Wena explores how ethnic enclaves both give way and disrupt American mythologies that immigrants have defended, labored towards, and resisted – in an act of making sense of new localities and topographies. What are the cultural and religious practices of ethnic enclaves that immigrants have dismissed or held on to – that are often deemed foreign and transgressional – as they are navigating new lands? Do the institutions of ethnic enclaves serve as a locus to reckon with the mythmaking of corruption, racialization, self-sufficiency, and the American Dream? How do we both resist borderlands and formulate

My piece, "Paisas on the plains," is a personal reflection of my experience researching the lives of the first families of Mexicans to migrate to Kansas in the early 20th century. This population in the Midwest, despite living away from the physical U.S.-M.X. borderlands, existed within an "between space" as their stories often do not fit with typical histories of Mexican migration to the U.S., which have focused on the Southwest. Because of this, I situate it within American Studies' scholars attempts to "queering the Midwest." Through its style of a stream of consciousness, it challenges possibilities of formal divisions between seeking to conduct objective research and scholars' personal stakes when encountering documents in the archive that is personal to them. In this piece, I navigate and negotiate this as I follow the story of the Rodriguez family in Garden City, Kansas through their photo collection at the Kansas Historical Society.