Congratulations to Yasmine Gomez who, on Wednesday, May 27 passed her written and oral exam. Surrounded by her committee (Jessica Perea, Sasha Welland, Sonnet Retman, Alexandria Ramos, and Michelle Habell-Pallan), Yasmine achieved ABD status for her dissertation project "Fronteras Embrujadas: Tracing Tejana Tensions and Speculative Statelessness on the U.S. Mexico Border."
Through ethnographic and archival research in South Texas, Yasmine is examining how Tejane activists are resisting technocolonial projects and the ways in which Tejana Feminist Speculative archives can offer methods of agency that center Indigenous sovereignty and transnational solidarity. This work looks to policy, literary archives, and community activism to understand how borderland feminist theory can be expanded in this moment through historical tracings of Tejana Speculative literature and cultural production to theorize new epistemologies of liberation.
Yasmine begins her archival research this summer in Texas and will begin writing her first chapter in the fall.