Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez, PhD.

For my entry this week I spoke with a UA professor whose class I took last spring. As I have previously mentioned, I like to combine my journalism projects with my other academic love, Mexican American studies and research.

So, I went to assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies Nicole Guidotti-Hernandez‘ office to talk to her about women and the border region. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses like U.S. Third World Feminisms and Latina Feminisms in the Americas. The class I took with her was Chicana Feminisms: History, Theory and Practice.

Guidotti-Hernandez has taught at the UA for seven years and in that time took a sabbatical for two fellowships; a postdoctoral in Chicago for nine months and another nine months as a Fulbright at UNAM in Mexico City.

During our discussion, she told me about her article on Dora the Explorer, a book she has coming out and how history has shaped the nationalism of this region; as well as a uniqueness of the Gender and Women’s Studies department.

Her article, Dora the Explorer, Constructing “Latinidades” and the Politics of Global Citizenship looks at the children’s television show and how it has commodified Latino identities- that they’re all the same, Guidotti-Hernandez told me. Dora represents a universal Latino identity and Guidotti-Hernandez argues that’s just not true- Latinos are not universally the same. The show then impacts how people see all Latinos and doesn’t show any national histories.

I’d have to agree with her, and I think that even our main Border Beat site shows a small piece of the uniqueness among Latinos.

We moved on to her new book, her first book actually. Unspeakable Violence: Narratives of Mourning, Citizenship and Loss in Chicana/o and U.S. Mexico National Imaginaries. Her time in Mexico City was dedicated to research for the book, in which she states and argues that border violence in the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped U.S., Mexican and Chicano nationalism.

“I write about the past to connect the present. There’s a lot of ignorance about history,” she says about her book. “A lot of the violence is motivated by economics.”

Part of the economics she touches on have to do with the Yaqui’s of Sonora being displaced and relocated to Arizona, in collaboration with U.S venture capitalists and Mexicanos who had financial interest in Sonora, the book’s description reads.

“Violence is always there, it’s the technology that advances,” she says about the evolving ways to monitor the border. “This place has always been a contested region.”

The “unspeakable” violence she writes about show the ignorance of history she speaks about- and she “challenges methodologies” in the Chicana/o studies field by discussing misrepresented history.

So… we haven’t touched 100% on women and the border, but that’s okay. I think it’s also important to look at the history of the border, to have some sort of idea of why things are they way they are… and why it’s interesting and relevant to even have these areas of study. Before I left, we also talked about the Gender and Women’s Studies department, which offers the only undergraduate concentration in Chicana/Latina studies in the U.S. Also, in the PhD program, it is required to take a Chicana/Latina studies course.

This is to “not only get into mainstream, white feminism,” says Guidotti-Hernandez. “But to get more inclusion in general. It’s good to be doing stuff differently.”