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Lynn Stephen, Mentor
Anthropology

Edwin Vega, McNair Scholar

Lynn Stephen is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is the author of four books including Zapotec Women (University of Texas Press,1991); Hear My Testimony: María Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist of El Salvador (South End Press, 1994); Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power From Below (University of Texas Press, 1997); and Zapata Lives!: Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (University of California Press, 2002). She is the co-editor with James Dow of Class, Politics, and Popular Religion in Mexico and Central America (American Anthropological Association, 1990) and with Matt Gutmann, Felix Matos Rodríguez, and Pat Zavella of Perspectives on Las Américas: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation (Blackwell, 2002). Lynn Stephen’s research focuses on gender, ethnicity, political economy, social movements, migration, human rights, and nationalism in Latin America. Her current project explores how two populations of indigenous Mexican migrants are using their multi-layered identities and bi-national labor and living experiences to organize for economic and political change in two contexts: (a) migrants who have gone from the Mixtec region of Oaxaca to live in the state of Oregon to work in commercial agriculture and are involved in a struggle for unionization and farmworker rights and (b) migrants who lived in northern Mexico, California, and Oregon and have returned to the Zapotec community of Teotitlán, Oaxaca to form weaving cooperatives in an attempt to bypass local merchant control of the textile industry in order to gain political space in their community and enter the global economy.