2025 Theses Doctoral

Pochitas: Mexican American Girlhood in Depression-era Texas

Villegas-Verrone, Jordan

Weaving threads of intellectual, cultural, and political history into a richly textured social history of Mexican American girlhood during the Great Depression, this dissertation offers the first book-length study of pre-WWII Mexican American girls’ history. The project describes how ethnic Mexican girls articulated a unique and heretofore unacknowledged vision of “Mexican American” culture and politics distinct from — and in some cases directly oppositional to — the political cultures of men’s ethnic Mexican leadership in Depression-era Texas.

Pochitas recovers this vision of Mexican American girls’ radical politics from a fragmentary archive of yearbooks, scrapbooks, photographs, receipts, English and Spanish-language newspapers, play scripts, children’s books, oral histories, menus, memoirs, choreography, censuses, city directories, and immigration and vital records, in addition to club organizational records like speeches, conference transcripts, meeting minutes, memos, correspondence, and case files.

The project identifies Mexican American girls’ radical politics expressed not just in the girls’ manifestos, speeches, organized labor actions, and rigorous, self-directed public affairs study programs but also in the choreography of their folk-dance expositions, the planning of their enchilada dinners, their choice of entertainment at their birthday parties, and in the contours of everyday life for working-class Mexican American girls at the height of the Great Depression.

The dissertation not only explores the local social geographies of Texas’s Depression-era “Mexican colonies,” but also tracks Mexican American girls’ broader entanglements with a transnational web of activists, scholars, and political organizations that stretched from New York City to Mexico City and beyond. Particularly when their work and leisure took them beyond the recognized limits of their ethnic communities, the project ultimately argues that girls represented a social and political vanguard of the pre-WWII “Mexican American generation.”