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 graduate of Mexican American Studies at The University of Arizona, 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 and beliefs. She is an Indigenous mother-scholar, knowledge keeper, and storyteller, and seeks to honor her ancestors and diasporic communities through her academic research by preserving and restoring their traditional knowledges and histories for generational healing and collective memory. Vanessa is currently a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at UC Santa Cruz where she is conducting a research project titled "Mexicana and Chicana Placemaking as Social Justice Activism in Northern California" utilizing archival materials from the Dolores Huerta Papers and Dolores Huerta Foundation Papers under the mentorship of Dr. Gabriela F. Arredondo.
Dissertation
Vanessa graduated from The University of Arizona with her PhD in Mexican American Studies 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, Mexico 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 the Northern California diaspora are being forcibly displaced by gentrification and 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 intergenerational displacement in Aguililla from its precolonial past when it was a tributary community part of the P'urhépecha Empire and the subsequent genocide of P'urhépecha people initiated by Spanish colonization, through the pueblo's continuous experiences of subjugation during Spanish colonialism and Mexican neocolonialism. The nation-state of Mexico has advanced extensive efforts of exploitation and extraction throughout the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, which has suppressed the people of Aguililla and their lands for centuries. This legacy of violence established in the Tierra Caliente region relates to the modern mass outward migration and manifestation of cartel violence in the region, thus displacing Aguilillenses, diminishing their communal wellbeing, and restricting their practices of transnationalism. Now, Aguilillenses in diaspora continue to face oppression, marginalization, and erasure while navigating life away from their ancestral homelands and are experiencing intergenerational displacement in the historic transnational community they founded a century ago. Aguilillenses are resisting this displacement and further erasure by engaging in methods of Indigenous survivance such as maintaining their practice of traditional Aguilillense culture, particularly through the production and consumption of the Indigenous food of Aguililla. Traditional food serves as a gathering mechanism to bring Aguilillenses throughout the Northern California diaspora together and honors the maternal knowledge of food passed down by ancestral cocineras tradicionales. Intergenerational Displacement in Aguililla-Redwood City features ethnographic interviews with members of the Aguilillense diaspora, archival study of historical documents, Indigenous autoethnography, and family history to recount the stories of Vanessa's community and honor her 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, Latinx Studies Association Conference, Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social Summer Institute, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference, National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Conference, and the Latin American Studies Association Conference. She is a co-founding member of the P'urhépecha Studies Collective along with her colleagues Dr. Mario Gómez-Zamora, Dr. Mintzi Martínez-Rivera, Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico, Dr. Luis Urrieta, Dr. Fabian Romero, Dr. Pavel Shlossberg, Rosario Niniz-Silva, and Lorena Gonzalez. Vanessa previously served as Graduate Teaching Associate in the MAS department for two years, leading multiple discussion sections in three different undergraduate courses for four semesters. Additionally, her first academic article titled "Intergenerational Displacement and Diaspora from Aguililla, Michoacán: Archives, Collective Memory, and Survivance" was recently published in the Winter 2024 issue of the Pasados: Recovering Histories, Imagining Latinidad journal.
