Q&A: Sarah Lopez, Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning

Architectural historian and migration scholar Sarah Lopez recently joined the Weitzman School as an associate professor of city and regional planning; she teaches in the Department of Historic Preservation as well as the Department of City & Regional Planning, including coursework for the PhD with a concentration in the History of the Built Environment. Her work explores the intersection of migration, architectural history, ethnography, and urban and spatial justice. Lopez is the author of the book The Remittance Landscape: The Spaces of Migration in Rural Mexico and Urban USA and is at work on two new books.

On November 2 at Weitzman, Lopez was in conversation with historian Mike Amezcua about his new book, Making Mexican Chicago, which tells the story of how the Windy City became home to the third largest Mexican metropolitan community in the United States. The conversation is available to watch on Weitzman’s YouTube.

What do you see as the throughline across your work?

I think about my work as resting at the intersection of US-Mexico migration and the material world. US-Mexico migration is about the country and places in Mexico and the country and places in the United States that are implicated in the movement of people and things across the border. In relation to the material world, I am talking as an architectural historian who looks at the built environment and who thinks about all the scales of our environment. The material world that surrounds us happens at the scale of buildings, landscapes, objects.

So all the projects I’ve done take a slice at that relationship in different ways. The first project, which turned into my book, was looking at remittance landscapes—what migrants who live and work in the United States build in Mexico with the money they earn here but send back home. That project continues to live on in different ways; it has kind of an interesting afterlife.

Another project of mine looks at the history of immigrant detention and immigrant incarceration facilities. For that, I examined Texas and the building up of the detention infrastructure from the 1960s to the present.
 

Why did you want to come to Philadelphia and continue pursuing this research and teaching out of the Weitzman School?

I think the Latinx migration in the East Coast is very different than it is in the Southwest and the West. I have a particular perspective that comes from having lived and worked in Texas, and I’m curious about the comparative geography of what it means to live and work in Philly as somebody from not just Mexico, but Central America as well.

And then Weitzman itself is a dynamic place. I am excited by the faculty that are here that I get to collaborate with. Like [Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning] Dominic Vitiello, who wrote The Sanctuary City. I don’t know of that many other scholars nationwide that really have their hand on the pulse of migration histories and cities and space the way he does. And he’s just one of many. Also [Associate Professor of City & Regional Planning] Francesca Ammon, who created the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment that brought me here. Weitzman is a place where history is elevated and it’s a place where there's a future for history—that’s exciting to me.

“I have a particular perspective that comes from having lived and worked in Texas, and I’m curious about the comparative geography of what it means to live and work in Philly as somebody from not just Mexico, but Central America as well.”

This semester you’re teaching the course Material Histories and Ethnographic Methods. Why do you think it’s important for students in design, planning, and preservation to learn how to do ethnography and anthropology in practice?

This class is very much about people’s stories and material worlds and how we combine those two sources of evidence to tell powerful stories about places.

Being excited about methods for students is about them realizing they can tell their own story, they can see something and identify something as important, and they can craft a way to communicate that importance. Design students engage so many different complex urban issues from transportation to articulating a façade to imagining a landscape. All of those arenas are about understanding the relationship between people and the built environment. In order to fully understand that relationship, you have to have a sense of the context of the built environment.

A big part of the class is about the context of one’s own subjectivity. It’s not just about interviewing, it’s also about looking at what is your own material and historical context and then how do you use that to then interrogate other social worlds.
 

Your current research focuses on both the material and social connections of labor from Mexico to the US through the lens of the cantera industry. Tell us a bit about this research and why you applied this particular lens.

This research tracks a material which is known as cantera in the commercial Mexican stone industry and colloquially amongst people in Mexico. The book I’m working on tracks the evolution of that material from bedrock to quarry to artisan town where it’s shaped and sculpted, to transportation networks, to installation at job sites, and finally to clients (from Mexico) who commission it.

It tracks the material and the people who shape the material. At each of those sites that I just described, I am trying to do business histories and labor histories of the individuals who are a part of cantera's transformation. When I was doing research in Chicago, Phoenix, and LA, I learned that people who had migrated and moved to the United States were finding these really informal and innovative ways to bring the material north. I realized that cantera was a critical material to Mexican people who are on the move or who have moved as well as people who are in Mexico. And that ignited my curiosity.

In terms of thinking about the people who work to shape it and install it, it’s a pretty obvious lacuna in built environment scholarship. Not just that the labor behind putting together landscapes isn't talked about, but specifically when we think of later 20th century scholarship on cities and architecture, Mexican labor, and more recently Central American labor, should at least figure into the conversation. It is a startling omission in my view. I’ve come across such amazing work in geography and political science and anthropology on Latinx labor, but not much in architectural and urban history. That is where thinking about these networks across the US Mexico border really just comes to life for me.