Friday Nov 1st, 10am, History Conference Room 529

Janey Fellow Melissa Amezcua presents her most recent work based on the 2013/2014 Janey Summer Fellowship she was awarded. See title and abstract below:

Melissa Amezcua: We speak for the Nation: Oil workers and the Nationalization of oil in post-revolutionary Mexico 1934-1938

This paper examines the discourses of sovereignty that converged in one of the defining events of Mexican nationalism: the nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. Official discourse construed this event as the act of assertion of the sovereignty of the nation mainly focusing on Cardenas expropriation decree and emphasizing a unitary conception of sovereignty rooted in the state. Against this dominant narrative of nation-building as a top-down process my concern is with the underlying politics at stake and that the official narrative leaves out: the role of oil workers in the articulation of sovereignty and national resources that constituted the central discourse in the legitimation of the expropriation. The aim is to examine how these different discourses converged in this conjuncture how they parted in the aftermath of the expropriation and how this illuminates tensions between competing notions of sovereignty.