The Portal to Texas History 2021 Research Fellowship Awardee

Joel Zapata

Project Title

From West Texas to the World: Chicana/o Activist Print Culture and Social Transformation

Project Description

Utilizing archival materials, oral histories, civil rights organizational records, print media, as well as the personal papers of several activists, “From West Texas to the World: Chicana/o Activist Print Culture and Social Transformation,” an article project, will uncover the history of the West Texas Chicana/o Movement and that movement’s print culture. Hence, this project will take scholarship on the Chicana/o Movement towards its actual geographical range that included West Texas and the larger rural United States, demonstrating the Chicana/o Movement’s national reach.

Biography

Joel Zapata is Assistant Professor at Oregon State University’s School of History, Philosophy, and Religion. Zapata completed his Ph.D. at Southern Methodist University, and his dissertation won the 2020 National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco Dissertation Award. His “Taking Chicana/o Activist History to the Public” received the Frederick C. Luebke Award for the best article published in the Great Plains Quarterly in 2018.