Project:
Excavating and Coding Indian Captivity in the Online Baptismal Records of Our Lady of Guadalupe Mission Church Parish in Sapello, NM (1868-1870)
This project repurposes online ecclesiastical records and excavate the language within the documents — via hermeneutic deconstruction — to expose suspected incidents of captivity at the U.S.-Mexico border. Hard copy census and ecclesiastical data has been used to identify suspicious entries to deconstruct: meaning entries believed to signify captivity. Much of the data has moved online. This fellowship will provide the tools to mine the data more efficiently and present its content in intriguing and creative ways.
Faculty bio:
My name is Rob Castro, and I am a Professor in the Division of Politics, Administration & Justice at the California State University, Fullerton. I hold a B.A. in Criminology, Law & Society from U.C. Irvine; a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law, where I was in the inaugural class of the Program in Public Interest Law & Policy (PILP) and I was Editor-in-Chief of the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review. Additionally, I am a former Gilder-Lehrman Postdoctoral Fellow in Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance from Yale University. My work focuses on American Political Development, Race & Law; Immigration Law; Federal Indian Law. My work has been published in top peer reviewed journals and law reviews from such universities as U.C. Berkeley, Harvard Law School, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. My family originates from the U.S.-Mexico border region, and I was raised with rich knowledge of its complicated yet dynamic politics, economies, and cultures. My parents were born on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico border (Imperial Valley, CA and Safford, AZ.). My paternal grandmother (Chiricahua Apache – Lordsburg/Silver City area, NM) and maternal grandmother (El Paso, TX) were born in areas immediately adjacent to the border. This regional ancestry sparks my intellectual curiosity and has animated the bulk of my teaching, research, and service.
