Dissertation in Progress
“In the Name of the Father, the Governor, and A-1 Men: Performing Race, Gender, and Empire in Territorial New Mexico, 1880-1912”
My dissertation adds the distinctly regional perspective of the Southwest Borderlands to discourse on citizenship, race, and ethnicity by building upon scholarship that positions Territorial New Mexico in the years after the Mexican-American War as a site of U.S. colonialism and imperialism. In conversation with late nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives of race and identity politics in U.S., Latino/a, and Gender history, I argue that incarcerated working-class Nuevomexicanos, disabled Navajo, ethnic Eastern European immigrant miners, and Black veteran fathers all articulated elusive rights of citizenship by harnessing a gendered rhetoric—one rooted in the familial responsibilities of able-bodied breadwinners—that working-class Anglo New Mexicans constructed for their own purpose of achieving the national political legitimacy of statehood. To question how these performances of racialized masculinity functioned as a strategy for political belonging in a site of U.S. imperialism in the Southwest Borderlands, I analyze Spanish-language newspapers, Mexican legal statutes, Pueblo and Navajo letters written to Anglo Territorial governors, district court records, and records of the Board of Education, Bureau of Immigration, Territorial Penitentiary, and Mounted Police Force.
Poster Presentation
U.C. Santa Cruz Graduate Student Research Symposium, May 2009
Link coming soon!
Public Lecture
New Mexico Office of the State Historian Lecture Series, State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, March 2009.
www.newmexicohistory.org/podcasts/sabrina_sanchez.mp3
Master’s Thesis, U.C. Santa Cruz, 2006
“The California Civic League and the ‘Unprotected Girl’ of the Barbary Coast, 1911-1917.”
This thesis examined the relationship between enfranchisement and moral reform within a community of affluent, white clubwomen in Progressive Era San Francisco. This examination of urban reform and women’s electoral politics illustrates the means by which a specific group of socially-privileged women initially utilized its political power by promoting a class and race position tangled in a rhetoric of defending morality. My research revealed California Civic League members’ own class politics and use of morality as a political strategy both promoted a feminist agenda and reinforced prescribed gender, racial, and class norms by asserting a position of superior morality over white, working-class women. I conducted seven weeks of research at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, The Young Research Library Archives at the University of California-Los Angeles, and California State University East Bay in Hayward.
Bachelor’s Thesis, U.C. Berkeley, 2004
“Regulating Mrs. Warren: Theatre Censorship and Moral Reform in Urban New York, 1905,” University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2004
This thesis examined Anthony Comstock’s 1905 failed censorship campaign of George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession in order to illuminate various reactions to broader social changes within New York City that included the effects of urbanization, increased crime rates, the increased visibility of prostitution, and the role of the nation in examinations of the morality of literary characters. My research revealed that at the center of this censorship campaign rested a contested debate over the protection of public morality in a time of growing parental and familial fear over sexuality in urban New York.
