The Geography Department's Speakers Series presents "Relational Life: Legal Death" with Yolanda Valencia of the University of Maryland.
Based on over two years of fieldwork, including archival research, interviews with city leaders, testimonios from undocumented immigrants, and ongoing transnational ethnography, Valencia's research focuses on understanding how the Mexican community in Pasco, Washington creates places of tranquility and meaning under conditions of, what she calls, legal death. Most of her participants migrated from "El Rancho," in Mexico, the same rural community where she resided until the age of 17. She employs a transnational/trans-border approach by centering these two communities in her analysis of how processes of border imperialism and immigration law have impacted agrarian communities in Mexico and Mexican immigrants in the US, and in turn how immigrants themselves resist by adapting and readapting, what she calls, epistemologies from El Rancho to produce meaningful lives in the US.
Bio: Yolanda Valencia is a feminist Mexican immigrant scholar, writer, and teacher. In 2019, Dr. Valencia completed her Ph.D. in geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. That same year, she joined UMBC as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Environmental System.
