The Portal to Texas History 2026 Research Fellowship Awardee
Kara Culp
Project Title
Schooling the Alamo: Mexican American Education and Literary Culture in San Antonio
Project Description
Schooling the Alamo: Mexican American Education and Literary Culture in San Antonio, presents a community-based microhistory of San Antonio’s Mexican American population in the 1970s. The paper is specifically centered around an examination of culture through writing, analyzing how Mexican Americans present themselves and their education in their own words, such as the newspaper the Chicano Times, as compared to those from the dominant Anglo culture like the San Antonio Register. It is couched in a methodology of source criticism, and argues that there was a substantial difference in how Chicanos viewed themselves and their schooling as compared to the politically Anglo-dominant culture in the city.
Biography
Kara Alexandra Culp is a PhD student in history at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies how local, state, and federal education policies affect Latinos in Texas. She is dedicated to community-centric history, a methodology that includes oral histories, using individuals’ personal papers, and creating public history projects which make her research more accessible to the communities which she is writing about. Kara attended Texas A&M university for her undergraduate degree, where she majored in history and minored in Spanish and secondary education. Before beginning her graduate studies, she spent several years working as a public high school teacher and volunteering. She was born and raised in Texas.
