Sierra Mondragón (She/Her)

Sierra Mondragón is a second-year PhD student from Northern New Mexico. She is of mixed Pueblo, Chicanx, and Anglo descent and her family are enrolled citizens of Nambé Pueblo. Sierra focuses on 19th and 20th century United States history with an emphasis on women of color feminisms and activism as well as processes of gender, race, and colonialism. Her research focuses on Southwest Indigenous women's historical narratives and oral histories, specifically Pueblo women's historical narratives as well as the overarching theme of Indigenous belonging. Sierra is invested in centering community and lived experience in her work, especially the ways in which Native women mobilize their lived experiences to confront ongoing colonialism and inform community well-being.

She is developing a dissertation project on how Pueblo women have always and continue to actively shape, practice, theorize, and experience diverse and dynamic models of Pueblo belonging. Sierra is combining existing Pueblo women's oral histories with her own series of oral history interviews and contextualizing them within broader currents of 20th-century U.S., New Mexican, and Indigenous histories. Sierra's project also calls upon Pueblo women's published and unpublished writings, art, memoir/autobiography, and other projects, taking them seriously as primary and secondary sources that shape Pueblo historiography. This project prioritizes gender and Pueblo women's lived experiences in a longer Pueblo history of belonging. It asks how the Pueblos have shaped belonging to navigate internal and external change and how settler colonialism has disrupted Pueblo belonging in gendered and racialized ways. Overall, her project investigates how Pueblo women's experiences and articulations of belonging shape Pueblo sovereignty, identity, and self-determination.

Sierra is a recent recipient of the 2023 Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.