In Their Words: Claire Urbanski

Name: Claire Urbanski

Department: Feminist Studies

What Scholarship or Award did you receive? The Lionel Cantú Memorial Award

What year are you (1st year, 3rd year)? Fourth Year

College: University of California, Santa Cruz

Where do you call home? Oakland, CA

What is your field of focus? Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

With all of the choices for college, what made UC Santa Cruz stand out? 

The intellectual and activist legacies of Angela Davis and Gloria Anzaldúa at UC Santa Cruz, as well as the Feminist Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies programs. I was drawn to these programs for its desire to challenge traditional academic disciplinary boundaries and to produce innovative, social justice oriented research.  

I hope to produce publicly engaged research through writing and community activism, as well as teach as a professor at a university or community college.

Attending “The Feminist Architecture of Gloria Anzaldúa: New Translations, Crossing and Pedagogies in Anzaldúan Thought” conference. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/Las Fronteras changed my entire worldview when I read it at the age of 19, and ultimately led me to pursue dissertation work. To be in an intellectual environment that recognizes and celebrates the brilliance of her work continues to open and expand my sense of possibility and passion for learning.

The Cantu award will allow me to complete a chapter of my dissertation titled “The Afterlife of Settler Colonial Incarceration: Archeological Excavation as Militarization in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” which will also be published as a chapter in the forthcoming book, Firsting in the Transatlantic Modern World (Routledge, 2019). The award will fund me to complete archival research at the Arizona State Museum and the University of Arizona Library during the summer of 2018. This chapter is especially significant to the completion of my dissertation and the growth of my academic career, as it will be my first academic publication and is where I will make the core of my dissertation argument. 

For research awards, please include a one paragraph description of your research written for a general audience. 

My research argues that U.S. historical practices of archeological excavation and museum containment of Indigenous dead have been foundational to forming the U.S.-Mexico militarized borderlands. I focus on historic and contemporary practices of archeological excavation along the Arizona/Sonora border (particularly along Tohono O'odham lands) to contend that archeological excavation must be understood as a key surveilling technology in mediating U.S. national boundaries of land, identity, and belonging. I do this by demonstrating how U.S. projects of Native American dispossession have been necessary to claim and assert U.S. militarized territory. I describe how the collecting and unearthing of Native American dead was written into U.S. settler law with the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allowed for Native dead to be unearthed and put on display in national museums. This mandated the incarceration of exhumed Native ancestors into colonial institutions, enforcing a federal containment strategy over Native connections to place and kin. By looking at archeological excavation as a part of incarceration, surveillance, and policing, I demonstrate the key role museums and research institutions have played in the formation of the militarized U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I then look comparatively at Arizona archeological records, newspaper articles, Border Patrol tactics, and forensic identification practices to consider the archeological removal of Indigenous dead as standing in direct correlation with the production of migrant death along the U.S.-Mexico border. I make connections across issues of human remains repatriation, militarization, incarceration, immigration, and state violence to position that U.S. archeological excavation and museum containment of the dead must be understood as central and foundational to state technologies of surveillance and policing, as part of enforcing and facilitating settler colonial boundaries of land and life.