Warnock Lecture Series: Sarah Lopez (The University of Texas at Austin), “Architectural History as Migrant History: The Development of a Binational Construction Industry from Below”

Architectural History as Migrant History tracks the development over the last fifty years of a binational construction industry that has emerged around the excavation (in Mexico), transportation, distribution, and installation (in the US) of cantera stone. Cantera literally means “quarry,” but the Spanish word is used in Mexico to describe a specific brittle rock used to build colonial churches and civic infrastructure. More recently, a network of Mexican quarrymen, stonemasons, homebuilders, architects, and businessmen have refined a cantera market that caters to a Mexican and Mexican American clientele in the American Southwest. Architectural History Is Migrant History recasts Mexican construction-related labor by tracking the development of a meaningful and sophisticated industry that has reshaped design norms and building trades in two countries from the shadows of a formal American economy.  

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