Mónica is a direct-entry Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of History and the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Her dissertation project examines the construction of Dominican citizenship from the Trujillo dictatorship (1930 – 1961) to 2013. The project investigates (1) the formalization of the Dominican historical imaginary, (2) the introduction of legal and institutional surveillance and citizen education structures, (3) and the construction of a shared social identity via the sanctioned and prohibited uses of national patriotic symbols. By triangulating the discipline’s traditional archives with oral histories and ephemeral archives she argues that the Dominican state undertook a nation-making project that created, enforced, and enforces Dominicans of Haitian descent and Trans Dominicans as impossible citizens, though ultimately this has been and remains an incomplete and contested project. Those who inhabit the nation, the very folks constructed as impossible citizens, contest, reformulate, and represent bids to other ways of knowing, being, performing and naming Dominicanidad, thus providing an alternative archive of belonging, or, an archive of alternative belonging to the Dominican nation-state. 

Mónica has been the recipient of the Junior Jackman Fellowship in the Humanities, the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the SGS Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship, and the New College Caribbean Studies Program Senior Doctoral Fellowship. Her desire to create accessible un/learning spaces, particularly for students marginalized by the education system, motivates her work as an educator. She believes that by changing the narratives through which we educate ourselves and future generations we can begin to alter the systems of exclusion that manifest violently on the lives of marginalized communities.