Student Work
The Mexican Cities Initiative compiles student work across the Graduate School of Design that is related to Mexico. Click on the links below to view more information about student research, projects, and professional work.
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Thesis: ENTRE FUTUROS: Más allá de las Fronteras y las Cicatrices del Río Bravo / In-Between Futures: Beyond Frontiers and Scars in the Rio Bravo
Miriam Hernández Medina’s (MLA II) Thesis: “Entre futuros” reimagines the fixed border on the Río Bravo between Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas. As the river shifted course, land disputes led to its channelization, leaving, since the 1930s, hundreds of cut-off meanders as “hydroghosts”—scars in both landscape and lived experience. These traces become a…
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Lo Que Sabe el Barro: From Clay to Fire
This research by MCI Fellow Andrea Martinez traces extraction, craft, labor, and reuse across Oaxaca, Saltillo, and Mexico City. Rather than locating rupture between artisanal and industrial practice, it proposes a material continuum, a framework for understanding how ancestral knowledge is not lost but translated through landscapes, labor, and economies.
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Clay as Living Archive
What can a planner learn from a pot? MCI Fellow Lys Otárola (MUP ’26) presents her 2025 research arguing that the pottery practice of Oaxaca’s red clay communities constitutes a living archive of design intelligence, a system in which social infrastructure, embodied knowledge, communal governance, and ecological reciprocity are not separate concerns but a single,…