Lecture Series: The Alternative Archive and Gendered Dispossession

About The Program

In this talk, Dr. Royal will discuss the relationship between gender and the law via her research/recovery of depositions, or testimonios, provided by Mexicanas/os in the late nineteenth century during land adjudication proceedings. Roybal argues that these testimonios form an “alternative archive” that offers insight into the multi-layered history of settler colonialism in the US Southwest as it relates to property, gender, and herencia (inheritance). Most histories about this period have traditionally privileged the male voice in terms of who/what is represented in the archive. The alternative archive reveals how Mexicanas/os enacted agency when they reinforced the significance of gender through their legal testimonies and resisted the US nation-state’s disciplinary power to dispossess them of their land and identities.

About The Presenter

Karen Roybal is an associate professor of Southwest Studies at Colorado College. Her specializations include Southwest Studies, Archival Studies, Chicanx and Latinx literature and history, and Cultural Studies. Roybal is the author of Archives of Dispossession: Recovering the Testimonios of Mexican American Herederas, 1848-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) and co-editor of the book New Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Her current book project focuses on the contestation of cycles of dispossession and displacement in the U.S. Southwest represented through different aesthetic forms including photography, short stories, oral histories, and musical compositions.