PhD Candidate
About Vanessa
Vanessa is an interdisciplinary scholar who applies a Critical Indigenous theoretical approach to her work to produce decolonial intersectional scholarship centering Mexican, Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. As a PhD Candidate of Mexican American Studies, she has been trained in the academic study of relevant topics and issues related to Mexican Americans including migration, transnationalism, identity, Indigeneity, traditional medicine, gender, health disparities, foodways, cultural traditions, beliefs, and ancestral practices. As an Indigenous mother-scholar, knowledge keeper, and storyteller, Vanessa seeks to honor her ancestors and diasporic communities through her research by preserving and restoring their traditional knowledges and histories for generational healing and collective memory.
Dissertation
Vanessa is currently in the final year of her doctoral program and will be graduating in Spring 2025. Her dissertation titled, "Intergenerational Displacement in Aguililla-Redwood City: Migration from Michoacán and Diaspora in Northern California," details the diasporic community of people originally from Aguililla, Michoacán who established the historic transnational community of Little Michoacán in the unincorporated neighborhood of North Fair Oaks near Redwood City, California in the 1940s during the Bracero Program. Aguilillenses in diaspora are being forcibly displaced in Northern California by gentrification and are incapable of safely returning to their ancestral pueblo since Aguililla is being subjected to extensive cartel violence that is present throughout the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán. Vanessa's research traces the history of Aguililla from its precolonial past when it was a tributary community part of the P'urhépecha Empire and the P'urhépecha people were subjected to genocide during Spanish colonization, which led to historical trauma for surviving generations. Now, their descendants continue to face oppression, marginalization, and erasure while navigating life away from their ancestral homelands and experiencing intergenerational displacement in the historic transnational community they founded less than a century ago. Aguilillenses are resisting this displacement and further erasure by maintaining their practice of traditional Aguilillense culture, particularly through the production and consumption of the Indigenous food of Aguililla, which serves as a gathering mechanism to bring Aguilillenses throughout the Northern California diaspora together and honors the maternal knowledge of food and cooking passed down by ancestral cocineras tradicionales. Vanessa's dissertation features ethnographic interviews with members of the Aguilillense diaspora, archival study of historical documents, Indigenous autoethnography, and family history to recount the stories of her community and Michoacáno heritage.
Photo by Vanessa Moreno Wilcox
Mural by José Castro at Second Ave and Middlefield Rd in North Fair Oaks
Awards and Experience
Vanessa has received numerous awards including the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Fellowship, Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellowship, University of Arizona Hispanic Alumni Graduate Scholarship, and the University of Arizona Graduate Access Fellowship. She was a member of the Crossing Latinidades working group "The Latinx Past: Archive, Memory, and Speculation" and participated in the 2022 Crossing Latinidades Summer Institute at The University of Illinois at Chicago. She has organized and participated in multiple panels and roundtables at various national and international conferences including the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, the Latinx Studies Association conference, the Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social Summer Institute, and the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies conference. Vanessa has previously served as Graduate Teaching Associate in her department for two years, leading multiple discussion sections in three different undergraduate courses for four semesters. She also has an article titled "Intergenerational Displacement and Diaspora from Aguililla, Michoacán: Archives, Collective Memory, and Survivance" scheduled for publication in Winter 2025 in the Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad journal.
"Arrival of the Spaniards in Tzintzuntzan" featured in the Relación de Michoacán
(Public Domain image)