Mexican Mobility in Perspective: Building Futures / Closing Pathways, Lecture and Q&A led by Dr. Sarah Lopez

Artwork used in event banner: Francisco Delgado, Brother, Carnal, 1997, Oil on Wood Panel, 48″ x 36″. Mexic-Arte Museum Permanent Collection

Join the Mexic-Arte Museum on Saturday, April 17th starting at 11am CST for “Mexican Mobility in Perspective: Building Futures / Closing Pathways”, Lecture and Q&A led by Dr. Sarah Lopez as part of the Museum’s current virtual exhibition, Life and Experiences in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands on view now via the Museum’s website. The virtual lecture will be live streamed via Zoom and Facebook Live and moderated by Mexic-Arte Museum Curator & Director of Programs, Dr. George Vargas. Participants can pre-register for the event via Zoom by filling out info and clicking the Register button on this site or simply by viewing the lecture on the Museum’s Facebook page on the day of the event. Participants will get a chance to engage in a Q&A with Dr. Sarah Lopez during the last few minutes of the virtual event!

Visit the Museum’s current virtual exhibition, Life and Experiences in the U.S/Mexico Borderlands on view now!

About the Virtual Lecture

“Mexican mobility” refers to a complex set of entangled processes that include bodies, dollars, desires, and objects. The concept of mobility is also constituted by its opposite: immobility. This talk situates images from the Juan Antonio Sandoval Jr. Collection—namely, the car and the activist poster—in two distinct phenomenon that are shaping contemporary migrant experiences: remittance homes and immigrant detention. While global remittances are primarily understood as a financial flow with economic, social, and political consequences, remitting is also transforming the built environments of migrant hometowns around the world. For many, the migrant dream is to build a new home in Mexico with money earned in the U.S. At the same time, the systems that detain and incarcerate migrants continue to grow. Whereas in 1960, Texas had only a handful of places to detain migrants, today it has dozens. This talk focuses on two aspects of the built environment—the remittance home and the immigrant detention center—to situate “the borderlands” and “migrant dreams and nightmares” in their material manifestations and lived experiences.

About Dr. Sarah Lopez

Sarah Lopez, a built environment historian and migration scholar, is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Lopez’ book, The Remittance Landscape: The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015 and won the 2017 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Lopez was a Princeton Mellon fellow in 2016-2017, and is a faculty affiliate with American Studies, the Amos Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and the Center for Mexican American Studies.