Meet the Mellon Fellows: Dr. Laura Dominguez

Dr. Laura Dominguez

University of Southern California
PhD, History

Host Site: NPS Intermountain Region Park History Program with support from the NPS Intermountain Region Interpretation, Education, Youth & Volunteers Program and the NPS Intermountain Region Heritage Partnerships Program
Fellowship Title: New Perspectives in Transcontinental Railroad History Fellowship
Project Description: Dr. Dominguez will use the lens of the Transcontinental Railroad to explore themes of labor, western identity, and Indigenous sovereignty. The Fellow will document sites worthy of preservation, engage partners, and update park interpretation

Bio:

Laura Dominguez is a historian of race, heritage, and placemaking in the American West. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and joins the New Perspectives in Transcontinental Railroad History Team as its postdoctoral fellow. Her dissertation examined the making and unmaking of settler histories, memory sites, and heritage practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Los Angeles. She looks forward to furthering her study of the reparative qualities of heritage conservation in marginalized communities throughout her fellowship.

Laura holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree in historic preservation from USC. She previously worked in education and advocacy at San Francisco Heritage and the Los Angeles Conservancy and serves on the boards of Latinos in Heritage Conservation and the California Preservation Foundation. From 2019-2021, she belonged to the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group. Her writing has appeared in the Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of American History, California History, and Lost L.A, and she is an affiliated scholar with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. She lives in Los Angeles (the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva people) with her husband, toddler, and kelpie.

Tell us about your research interests!

I am a historian of race and memory in California. I write about the ways people connect to their ancestral heritage during periods of struggle, and I am especially interested in how marginalized communities form healing attachments to buildings, landscapes, and other kinds of places. My research questions spring from my longtime work as an advocate for heritage conservation in Latinx/e and other BIPOC communities. I have witnessed firsthand how local, state, and national institutions erase the stories and places that matter to racialized and Indigenous peoples, women, LGBTQ+ communities, disabled communities, and others. I hope to better understand the roots of these exclusions and how people have preserved their history and culture outside of formal processes. My dissertation answers these questions by retracing more than 200 years of heritage practices in my hometown of Los Angeles.

How does your research connect to the mission of the National Park Service, which serves both parks and communities?

My research dovetails with the National Park Service’s efforts to tell more expansive and complicated stories about the American past by revealing how local communities have historically fought for preservation. I write, for example, about how Chinese American, African American, and Chicano/a leaders in Los Angeles challenged the whitewashing of their histories and experiences through religious rituals, public art, architecture, archives, businesses, and institution-building. Knowing that their efforts were at once reparative and imperfect helps motivate me, and as a fellow I feel grounded in this larger tradition of truth-seeking.

What are you most excited about as you begin your fellowship?

Having spent most of my career in cities, I’m excited to learn more about memory practices in rural communities of the American West. My project, “New Perspectives in Transcontinental Railroad History,” explores the lives and experiences of the immigrant workers who built the railroad, the Indigenous peoples who lost their ancestral lands to infrastructure, and the consequences of industrialization on the environment. These are necessary and challenging stories to tell, in part because they upend the celebratory narratives we’ve long embraced about the railroads. So much of this heritage, too, is quite literally below the ground or has long since vanished. I’m eager to build relationships with Tribal and Chinese American descendant communities in the Intermountain Region and to learn how they have preserved their memories of the transcontinental railroads and how and where they would like to interpret those stories for the public.

Do you have a favorite story about your personal experience with the NPS, or a park or program you admire?

Yosemite National Park has been one of my favorite places since childhood. I married my husband on the banks of the Merced River (in between thunderstorms!), and I’ll never forget the joy of our son’s first few trips, including during last spring’s epic snow melt. A close second, though, is the time I spent in Grand Teton National Park with my mentors and fellow graduate students in the fall of 2019 (shoutout to the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West). Our writing and hiking retreat helped me refine my research ideas, and it fostered the kind of togetherness and friendship that we would soon crave with the onset of the pandemic.

This project was made possible through the National Park Service by a grant from the National Park Foundation through generous support from the Mellon Foundation.
Find out more about the Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.