Assistant professor Michael Matthews presented at the 59th annual Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies in Park City, Utah on March 29, 2012.
His paper, “Rhythm, Rhyme, and Railroads: Challenges to Porfirian Policymaking in Popular Verse,” examines how lower class groups in 19th century Mexico used popular venues to engage economic and political policies from which they were excluded and that whjle they often sought to challenge elite policymaking, their discursive challenges worked within the language of domination at the same time that they confronted it.