Miroslava Chavez-Garcia

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · Department of History

This special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is guest edited by Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz. The articles in the collection reflect the primacy of gender and intimacy as tools of analysis in recovering the experiences of women of Spanish-Mexican and Mexican origin...

The television sitcom The Brady Bunch (1969–1974) and its subsequent reruns presented upper-middle-class whiteness and a version of idealized family life as normative. Its underrepresentation of racial, ethnic, and class differences did more than serve as a form of escapism for young Latina/o television watchers—it impacted their sense of identity...

Drawing upon a personal collection of more than 300 letters exchanged between her parents and other family members across the U.S.-Mexico border, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia recreates and gives meaning to the hope, fear, and longing migrants experienced in their everyday lives both "here" and "there" (aqui y alla). As private sources of communication h...

The introduction outlines the significance of the 300 personal family letters at the heart of the study’s archive. It describes the process through which the correspondence was acquired, examined, and analyzed as well as the tools and techniques used to narrate a broader history of migration, gender, intimacy, identity, and race across the U.S.-Mex...

Chapter five traces the experience of Paco Chavez’s friend Rogelio Martínez Serna— and that of his male peers—across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and attempts to achieve his hopes and dreams for an economically, physically, and emotionally stable family life. To do so, the chapter opens by examining Rogelio’s effort to migrate lawfully. It shows tha...

Chapter 3 focuses on gender and family life in Mexico, centering on the shifting power relations in the patriarchal household. Using dozens of letters written by José Chávez Torres to his son Paco Chávez, the author’s grandfather and uncle, respectively, the latter of which was living and working in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the chapter examines...

To explore the ways in which migrants negotiated longing, gender, intimacy, courtship, marriage, and identity across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the 1960s and 1970s, chapter 1 opens by examining and analyzing the broader racial, labor, and environmental contexts shaping José Chávez’s—the author’s father—experience as a Mexican laborer in Imperia...

Chapter 4 reveals that maintaining relationships between parents and children, though challenging, paled in comparison to the work needed to keep alive passionate romantic relationships between male migrants and the female partners they left behind. This chapter focuses on the on again, off again relationship between José’s younger brother, Paco, a...

Chapter 2 situates the historical lens to south of the border—to Calvillo, Aguascalientes, specifically—to probe how and why María Concepción “Conchita” Alvarado, the author’s mother, a vibrant, free-spirited young woman, eventually went through with the wedding, even though she had little interest in settling down and forming a family and expresse...

The conclusion details how the creative art of letter writing and 300 plus letters written in the 1960s and 1970s at the heart of this study have proven an invaluable source of insight on the past and present world. Indeed, the intricate and detail-laden missives provide a window onto the ways in which immigration policies and practices impacted th...

This essay provides an introduction to publishing in the humanities for junior scholars at the start of their careers and beyond. It reflects on how our relationships to publishing change along our career paths. Indeed, while the focus on publications is significant during our junior years and continues after tenure, the pressure feels more intense...

Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility Miroslava Chavez-Garcia Miroslava Chavez-Garcia is a professor of Chicano and Chicana studies at the University of California, Santa Bar- bara. I would like to thank Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Kelly Lytle-Hernandez, and the anonymous reviewers of the Journal...

On 28 October 2003, 15-year-old Ronny Tapias was gunned down in the late afternoon outside his school in Barcelona, Spain. News of his death sent Shockwaves throughout the Catalonian city and beyond. Alarmed about the growing skirmishes involving youths in the region, the press dubbed it a gang-related killing. The public, in turn, became incensed...

Chicana history has come a long way since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. While initially a neglected area of study limited to issues of labor and class, today scholars in history, literature, anthropology, and sociology, among others, study topics of gender, culture, and sexuality, as well as youth culture, reproductive rights, migration, an...

This unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries uses one of the harshest states-California-as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of you...

“Interview with Yolanda Cruz” is a conversation with filmmaker Yolanda Cruz, a graduate of UCLA’s film school and 2011 Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellow. The interview focuses on her filmmaking, indigenous origins as a Chatino (one of sixteen indigenous groups in Oaxaca, Mexico), and views of indigenous peoples in California and across the globe. T...

Three decades after the publication of “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality” it remains a classic in juvenile justice, criminal justice, and women’s history. At a time when only a handful of scholars had taken interest in the experiences of troubled females in the emerging juvenile justice system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,...

This article examines the intersections of youth, race, and science in early twentieth century California. It explores how scientific researchers, reform school administrators, and social reformers at Whittier State School advocated the use of intelligence tests to determine the causes of delinquency. Through the process of testing, they identified...

Nearly forty years have lapsed since the publication of Anthony M. Platt's The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969; 1977), a groundbreaking study critical of social reformers and the juvenile court of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that time, the study of juvenile justice has evolved into a rich and diverse as we...

Journal of Social History 39.4 (2006) 1225-1226 In Whitewashed Adobe, William Deverell details the ways in which city leaders and city builders "whitewashed" Los Angeles's early history and created a new regional identity that all but erased Mexican history and peoples from the landscape. Unlike Carey McWilliams's critique of southern California's...