I am a historian of Guatemala during the Spanish colonial period and associate professor of Latin American history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A. I’m interested in how people recreate meaning and community after long migrations and/or in radically changed circumstances.

I’ve published two books about Mesoamerican allies of the Spanish conquistadors in Central America, Memories of Conquest and Indian Conquistadors. I also created the digital archive Náhuatl/Nawat en Centro América with programmer Michael Bannister. I’m currently working on a book tentatively titled Walking Backwards: Commerce, Migration, and Memory in Pacific Central America, 1570-1630, which considers the persistence of Mesoamerican commerce and material culture in the midst of disaster.

I have a beautiful family that never complains when I disappear into the archive.

You can reach me at laura.matthew@marquette.edu

Náhuatl/Nawat en Centro América (NECA) is a digital archive of documents written in Nahuatl or Nawat from Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua during the Spanish colonial period. Part of La Alianza para la Investigación Digital sobre la América Latina Temprana (ADRELA), it aims to encourage the historical study of Nahuan languages in Central America. Read more about it in the Digital Humanities Quarterly

Memories of Conquest tells the story of thousands of Nahuas and Oaxacans who invaded Guatemala alongside the Spanish in the 1520s. Some remained in Central America as colonists, creating a new ethnic identity for themselves as “Mexicanos.” It was published in Spanish as Memorias de conquista: De indígenas conquistadores a mexicanos en la Guatemala colonial (copia bibliotecaria aquí). I was honored to receive the 2013 Howard F. Cline Memorial Prize and the 2013 Murdo MacLeod Prize for this work.

Other scholars were noticing similar patterns throughout the region. Hence the volume I co-edited with Michel Oudijk in 2007, Indian Conquistadors.

My current research examines interregional commerce and migration at the end of the disastrous sixteenth century, across one of the most important trade corridors of the Mesoamerican world: the southern Pacific coast from modern-day Oaxaca to El Salvador.

I am grateful for generous support over the years from Marquette University and from Dumbarton Oaks (Pre-Columbian Fellow ’25); the U.S. State Department (Fulbright ’23); the Newberry Library (Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee  ’21-22 and Mellon ’05-06 Long Term Fellowships); the American Council of Learned Societies (Fellow ’12) ; the American Philosophical Society; the Amerind Institute; the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays) and the Research Institute for the Study of Man (Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund).

SELECTED ARTICLES/ESSAYS

• “Two Bigamists in Tehuantepec: Global(ized) Itineraries in Southern Mesoamerica, c. 1600,” Hispanic American Historical Review 103:2 (2023), pp. 251-282.
• “The Spanish Conquest?” in Robert Holden, ed., Oxford Handbook of Central American History (Oxford. 2022), pp. 141-166.
• “The Form of the Content: The Digital Archive Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14:4 (2020)
• “A Tense Convivencia: Place Making, Pluralism, and Violence in Early Spanish Central America,” with William Fowler, in Christine Beaule and John Douglass, eds., The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism (Arizona, 2020), pp. 130-149.
• “Huipiles y huino: El comercio mercantíl en la región de los Izalcos, 1524-1574,” Anales de la Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala XCIV (2019), pp. 177-204.
• “De ciudad capital a altepetl colonial: El urbanismo mesoamericano en Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala,” in Pedro Antonio Escalante Arce and Gustavo Herodier, eds., Génesis y desarrollo del a ciudad iberoamericana: Actas del IV Seminario RII-UC, Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de San Salvador, pp. 95-108.
• “Facing East from the South,” in D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard, and William O’Reilly, eds., The Atlantic World (Routledge, 2015), pp. 79-99.
• “Because here, color largely decides nobility: A 19th-Century Letter by Fr. José Antonio Goicoechea, Guatemala.” Mesoamérica 55 (enero–diciembre de 2013), pp. 153-167.
• “Mexicanos and the Meanings of Ladino.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 7:1 (Spring 2006)
• “El náhuatl y la identidad mexicana en la Guatemala colonial.” Mesoamérica 40 (diciembre de 2000), págs. 41–68.

In 1951, at age 33, Maryknoll Sister Dorothy (Rosa Cordis) Erickson graduated from Marquette University’s medical school (now the Medical College of Wisconsin). Ten years later she was assigned to the town of Jacaltenango in the Cuchumatanes mountains of Guatemala, where she was joined in 1963 by Milwaukee native and fellow Maryknoll surgeon Sister Jane (Juana) Buellesbach. Other Maryknoll sisters followed, many of them also Marquette alumni, including a graduate of Marquette’s last Medical School class of ’71, Sister Mary Annell.

Together, the community of Jacaltenango and the Maryknolls built a 50-bed hospital, eighteen clinics, and a regional training program for nurses, midwives, and health promoters. By 1987 the hospital had cared for 12,686 inpatients, served 475,889 outpatients, immunized 182,117 children — and had survived the town’s military occupation during the worst years of Guatemala’s genocidal Cold War counterinsurgency conflict.

“Remembering Madre Rosa” is a multi-year undergraduate research project to reconnect the Marquette University community with this history. Inaugural 2017-19 team Janet Peña, Francisco Hernández, Isabel Piedra, Luis Jiménez, and Ricardo Fernández Iguina did foundational work in New York and Jacaltenango — see their article here. The interviews they conducted in Jacaltenango in July 2018 have been donated to the Maryknoll Mission Archives.

2019-20 team members Isabelle Soto, José Ortíz, Marycruz Sánchez, and Eddie Godina created an exhibit that they also translated into Spanish and gifted to the hospital and individual interviewees in Jacaltenango. In the midst of COVID-19, they co-hosted (with Engineers Without Borders Marquette student chapter president Alex Quiles) a conversation with Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick Behrens and several generations of Maryknolls, “Beyond the White Man’s Burden: What Does Service Really Mean?”.

In 2024, students in the History department’s methodology course HIST2000 created an exhibit on gender and Catholic activism focusing on Madre Rosa, her mentor Sr. Mary Mercy Hirschboeck, Father Bill Woods, and former Father Thomas Melville.

• Curriculum vitae
• Pinboard
• National Immigrant Justice Center (Chicago)
• Voces de la Frontera (Milwaukee)
• Black Leaders Organizing For Community (Milwaukee)
• Latino Arts (Milwaukee)
• Wisconsin Farmer’s Union
• What Was Achieved? Migration, Impunity, and Social Justice after the Peace Accords in El Salvador and Guatemala
• blog #1 – Tira de Ixtepeji
• blog #2 – First Peoples
• blog #3 – Goicoechea letter
• blog #4 – Mapping Nahuatl
• blog #5 – The Other September 11
• Latino Arts Lunch & Learn – Day of the Dead Rituals
• ArsForum – Museo Regional de Cholula, 1a y 2a parte
• Noticonquista – “Más allá del istmo”
• Noticonquista – “La invasión de Centroamérica”
• Noticonquista – “#500Años: Los indios conquistadores”
• American Historical Association: “Erasing History”
• Letras en el Aire con Cristóbal Pacheco
• Casa Herrera/UT Austin, “La migración en medio del desastre”
• CIRMA/Antigua Guatemala, “La vestimenta indígena: motor de la economía colonial”