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Maria Lopez Calleros

PhD
American Studies
euge23@unm.edu

Photo: Maria Calleros

Title of Dissertation : Female Disposability and the Intimate Economies of Precarious Work: Maquila Workers and Domestic Workers in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest

María Lopez, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies, was awarded an LAII Ph.D. Fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year. Her project contributes to the literature on women’s studies and ethnic studies by theorizing the devaluation of domestic service and maquiladora work, combining comparative racialization and women of color feminist critique. She stages two significant interventions: First, the study of racialization processes from within particular labor sectors challenges the presumption of a unitary experience of racialization of Mexicans, and a homogenous experience in confronting relations of domination. Second, it conceptualizes the experiences of Mexican and immigrant domestic workers and Mexican and Mexican American maquiladora workers as complex female imaginary that not only speaks to the material reality of the multiple oppressions they face in their daily lives, but also how they conceive, contest, and analyze the embodied subjectivities that emerge from the devaluation of their lives and labor. She believes this project will make important contributions in postcolonial literature through the analysis of the epistemic violence of disposability as a hegemonic discourse that travels along circuits of transnational labor.