Nora Paola González Solís
Newnham College
Email: npg28@cam.ac.uk
Supervisor: Dr Liesbeth François
Biography
I was born in Culiacán, Mexico, and grew up in different parts of the north of the country. As I grew up, my region became increasingly violent, and I witnessed how this fragmented communities by causing displacement and panic among the population. In 2017, when I was a first-year student at Tecnológico de Monterrey, the #MeToo movement emerged and I became an activist focused on violence against women, while also directing my studies towards analysing literature written by women in Latin America. I became part of several organisations fighting for the recognition of women's rights and against the effects of violence against women. I spent the years of the pandemic doing digital activism and fundraising for different causes related to violence and precarity, which included advocating for changes in the Constitution of the State of Nuevo Leon for the decriminalisation of abortion and for reforms to police protocols to respond more effectively to femicides.
In 2021, I graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Spanish from Tecnológico de Monterrey. I worked for two years as a teacher in the same institution, while also working as a spokesperson for the NGO Ya Basta, Nuevo León. In 2022-23 I co-hosted the podcast Insumisas NL, which focused on news coverage from a gender perspective. I moved to the UK to start my postgraduate studies and graduated with distinction in July 2024 with an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge. During my MPhil, I focused my research on Mexican literature and cultural productions such as the narcocorrido. I wrote a dissertation on the discursive construction of motherhood in contemporary Mexican literature, supervised by Dr Liesbeth François.
Research
I am currently researching a new trend in Mexican literature and film that articulates motherhood and violence. I am particularly interested in how cultural products reflect women's experiences and how resistance to violence is manifested in the recognition of the vulnerability and precarity created by the implementation of neoliberal policies. I am also interested in how literature and film show violence has had a differential impact on some populations through processes of framing and exclusion based on notions of gender, race and class. From October 2024 I'll be working towards my PhD with the generous support of a Cambridge Trust & Newnham College Scholarship.
Selected publications
González-Solís, N. & Mijares, M. "The discursive construction of the female figure in nineteenth-century periodical publications in Northern Mexico." Women and Print Culture: A Critical Exploration of the Archives of the Border Region of Mexico and the United States edited by Donna Kabalen Vanek, Arte Público Press, 2021, pp.13-24. ISBN: 9781558859296.
