History professor wins ACLS fellowship

Moramay Lopez-Alonso will study urban development and land ownership in Mexico

Moramay López-Alonso, an assistant professor of history, has received a six-month fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to study how agrarian reforms contributed to some of the most severe challenges that Mexican cities face today.

Moramay López-Alonso

The ACLS offers international and area studies fellowships in conjunction with the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. López-Alonso, who has taught at Rice since 2005, was one of 65 scholars selected from nearly 1,200 applications for the ACLS program, which promotes research in the humanities and social sciences.

López-Alonso will combine the fellowship, which stretches from January through June of 2013, with a junior sabbatical this fall for a full year of research and writing in Mexico. She’ll use the time in her native country to study such problems as overcrowding of settlements that lack basic urban infrastructure, the proliferation of squatters and the low levels of property tax collection.

Agrarian legislation resulting from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 did not meet its intended objectives because policymakers misread the social and economic reality of the country at the time, López-Alonso said. Legal and political flaws paved the way for a series of irregularities that created problems in agriculture production, land tenure and property rights, which had a negative impact on the growth of urban settlements.

López-Alonso will have access to the private files of a Mexico City lawyer who has spent decades defending clients in land disputes. Her work will zone in on three particular land disputes that started in the 1920s and ’30s, two of which lasted well into the 21^st century.

She said her project will contribute to three fields: modern Mexican history, public-policy studies and the New Institutional Economics in Latin America. She applied for an ACLS fellowship for this project, she said, because “they were open to area studies and they valued interdisciplinary research.”

The ACLS fellowship program is funded by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and ACLS college and university associates, along with individual contributions from friends and former fellows.