Sarah Lopez

Sarah Lopez
This Transnational Tie is Volcanic: Migrating Materials and the People that Carry Them in Mexico and the US
Part of the MIT Fall 2024 Architecture Lecture Series. Presented with the History Theory Criticism Group and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. 

ONLINE Webcast

This Transnational Tie is Volcanic elevates both Mexican laborers and cantera stone as two key protagonists in the production of new architectures and landscape elements on both sides of the US-Mexico border. “Cantera” means quarry but in Mexico and among the migrant community in the US Southwest, cantera is used as a commercial term to describe Mexican tuff, the mottled volcanic rock that built both colonial churches in cities like San Luis Potosí and Pre-Columbian monuments like the Zapotec structures of Mitla. Once reserved for Mexico’s elite, an exploration of cantera today repositions Mexicans and Mexican Americans as key informants in the design and execution of migrant urbanisms in the US defined as both transnational and hyper-local. By tracking the excavation, processing, distribution and commissioning of cantera stone over the last fifty years, I also explore the limits and possibilities of a material-ethnographic-environmental method that situates Mexican quarrymen, artisans, masons, entrepreneurs, and their objects, at the heart of a binational history. Transnational building processes are here key to understanding cantera landscapes, deployed by once-and/or-still marginalized individuals in both Mexico and the US who claim binational futures.

Sarah Lopez is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Lopez is a built environment historian of 20th century Mexico and the United States whose research focuses on material histories of migration, remittance development and landscapes, and migrant incarceration. She is interested in experimental historical methods, ordinary landscapes, and environmental humanities. Lopez' book, The Remittance Landscape: The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA, won the 2017 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She has been the recipient of Mellon fellowships at Princeton, Dumbarton Oaks, and in 2023, the Center for the Study of Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery. 

This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online.

Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.

HTC Forum is made possible in part with the generosity of Thomas Beischer and the Lipstadt -Stieber Fund.