Sarah L Lopez is interested in how material evidence sheds sometimes surprising light on human experiences, perceptions, and actions of the past. She is a historian of the built environment and a migration scholar who focuses on how almost two centuries of migration between Mexico and the United States have created new landscapes, new architectures, and new subjectivities.
Lopez wrote a book about “remittance landscapes” in Mexico; places built and financed with dollars by people who were absent, remitting from afar. Homes, schools, roads, cultural centers, grave-plots, and more become indicators, echoes, and emblems of a complex distance embedded in migratory places. Now, she is studying volcanoes and their rocks, and how people from Mexico have quarried, carved, and carried those rocks to places throughout the United States—creating networked infrastructures of making that refashion two places through the goals and desires of bodies on the move. In this project, she seeks to understand how material objects and building materials like volcanic stone can strengthen or qualitatively influence the ties that bind people to places, and to one another. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and works with organizations, journals, and web-platforms to further research on the built / environment.
At MacDowell, Lopez worked on three chapters of her forthcoming book, Overburden: Mexican Migrant Labor and the Construction of North America. The culmination of ten years of field research, the book charts a transnational history of making from deep Mexico to urban U.S.
