Elisa is a post-graduate fellow with the Transborder Digital Humanities Consortium at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where her research focuses on migration, archival studies, and transborder digital humanities. Born in San Antonio, Texas, with roots in Viesca, Coahuila, she examines Coahuila–Texas migration through a transnational perspective using community-centered archives, GIS mapping, and visual storytelling, emphasizing migrant identity, historical migration, and ethical memory reconstruction.
Why did you apply to HASTAC?
I learned about HASTAC through my peer and colleague, Jessica Corona, who was a member. I was immediately drawn to HASTAC because of its strong emphasis on networking and community building. As someone interested in transborder migration and community-centered practices, I am especially drawn to the intersectional approaches represented within HASTAC. I have found it to be an invaluable space for keeping up with scholars across disciplines, connecting with like-minded individuals, and learning from their work. I have also found the opportunities to publish and write through HASTAC to be incredibly helpful as a post-master’s fellow preparing to apply to PhD programs in the fall.
What has been your favorite course so far (as instructor or student)? Why?
In the course Mapping Course: Making History in the Dark Age, taught by Dr. Jessica Nowlin, I created and presented the project The Álamo & the Rise of a Military Society: Through the Lens of the Second Flying Company of San Carlos de Parras, which examined the Second Flying Company of San Carlos de Parras, stationed at Mission San Antonio de Valero beginning in 1803, and included numerous soldiers from Viesca, Coahuila. These soldiers were not only military agents but also carriers of familial and cultural networks that shaped early settlement patterns in San Antonio, particularly in La Villita. Their migration from Viesca to San Antonio represents an early instance of large-scale mobility that influenced the city’s demographic and cultural composition. This course taught me how to use StoryMaps in ArcGIS and how to integrate textual and cartographic sources. Using StoryMaps, I was able to visualize these spatial relationships to enhance scholarship on Tejano identity, the historical ties between Texas and Coahuila, and the development of early colonial settlements in the region. I was able to take this history course, despite being in the Spanish department, through my involvement as a Transborder Digital Humanities fellow. We were also invited to present at the 4th Annual John L. Nau III Conference on Texas History at The Witte Museum in San Antonio, where I was awarded Best Interdisciplinary Poster. This class demonstrated how interdisciplinary projects can be and taught me how to make them legible across multiple fields of study. It was fascinating to hear from professors and students in the History department and to see where our disciplines and research interests intersected, reinforcing the value of bridging methodologies across departments to deepen scholarship and understanding.
What inspired your current research or creative work?
I was deeply inspired by the resilience of my parents’ homeland and its underrepresented yet historically significant past. My parents come from a small town in southern Coahuila, Mexico—Viesca, Coahuila—that has endured multiple crises, including governmental abuse and corruption, environmental damage, water loss, and large waves of migration. Despite these challenges, Viesca has persisted, a resilience reflected in the town’s motto on its crest, “Resurgiremos siempre,” which translates to “We will always rise.” Many community members continue to return, while others have remained throughout it all. As I began to learn more about the town’s history and my own family’s history, I wanted to tell a different story of migration and survival—one that centers the microstories of the community within Viesca and of its immigrant populations who were pushed to leave by various structural forces. I have long been fascinated by photographic collections, and this interest led me to digitize many family archives from the community through a postcolonial digital humanities lens, a process that ultimately grew into a community archive designed to remain accessible to the community itself. Using ArcGIS StoryMaps and StoryMaps JS, the repository was transformed into interactive maps that trace the relationships between migration flows, significant historical spaces, and the region’s shared memories.
What do you want to do after you graduate?
Now, as a post-graduate fellow at the Transborder Digital Humanities Consortium at the University of Texas at San Antonio, I am planning to apply to doctoral programs that will allow me to expand my community archive in order to involve more community members and build a larger, more connected narrative. I hope to become a professor working within the transborder, preferably digital humanities, field. I aim to combine research, teaching, and community-engaged digital scholarship to continue studying and expanding research on northern Mexico and South Texas, particularly regions and communities that have been historically marginalized or rendered peripheral within national narratives. I believe there is much that is consistently overlooked or erased in these regions when the history of Mexico is studied, especially in relation to migration, cultural continuity, and local forms of knowledge production, and through my work I seek to challenge these omissions by centering community memory, oral histories, and ethically grounded digital methodologies.
How does digital scholarship fit into your research, teaching, or activism?
Digital scholarship allowed me to democratize access to knowledge and memory work. The development of the digital archive began in spring 2024 within the course Latina/o Studies Text and Context 6053, taught by Dr. Sylvia Fernández at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Its initial phase featured a digital map highlighting five key sites in Viesca, each accompanied by a brief spatial analysis. This was complemented by a digital timeline that documented, in chronological order, the changes resulting from migration processes reflected on the map. When I began conducting a spatial analysis of Viesca, Coahuila, I found very little information available online and was often led to Facebook pages where community members shared photographs and videos while collectively reminiscing. I came to realize that this need for connection—central to the community—had been modernized and sustained through social platforms such as Facebook, allowing members who had migrated to continue sharing memories and maintaining ties across borders. While these platforms are incredibly important community spaces, I felt it was also essential to create a dedicated digital repository where these materials could be preserved, made searchable through metadata, and accessed more intentionally. I then began digitizing various personal and institutional materials and articles to create digital copies that could be housed on an Omeka site, ensuring community access regardless of whether members were living in Viesca or elsewhere. Because many of Viesca’s physical spaces have been destroyed or have deteriorated over time, I also felt that locating them on a digital map would allow for deeper historical and spatial analysis of the town and its evolving landscape.
What are you currently working on, and what do you hope to accomplish with it?
While the site has been published and my master’s thesis has been completed, I hope to publicly present the site in Viesca, Coahuila for all members of the community. It is important to me to showcase the project in person, and I hope to continue expanding the collection and the microhistories that are documented. For the project, I interviewed five community members and included excerpts from these oral testimonies in the published StoryMap. I am currently in the process of editing the full video interviews and uploading them in their entirety to a designated page on Omeka. I also plan to expand this section to include additional interviews, as oral testimony plays a crucial role in the production, preservation, and sharing of knowledge within the community.
What are some things you wish you had known before graduate school (or before entering your current field)?
I wish I had known just how much time and possibility there is out there, even when you come from a completely different background than others. I began university with the goal of becoming a professor or academic researcher in Latino studies, but I almost let go of that goal halfway through my undergraduate years, fearing how much time this would take. Thankfully, during my final semester, I met my current mentor, who—along with the support of my parents and grandmother—encouraged me to apply to graduate school and pursue work in digital humanities. When I think back on this, I am reminded of advice Guillermo del Toro recently gave to an audience: “You young people are in the exact age of desperation. I never felt more done and old than in my twenties. I’d say ‘life has passed me and I did nothing.’ But I’m here to tell you that’s not true: you have a lot of… time.” While I am still in my mid-twenties, I realize that his words have never rung truer. Looking ahead to the coming fall, I see that the goal I set for myself when I began undergrad is getting closer and closer, and it has unfolded in ways I could never have imagined. While my goal has evolved, it has shifted and adapted to the field of study I am currently in, aligning more closely with my growth and interests.
Collaboration and community are central to HASTAC. How have these shaped your work, or how would you like them to in the future?
Collaboration and community are at the very heart of my research, and they are what I hope to continue strengthening and learning from. As a first-generation Mexican-American, I have found that community is one of the most powerful and essential forces to nurture and protect. This project has been largely a collective effort, bridging academic work with the lived experiences of the community. Engaging with the community where I grew up, alongside family collaboration, allowed me to approach the work with both a critical and empathetic perspective—balancing the emotional closeness of being connected to these stories with the analytical distance gained from living outside Viesca. This dual perspective helped prevent the unintentional reproduction of dominant narratives that often create divisions within a population, while my personal connection to these stories ensured that the work was approached with care and respect, which has been essential to the project’s development. On a personal level, this process has strengthened my connection to my ancestral land and deepened my understanding of the traditions and histories that have shaped my life.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with the HASTAC community?
I would encourage current and future students to actively seek out and build community. For incoming students, particularly those who are first-generation, navigating academic spaces that were not historically designed for us can feel isolating. Engaging with peers who share similar experiences can help overcome this isolation and foster a sense of belonging. Furthermore, recognizing that there is space within academia for students from diverse backgrounds across all fields of study can be deeply validating. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from and work alongside successful Latina academics, as well as to share this academic journey with a supportive cohort of fellow HASTAC scholars.