Sarah Lopez

I am interested in the myriad ways that material evidence sheds sometimes surprising light on human experiences, perceptions, and actions of the past. I am 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. My first book,  The Remittance Landscape: The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA , explores the impact of migrant remittances—dollars earned in the U.S. and sent to families and communities in Mexico—on the architecture and landscape of "rural" Mexico and "urban" USA. Homes, schools, roads, cultural centers, grave-plots and more become indicators, echoes, and emblems of a complex distance embedded in migratory places. Now, I am working on two books. One is a study how people from Mexico have quarried, carved, and carried volcanic tuff, known as “Mexico’s marble,” to homes, restaurants, and businesses 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, I seek 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, as well as how so called 'laborers' from Mexico are reshaping the US construction industry. The second project examines the long history of migrant incarceration in the U.S. from the docks of Ellis Island to the privately run mega-detention facilities in rural Texas.

My teaching interests include architectural and urban histories of the Americas; the  interface between migration, architecture, and places; the use of interdisciplinary methods (including ethnography) to study history, space and society; and micro-history as a tool to contextualize the past and fight for the future. These grants and fellowships have supported my work: Princeton-Mellon in Architecture, Urbanism, & the Humanities; Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard in Urban Landscape Studies; Center for the Study of Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery; and MacDowell. My book, The Remittance Landscape, won the 2017 Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians.  

EDUCATION

• B.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2001
• M.S., University of California, Berkeley, 2006
• Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2011