MEXICAN STUDIES / ESTUDIOS MEXICANOS
Christian Zlolniski Award for Best Early-Career Article

The editorial committee of MS/EM is pleased to announce the Christian Zlolniski Award for Best Early-Career Article. The award aims to recognize contributions of the highest academic quality in the multidisciplinary field of Mexican studies for the originality of their topics, theoretical perspectives, and/or methodological strategies. In addition to the one award for best article, one honorable mention will be recognized.

For more information or to nominate an article, please see the Award Rules.

2022-2023 AWARD WINNERS

First place: Rocío Gomez, “Mining the Sky: José Árbol y Bonilla, Zacatecas Meteorites, and the Circulation of Scientific Knowledge”

The committee has selected Gomez’s article as the winning entry due to its imaginative, thorough, and well-rounded analysis, which succeeds in revealing the role of Zacatecas in the complex regional, national, and international networks through which scientific knowledge about meteorites circulated in the late 19th century. The article skillfully reveals how the inhabitants of the celebrated mining city from across the socioeconomic spectrum and professional spheres applied their different knowledges of minerology and metallurgy to make sense of two local meteorites, as well as the international impact of their contributions. The article excels at bringing to light the often erased and/or ignored significance of scientific contributions originating in regional areas, and the participation of those outside of metropolitan institutions, usually deemed to be the protagonists of scientific knowledge-making. Moreover, the study illuminates the various interests involved in the possession and stewardship of meteoric bodies, such as international profiteering and official projects of national aggrandizement.

Honorable mention: Alfonso Fierro, “Modeling the Urban Commune: Collective Housing, Utopian Architecture, and Social Reproduction in the Mexican 1930s”

The committee awards an honorable mention to Fierro’s article for its highly insightful analysis of the utopian architecture project put forth by the Unión de Arquitectos Socialistas in 1938. Fierro’s study highlights the significance of the project by thoroughly contextualizing its genesis within the housing shortage for industrial workers in Mexico City in the 1930s as well as the ways in which the project put forth a bold intervention within contemporary national and international debates on popular housing. The article brilliantly conveys the extent to which the UAS undertook a reimagining of labor within the family unit while also recognizing moments in which the leftist intellectual’s plans exhibited distance from the popular classes they had in mind. Furthermore, the piece clearly illustrates how, though never built, the UAS’s ideas surfaced in the aspects of popular housing projects throughout the mid twentieth century. Finally, Fierro’s study succeeds in arguing for the value of the speculative, especially as he engages it in relation to the ever-pertinent challenges related to housing, family structure, and domestic labor.

2020-2021 AWARD WINNERS

First place: Marjolein Van Bavel, “Morbo, lucha libre, and Television: The Ban of Women Wrestlers from Mexico City in the 1950s"

Honorable mention: José Ignacio Lanzagorta García, “La conquista de la Glorieta de Insurgentes de la Ciudad de México: lo abyecto en los procesos de gentrificación”