Center for Regional Studies fellow examines how Latine writers shape their communities

The Center for Regional Studies (CRS) welcomed its new postdoctoral fellow Jorge Hernández. His one-year appointment will be spent developing his manuscript Corazones Urbanos: Critical Literary Regionalism and Southwest Cities and which expands his dissertation into a full-length book examining how Mexican American writers articulate and critique the transformations of their communities.

He also plans to lay the groundwork for a digital humanities project titled Mapas del Corazón, which will map Chicanx literary works and how writers imagine and inscribe the cities they write about. Additionally, it will serve as a public-facing, community-engaged project to accompany his book, incorporating oral histories, images, and narratives from community members in Tucson, Albuquerque, and San Antonio, so that the people whose stories shaped this research can see themselves in it as well.

"At its heart, my project is about these communities' resilience. Gentrification and displacement are part of their story, but that's not the whole story. The intellectuals and writers I study offer powerful visions of how these communities respond to change: how they organize, assert their identity, and preserve both memory and place even under pressure. Their endurance is what my work keeps circling back to," Hernández said.

Having grown up in Vado, New Mexico, is what inspired Hernández's interest in place, community, and the stories that shape them.

"When we arrived, the community still preserved many of its historic buildings, including a post office, a general store, and a schoolhouse," Hernández said. "The schoolhouse anchored the community and was where I began my education as a child. Though I didn't have the words for it then, I began to understand very early on the many layers that make up a place and how story shapes it."

That early awareness stayed with Hernández throughout his academic journey, eventually becoming the foundation of his research on Mexican American urban spaces in Tucson, Albuquerque, and San Antonio.

"My scholarship is rooted in my borderland experience and in my effort to understand the resilience of my home community, despite its invisibility to others," he said. "I watched friends, relatives, neighbors, and myself weigh whether to stay or leave the community as it faced real challenges, from poverty to gaps in basic infrastructure and economic opportunity. Those choices shaped my experiences, and the questions that arose from them now drive my work."

Returning to UNM as a postdoctoral fellow is especially meaningful for Hernández, who earned his doctorate through the university's Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

"I came to UNM because it's one of the most important and distinctive places in the country for this kind of work," Hernández said. "It's home to faculty whose work on Chicanx and Latinx literature isn't only their specialty but also their life's work. I wanted to be somewhere that could match the seriousness of the questions I'd been asking since I was young, and UNM was that place."

Albuquerque has also become integral to his research. As one of the cities at the center of his scholarship, living in the city provides a perspective that extends beyond archival research.

"Albuquerque's layered history is evident in my daily drive to campus, in conversations with neighbors, and in the neighborhoods I write about," Hernández said. "That closeness enriches how I read every source, every interview, and every archive, grounding my scholarship in the place it studies."

As CRS's newest postdoctoral fellow, Hernández looks forward to expanding his research while creating opportunities for community members to see their own histories reflected in his work. Through both his book manuscript and the Mapas del Corazón digital humanities project, he hopes to demonstrate not only how places shape stories, but how stories, in turn, help communities preserve memory, identity, and a sense of belonging.