Marcelo Morales

Biography

Marcelo Morales was born in La Paz, Bolivia and moved to the United States in 2009. He is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Spanish at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame.

He attended the University of Virginia where he earned a B.A. in History and Spanish, focusing on Cultures and Literatures in 2021. He also earned a M.A. in European Studies from the University of Virginia in 2022. As a M.A. student, Marcelo produced a master’s thesis titled: “A Woman’s Struggle: The Changing Image of Womanhood on the Republican Side of the Spanish Civil War,” which focused on evaluating how women participated and challenged gender normative standards in the war and how they became sites of ideological contention for both the Republican and Nationalist forces in the first year of Spanish Civil War.

Marcelo’s dissertation examines the transgression of the male-female gender binary in postrevolutionary Mexico and how this construction of the self parallels the state’s own construction of what it meant to be a nation as well as the developing concept of citizenship. In this project he researches the trans/travesti body in Mexico between 1920 and 1990 through an archival analysis of different –but consecutive– historical periods in Mexico’s history. This project examines two emerging identities in Mexico during the first half of the 20th century: mexicanidad and homosexuality. This project assesses how gender-transgressive individuals constructed a sense of identity while simultaneously forming a Mexican identity in the post-revolutionary sociopolitical landscape.