Miriam Fernandez

My current work studies the construction of Mexican nationalism in the early nineteenth century, I focus on the rhetorics that helped create and support nationality. Rather than study the Mexican nation as a broad construction, I look at the particulars. I analyze the ideological tropes that support the people’s imagination of a nation. Such as the story of a translator in the sixteenth century, named Malintzin, who is turned into a national traitor in the nineteenth century; or like the story of la Virgin de Guadalupe who is constructed by Criollos in Mexico in the seventeenth century; or the story of a weeping woman who foretells the destruction of her people and is later turned into a boogey-woman story that maintains patriarchal order through fear. I analyze how these ideological tropes play a role in the maintenance of nationalism. This is important because the way in which nations are imagined (created) leads to the way that nations imagine us, too. My work breaks down the mythic aspect of nation/nationalism to understand how people are constructed as citizens and subjects of the nation—and how these constructions lead to the marginalization of certain bodies, languages, and histories.