Rivera Garners UNM-Mellon Fellowship

ALS PhD candidate in English, Díana Noreen Rivera, has been awarded a UNM-Mellon Doctoral Defense Preparation Fellowship to facilitate the completion of her dissertation, “Remapping the U.S. Southwest: Early Mexican American Literature and the Production of Transnational Counterspaces (1874-1958).” Her study argues that early Mexican American writers offer an alternative paradigm of transnationalism for understanding the literature, culture, and geography of the U.S. Southwest as it has been imagined in Anglo American cultural production about the region. Dr. Jesse Alemán, ALS coordinator, directs the dissertation.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the highly competitive UNM-Mellon awards dissertation fellowships in the humanistic social sciences across ten UNM departments to senior doctoral students working on studies relevant to Latino/a or Native American communities. This is the first year that the English Department’s ALS program has been included in the qualified field of humanistic social sciences at UNM designated by the Mellon Foundation. The six-month award is meant to assist in the completion of the dissertation by providing a $12,500.00 stipend; tuition remission and health care coverage; and a $500.00 professional development or research support fund.

Rivera was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas and received her BA and MA at the University of Texas-Pan American. She credits her passion for Mexican American literary study to her parents and grandmothers, who shared family stories of life in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. Her publications include “Third Space Resistance in Américo Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand: A Defense of Nuevo Santander” (forthcoming) in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Volume IX; “Reconsidering Jovita González’s Life, Letters and Pre-1935 Folkloric Production: A Proto-Chicana’s Conscious Revolt Against Anglo Academic Patriarchy” (2011) in Chicana/Latina Studies Journal; and “Dime con quién andas”: Toward the Construction of a Dicho Paradigm and Its Significance in Chicano/a Literature” (2008) in the Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas. She’s the recipient of the American Association of University Women Santa Fe scholarship, the Office of Graduate Studies Earickson Trust award, the New Mexico Folklore Scholarship, and she was the English Department’s inaugural Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres fellow.