2007-2008 Pruitt Dissertation Fellowship Recipients

“Protecting changing spaces: A comparative study of three Mexican cities with UNESCO World Heritage districts, Guanajuato, Morelia, and Oaxaca”

First, I would like to thank the Society of Woman Geographers for providing me with the financial backing needed to undertake my research in Mexico. I am currently a PhD candidate in Syracuse University’s geography department. I was born and grew up the youngest child of ex-pat American parents in Tübingen, Germany. As long as I can remember, I have always been a geographer of sorts – I started traveling on my own in Europe as a teenager. In college, I studied political science and Spanish – my college did not offer geography. I spent a semester abroad in Chile and upon graduation, moved to Korea to work as an English teacher. When I returned to graduate school in international relations at Syracuse, I discovered geography, and finally found a disciplinary home. My geographical interests include cities, tourism, urban landscapes, and tourism cartography.

My dissertation research focuses on the symbolic and material importance of UNESCO World Heritage designation for three Mexican cities whose historic centers share this distinction: Guanajuato, Morelia, and Oaxaca. Mexico’s historic city centers are characterized by colonial architecture and their centrality to local power structures, both civil and religious. Thus, despite their changing uses and the movement of such power structures to peripheral areas, the symbolic meaning of these spaces remains salient for locals, yet their look and structure has also been reconfigured to fit the needs of cultural tourists, a market niche Mexico increasingly seeks to capture. Tourism, after remittances and petroleum, is Mexico’s largest source of income. Traditionally, national tourism strategies emphasized Mexico’s beaches, but the need to diversify Mexico’s tourism products has led to the increased promotion of colonial cities as well as archaeological ruins. Mexico ratified the World Heritage Convention in 1984 and by 1987, Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico City’s historic districts had been added to the list, in addition to archaeological zone of Monte Alban, near Oaxaca. Guanajuato followed in 1988, and Morelia in 1991. But, what exactly does “World Heritage” designation mean for these sites? Their architectural richness, first and foremost, is considered to be of “universal value” though also, their political and economic importance in the context of the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, respectively.

My research seeks to examine what UNESCO World Heritage designation means for historic districts, their preservation, and contemporary uses and promotion. I arrived in Guanajuato in August and the majority of my research to date has taken place there. Major activities include consultation of the State Archives and Municipal Archives, which provided back issues of local newspapers as well as other archival material, as well as interviews. Cartographic products for tourism purposes were available and not surprisingly, they emphasize the historic center and not the city’s mines, which provided the economic basis for the city’s development in the seventeenth century. Review of the newspaper records have yielded more than four hundred articles that report on preservation efforts, public works intervention, and tourism-related activities in Guanajuato. I also collected current newspaper articles, as well as solicited data from various government offices, when available.

Furthermore, I spoke with officials in various governmental sectors, including urban development, tourism, cultural affairs, and heritage preservation. I also interviewed architects that have been involved in the preservation schemes. I have obtained the current planning tools, which date back to 1994, as well as the regulations and norms that apply to the historic center. The Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) published a catalog of inscribed buildings in 2001 and small plaques on the buildings designate them as cataloged. Land use changes in the historic center, however, have not been systematically recorded, for instance, it is unknown how land uses really breakdown in the historic center, i.e., how commercial uses compare with residential uses, though the current municipal government is considering the creation of an archive that will begin documenting this information in 2008. Land use changes are lamented and casually referred to as widespread, yet the lack of data makes it difficult to ascertain how much more commercialized the historic center really has become. One indicator, however, of more emphasis on a tourist economy is that since 1998, the number of hotels and hostels in Guanajuato doubled from 55 to 110. Another effect of the lack of land use data is that the municipal government does not know exactly how many of the buildings are part of the built environment’s heritage are in disrepair, uninhabited, or in danger of collapse. The urban development office estimates that between seventy and seventy-five buildings are in this state. Furthermore, Guanajuato does not have one office dedicated to its historic center; only a sub-section of the “Protection and Vigilance” department within urban development conducts daily visits to the historic center. Minimally, Guanajuato’s historic center is now mainly a landscape valued for economic and particularly tourism-oriented purposes, yet the lack of territorial information makes it an endangered and vulnerable resource, and considerably alters the nature of production of urban space due to World Heritage designation.

I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Arizona, and have just arrived in Leh, Ladakh, India, to begin my dissertation research. I am a feminist political geographer and my dissertation research reflects those concerns – it is focused on the geopolitics of reproduction as experienced by women in Leh. In Leh, religious identity has become politicized and personal decisions such as whom to marry and how many children to have are now part of political discussions. In my MA research, I explored the ways that this has played out in the decline of intermarriage between Buddhists and Muslims (the main religions prevalent in Ladakh). I found that when I asked questions about politics, people told stories about marriage, social occasions and children. This inspired my dissertation research, which is focused around the question of how women negotiate intimate decision-making when their decisions are part of political narratives. Given political narratives about population competition, are women’s choices affected? If so, how?

I intend this research to contribute to scholarship in the following ways: a) provide an explicitly feminist take on geopolitical theory, by making the focus of the research the very people who are often left out of conventional geopolitical theory; b) make geopolitics less abstract by examining the everyday processes through which state formation and international relations play out; and c) draw political geographers’ attention to demography – the study of population is very political, but political geographers have so far not addressed demographic questions.

My specific research questions and related methods are as follows:

1. Geopolitical dynamics of the district: What are the intersections between local political identities, international geopolitical narratives (e.g. the India/Pakistan conflict), and community geographies of interaction?
   1. Method: Semi-structured interviews and participant observation
2. Geopolitical dynamics of town and neighborhood: How are changing geographies of interaction – the meaning and use of public spaces and households – understood? What influences do these spatial dynamics have on family, identity and self-definition?
   1. Method: Community-based Ethnographies (Discourse analysis)
3. Geopolitical dynamics of the body. How do emergent geopolitical narratives and concurrent identities relate to marriage patterns, family decision-making, reproductive strategies and fertility decisions? To what degree are families of Buddhists and Muslims related, and, if so, to an increasing or decreasing degree?
   1. Method: Oral histories, Survey, and Participant Observation

This summer I began my research with a pilot study that involved testing my survey questions, making contacts with local women’s organizations and the local reproductive health providers, doing preliminary interviews, and planning how to accomplish the community-based ethnographies. During the fall in Tucson, I reviewed the data I had collected thus far and made arrangements for my longer research stay. My experience over the summer was very encouraging, and the preliminary results are exciting. Although my sample size was small, the pilot of my survey questions proved to be very intriguing: while prevalent political narratives in Leh suggest that Muslim women have more children, the survey results suggest that both Buddhist and Muslim women share the “quality over quantity” discourse in common, that is, they express a desire for small families with the perception that they will be better able to care for two or three children. I also had very interesting interviews with reproductive health providers, who have a lot to say on these issues. My preliminary interviews revealed heightened tensions around family planning, as there are some who fear that women’s enthusiastic embrace of family planning, (especially sterilization), will lead to the decline of the Buddhist community.

The summer was heartening, because my initial fears that women would be reluctant to talk about personal matters were exaggerated. My personal ties to Ladakh have placed me in a position that has some advantages. My marriage to a Ladakhi and prior experience working with a women’s NGO in Leh have made me a somewhat familiar figure (women are often keen to comment on my own reproductive choices and relate their stories to mine – e.g. having a love marriage, waiting to have children). At the same time, being a foreigner also has advantages as people have a sense of my neutrality or want to make sure I understand their side of the story. I am currently settling in, refining my survey and setting up participatory ethnographies.

The SWG Pruitt National Dissertation Fellowship has greatly aided my dissertation work through the funding of equipment, software, and stipend money for the data analysis I will conduct when I return to the U.S. in the fall.

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. My research involves the causes and impacts of climate variability and change. My dissertation aims to increase our understanding of how climate variability in the western United States impacts water resources, which are increasingly threatened due to population growth pressures, natural climate variability, and the prospect of future climate change.

My receipt of the Pruitt National Fellowship has made a tremendous contribution to my ability to progress in my research. Over the last six months, I have been able to concentrate on my research, spending my time in the field and in the laboratory. In July and August 2007, I conducted the main thrust of my dissertation field work. I completed a pilot study in summer 2006, but the majority of my sample collection occurred this past summer. Using an increment borer, which is a non-destructive method to remove cores from trees, I was able to collect approximately 500 tree-ring cores from Pinus flexilis (Limber pine), Pinus Ponderosa (Ponderosa Pine), and Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas fir) trees over eight sites in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

Since returning to Tucson at the end of August, I have spent the large majority of my time in the laboratory, working with the tree-ring samples I collected. I first mounted and sanded all of the cores. I then began cross-dating my samples and building chronologies for each of the field sites. This important process allows dates to be assigned to each core with certainty, and must be completed before further analyses take place. Thus far, I have completely dated one site and partially dated four other sites. Following the cross-dating procedure, the tree-ring cores must be measured for future climatic analyses. This is a very time-intensive procedure. Due to the Pruitt Fellowship, I was able to hire an undergraduate student to work for me part-time measuring these samples. This has been incredibly valuable to me, freeing me to concentrate on the dating aspect of the lab work.

My research is also advancing on other fronts. I have been meeting individually with each of my committee members to decide on the papers that will make up my dissertation. I have received very good advice from them and look forward to my future analyses and writing. I have also entered into a collaboration with a non-profit educational institution in Wyoming, which will culminate in a workshop with natural resource managers in the Jackson area, likely in summer 2008.

In October 2007, I had a paper accepted for publication in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. This paper is one of two papers I am tying up that deal with air quality, the topic of my Master’s thesis. The other is currently in the revision stage at the International Journal of Climatology. In addition, I submitted an article for inclusion in the Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change. I attended the 70th Annual Meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers in Long Beach, CA in October. I presented a paper and was awarded the Harry and Shirley Bailey Award for the Outstanding Paper in Physical Geography for this presentation. Outside of my dissertation research, I participated as a judge in an undergraduate poster competition for the University of Arizona’s Student Showcase event. I also attended a workshop held at Arizona State University, titled Conference on Climate Change & the Role of Higher Education in Arizona: Preparing our Students for a Changing World, a topic that is important to me.

In the upcoming six months, I will continue working with my samples, and I will then be able to start analyzing the resulting data. I will be attending three more conferences over the next six months: the American Geophysical Union, the Association of American Geographers, and the Mountain Climate Research conferences. I will also be teaching an introductory physical geography course in summer 2008. Once again, I would like to thank the Society of Women Geographers for your role in helping me achieve the progress noted in this report.