Lisa Pinley Covert
I was born and raised in Southern California where I received a B.A. in history at California State University, Long Beach. My research interests include state formation and national identity in Latin America; the intersection of politics, religion, and gender in twentieth-century Mexico; US-Latin American relations on a formal and informal level; international and transnational histories of the United States; the Cold War; American empire; and the idea of Americanization. My dissertation is titled Defining a Place, Defining a Nation: San Miguel de Allende through Mexican and Foreign Eyes. Through a study of the Mexican town San Miguel de Allende between the 1920s and 1990s, this project grapples with the concept of national identities. Scholars and intellectuals have long been preoccupied with the question of national identity in Mexico. Most studies, however, fail to place national identity formation within a transnational context or to root abstract analyses in specific locales. To address these shortcomings, I apply methodological and theoretical approaches from history, anthropology, and cultural studies, and draw upon a wide variety of sources from oral histories and government archival sources to newspapers, novels, and tourist promotional materials. I am interested in two related questions: How did San Miguel move from the periphery to the center of national narratives about Mexicanness? And, how did the presence of a large population of foreigners – in this case tourists and expatriates – influence debates about San Miguel’s place in the nation? My project places several scholarly literatures in dialogue, from the study of foreign relations, culture, and gender, to globalization and political economy. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of studying national identities in a transnational context and it reveals how various interest groups use the concept of national identities to influence the distribution of economic resources and political power.
