Overview
Jessica Muniz (she/her/hers) is a third-year PhD student in the History Department at Duke University. She earned her Bachelor's degree in History with an emphasis on American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. As a public historian, she approaches research as an opportunity to produce community-oriented histories, alongside papers for the academy.
Her research reimagines Puerto Rican migration and place-making through the lens of military service, exploring how their unique status as both colonial subjects and U.S. citizens has shaped their community-building efforts in the American South since the interwar period, with a particular focus on military town Fayetteville, North Carolina. She examines the trajectory of Puerto Rican migration to the South from the first wave of migration to North Carolina during World War I, to the 2010s.
Additionally, by locating Puerto Rican burials in American South, she addresses the overlooked role that sites of death play in migration histories as crucial markers of identity and connection to place. Drawing on death studies, which examines how sites of death reflect power structures within communities, she explores how Puerto Rican cemeteries in the South reveal important dynamics of placemaking.
So far, she has identified 355 marked and unmarked graves of Puerto Rican WWI war workers across North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Georgia.
