Lecture Series: Sarah Lynn Lopez

Lecture Title: This Transnational Tie is Volcanic: Migrating Materials and the Mexican Men that Carry Them

Lecture Description:

What does it mean to study architecture at the crossroads of human migrations and place-making? What does a transnational story look like on the ground? What role do Mexican men play in hemispheric construction networks that span from Mexico’s heartland to metropolitan USA? And finally, by creating the structure to commission objects and architectures for themselves, what do people from Mexico who live outside the motherland choose to build and why? 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 critical to Mexico colonial and post-colonial infrastructure. 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 transnational (and hyper-local) migrant urbanisms in the US. This talk starts in the substrata of Mexico’s bedrock and ends in the commercial districts of Latinx Los Angeles. Here, the people who orchestrate fragile but highly sophisticated cantera networks, sometimes demeaned as “illegals” or “migrant bodies,” are understood through specific histories of placemaking and embodied forms of knowledge.