Marjorie R. Becker

Latin American historian with expertise in Mexican history and indigenous culture
  • Professor of History and English
  • Co-founder of the USC Latin American Studies Program
  • Associate, USC Gender Studies Program
Office: (213) 740-1674

Expertise

  • Latin American history
  • Mexican history
  • Modern Mexican indigenous civilizations
  • Tarascan indigenous world
  • Peasant and state in Latin America
  • Gender and hegemony in Latin America
  • Mexican Revolution
  • Racial matters
  • The invention of the notion of "Indian"
  • Cultural history
  • Innovative historical fiction
  • Poetry composition and critique
  • Approaches of and to time
  • Spanish and Guarani language translation
  • Mexican women's history

Languages

  • Spanish
  • Portuguese
  • French
  • Yiddish
  • Guarani

Additional Information

  • Author of Body Bach (2005), Piano Glass/Glass Piano and Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lazaro Cardenas, Michoacan Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (1995)
  • Author of “As Though They Meant Her No Harm, Maria Enriquez Remade the Friends Who Abandoned Her — Their Intentions, Their Possibilities, Their World, Inviting Them (Perhaps, It Is True) To Dance,” “Talking Back to Frida: Houses of Emotional Mestizaje” and numerous other essays based on in-depth study, research, and life in Spain, Mexico, South America and the U.S. Deep South
  • Recipient, Faculty Fulbright; awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, Yale University, the Inter-American Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (Charlotte Newcombe), the National Defense Foreign Language fund, the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies at the University of California at San Diego; and many other fellowships, grants and awards
  • Fluent in Guarani