Ursula RallGraduate Student

I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate studying colonial Latin America. My dissertation research explores the spatial mobility of women of African descent within and between Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz from 1580 until 1750. More specifically, I seek to understand how Black women's social networks formed across urban centers can help us better understand their contributions to the socio-economic mobility of the Black Mexican population during the seventeenth century and these women's sense of community, ethnicity, and womanhood.

My dissertation, titled "Forging Inter-Urban Communities: The Spatial Mobility and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in Seventeenth-Century New Spain," explores Black women's movement within and between Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz in the long seventeenth century. With my project, I hope to complicate our understandings of race, ethnicity, and womanhood in the Spanish empire, using explorations of space and community to demonstrate the key position of women of African descent in the socio-economic mobility of the Black population throughout the seventeenth century. Furthermore, I hypothesize that women had a unified sense of identity based on Blackness and womanhood during this time, earlier than previous scholarship believed these categories emerged, through their racialized and gendered inter-urban social connections. I am currently completing a year of archival research split between Mexico, Spain, and Italy.

My research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Grant, the American Historical Association, the Forum on Early-Modern Empires and Global Interactions, the Conference on Latin American History, Emory University's Halle Institute for Global Research, and Emory University's History Department.

Education

• B.A. Bates College

Research Interests

Colonial Mexico
Gender Studies
The Black Atlantic
Empire
Space

Dissertation Topic

"Forging Inter-Urban Communities: The Spatial Mobility and Social Networks of Women of African Descent in Seventeenth-Century New Spain"

Faculty Advisors