A history reclaimed

Brooke Porter Katz | April 8, 2025

Before Marissa López was Marissa López — and a professor of English, Chicana/o Studies, and Central American Studies at UCLA — she was known by the surname of Goodman, after her Jewish mother from Long Island.

The story behind her name change is one that has profoundly impacted her life, including her academic focus area. Most recently, she was part of a collaboration to create the publicly engaged passion project Picturing Mexican America, an app and Instagram account that sheds much-needed light on the erasure of Mexican history from the maps of Los Angeles.

López was raised by her mother in L.A., while her father, the son of Mexican migrant workers, lived in Tucson, Arizona, where the couple had met and she was born. The relationship ended when López was two, after which she had only sporadic contact with her father and his family. That all changed when she reconnected with her dad in her teens — and made the consequential decision to embrace her Mexican heritage and use the surname on her birth certificate.

“This is just one example of how my earliest and most formative experiences,” she says, “were of the kinds of erasures that I combat in my work.”

López’s academic work centers around Chicana/o literature, specifically from the 19th century, a field of study she found lacking as a graduate student. “The U.S. doubled in size during the Mexican-American War, so surely it had an impact on literary production,” she says. “But when I went to write about it, there was nothing. There was this blind spot.”

Her work on PMA is López’s attempt to address another gap in history — one related to Mexico’s place in California’s past. The version of history that’s often told and that appears on maps is one that was made through the lens of white cultural supremacy, she says.

“California was Mexico, and that land — including where this university sits — was taken away by legal, yet shady, means,” says López, who also makes it a point to acknowledge that this land was originally owned by the native Tongva people.

The app provides a way for people to engage visually with Mexican Los Angeles through a geotagged map of Mexican-owned ranchos, stories about the landowners, and archival imagery from Los Angeles Public Library, a partner on the project. (Open it on campus, and you’ll see that Westwood, UCLA, Holmby Hills and Bel Air were all part of the 4,438-acre Rancho San José de Buenos Ayres.)

The goals for PMA are lofty — and for López, the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, they’re personal.

“I was thinking about the political potential of sharing this material,” she says. “How does it galvanize participatory democracy? If you’re an undocumented immigrant in L.A., what would it mean to see that’s only the case because of political decisions?”

She also hopes PMA can play some part in shifting the national conversation around immigration and belonging. “If we can get these stories and images out,” she says, “I’d like to think they can help move us toward a kinder, more inclusive future.”

This story appeared in UCLA Magazine. Read the complete winter 2025 issue here.