Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Interdisciplinary Studies

First Advisor

Stephanie Alvarez

Second Advisor

Alejandra Ramírez

Third Advisor

Christen García

Abstract

The U.S.–Mexico borderlands, specifically the Rio Grande Valley, is a culturally rich site yet deeply affected by coloniality where Indigenous cultures have been erased and suppressed. The Mexican American War devastated Indigenous communities as their knowledge of healing was dismissed by Western science and predominantly buried. This history of oppression and colonization in the borderlands rendered the region with “una herida abierta,” in the words of Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa. However, despite an open wound, there is potential healing that can be incited through colonial resistance within the home. Texts that convey culinary and healing epistemologies include cultural productions such as oral histories of a borderland curandera, the visual art of Carmen Lomas Garza’s Curandera (1977), Alexis Marie Ramos’s Valle de el Rio Grande Codex (2022), Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez’s Citlali: Cuando Eramos Sanos (2012), and Anel Flores’s book Empanada: A Lesbiana Story en Probaditas (2013). Together, these texts bring to light embodied ancestral knowledge that has long been marginalized. These texts contribute to a larger decolonial project that reclaims and values decolonial epistemologies, in this case, sensorial knowledge. My thesis not only reclaims ancestral wisdom but also positions the body as a site of resistance and survival. This project fills a critical gap by demonstrating how the home, food, and the body can serve as archives of resistance and tools for cultural resurgence.

Comments

Copyright 2025 Kimberly Monserrat Grimaldo. https://proquest.com/docview/3240621819

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