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UH Grad Student Awarded Women’s Studies Fellowship
Posted: August 8, 2007
The University of Houston (UH) Women’s Studies Program awarded the 2007 Maude Smith Paddock Graduate Fellowship to Erin Graham. Ms. Graham is a Ph.D. student in history at UH where she works on the history of the family in the border cities of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. Her advisor is Dr. John Hart.
Ms. Graham’s research explores the changing family dynamics, gender roles, and definitions of childhood as migrants relocated from states such as Veracruz and San Luis Potosi to the northern border. With the initiation of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965, multinational corporations relocated their sites of assembly to the U.S.-Mexican border; while simultaneously, displaced Bracero workers returned to Mexico in search of employment. In addition, rural agricultural workers found it increasingly difficult to profit from the cultivation of their lands. The convergence of these three factors spurred mass migration to the border. Changes within the maquiladora industry, such as varying demographic preferences for potential employees, forced families to reevaluate their survival strategies as well as their interactions with each other and the state. Since 1965, bilateral and multilateral agreements such at the GATT and NAFTA intensified the border’s industrialization and globalization further accelerating profound changes within and responses by the family.
Ms. Graham’s research incorporates both oral histories and archival research to explore these processes of change within the context of mass migration and constantly flowing bodies, ideas, values, and labor.
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