Department of English

• Friday, October 30, 2026 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm

McNeil Building Room 473 (3718 Locust Walk)

“Browning Avant La Lettre: Punjabi-Mexican Relationality in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” analyzes archival materials and literary fiction to challenge conventional understandings of the so-called “browning of America,” a phrase used to describe the demographic growth of Asian and Latin American immigrant populations in the United States post 1965, as a distinctly mid 20th century phenomenon. This talk draws on sociological studies of interethnic relations, family testimony, and narrative fiction to challenge nation-state frameworks of racial classification and expand our understanding of civic belonging against a backdrop of anti-miscegenation laws from 1850 to 1965. 

Natalia Reyes is the Yoonmee Chang Dissertation Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation analyzes narratives of interracial romance to examine how ideas of “brownness” shape conceptions of race and time in literature across the Americas in the 19th and 20th centuries.