Alejandra Vela Martínez

Academic Degrees: Ph.D., New York University (Latin American Literature), M.A., Columbia University (Hispanic Cultural Studies); B.A., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Letras Hispánicas)

Research Interests: 20th-21st Century Mexican Cultural Studies, with broad interests in transnational mass culture, archives, feminine periodicals and literature, diasporic and border feminine literature, their reception and preservation throughout Latin American Modernity. I have also researched Latin American cinema, T.V. and their role in creating specific notions of gender, womanhood, and queerness. 

I am a literary and cultural studies scholar of modern Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico. My research examines how literature, film, visual culture, and archival institutions shape ideas about gender, cultural value, collective memory, and belonging. Trained as a philologist and textual critic, I bring literary analysis into conversation with archival research, material culture, and the study of cultural institutions.

My first book, Cursi: A Genealogy of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Mexico, forthcoming in Vanderbilt University Press’s Critical Mexican Studies series, examines feminized and devalued aesthetic forms in Mexican literature, journalism, and popular culture from the 1930s through the 1980s. Focusing on the category of cursi—a term associated with sentimentality, class aspiration, femininity, and aesthetic excess—the book asks how supposedly minor or conservative forms shaped women’s participation in the public sphere and influenced the production of cultural memory. More broadly, it investigates why certain authors, genres, and traditions are forgotten, and how literary and feminist histories reproduce particular hierarchies of value.

My work on individual authors and intimate archives provides a bridge between this project and my current research on institutional preservation. In my article “Elena Garro’s Gambit: The Politics of a Female Writer’s Intimate Archive (1935–1998),” which received the Victoria Urbano Award for a Critical Essay and the LASA–Mexico Section’s prize for Best Article in the Humanities, I examine Garro as a curator of her own literary legacy. I argue that the personal papers she assembled and deposited at Princeton University constitute a final act of literary and archival self-fashioning—an effort to shape how her life and work would be read, remembered, and valued.

This work also informs my critical edition of Rutas de emoción (UNAM Press, 2026), a selection of columns by Rosario Sansores, one of the central figures in Cursi. By bringing Sansores’s writing back into circulation, the edition extends my investment in expanding the archive of women’s cultural production while examining the material processes through which literary histories are preserved, organized, and remembered. Together, these projects mark a shift in my research from recovering overlooked cultural genealogies to examining the archival and affective structures through which cultural memory is produced.

My second book project, tentatively titled Preserving Latin America, extends these questions from individual archives to the institutions, practices, and affective formations that organize cultural preservation. Drawing on affect studies and Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” the project traces the attachments, anxieties, desires, resentments, and aspirations that configure genealogies of preservation and shape political memory. It examines archives, museums, heritage regimes, and other institutions that determine what cultural materials are preserved, displayed, and remembered, asking how objects acquire authority, symbolic value, and institutional meaning through processes of acquisition, conservation, restitution, and public debate. More broadly, the project explores how preservation reflects and produces struggles over cultural ownership, belonging, and the authority to define the past.

My earlier work addressed gender, sexuality, violence, popular culture, and queer literary networks in Mexico and Latin America. Across these projects, I am interested in how cultural forms organize judgments about culpability, victimhood, legitimacy, and social worth.

Taken together, my research explores the relationship between aesthetic form, archival practice, affect, and cultural memory. I am especially interested in recovering overlooked genealogies while also examining the institutions and interpretive frameworks that have rendered them marginal. These concerns inform my teaching and my engagement with students working on Latin American literature, gender and sexuality, archives, material culture, and the politics of memory.