries between economic migration and forced displacement while shaping claims to national membership. Most recently, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to support this research.
Dr. Nolan-Ferrell teaches contemporary Latin American courses to undergraduate and graduate students, and she was awarded multiple UTSA President’s Distinguished Achievement Awards for teaching. She received a Department of State IDEAS grant to develop an education abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico that emphasizes collaborative and experiential learning with UABJO (State University of Oaxaca) and two local NGOs (SURCO and Ollin Tlahtoalli).
Research Interests
- Modern Mexico and Guatemala
- Migration
- Refugees
- Citizenship and Nationality
