At the heart of Maya culture are sacred spaces. Sacred spaces are found and were used throughout Mesoamerica, designed for devotion and communion with the gods. Beyond their intended spiritual usage, these sacred spaces were a powerful tool for the legitimization of political leaders and communal gatherings. This research project aims to investigate the spatial orientation and possible uses of buildings and platforms at Xanab Chak, a small-scale prehispanic Maya archaeological site in the Puuc region of the northern lowlands of Yucatan. One of the main goals of the study is to explore the possible cosmological, ritual, or socio-political reasons behind the fourteen to seventeen-degree east of north alignment. The analysis will focus on identifying patterns and anomalies in the orientations of buildings and platforms while exploring connections between the orientations and other aspects of prehispanic Maya culture. The goal of this analysis is to gain a better understanding of ancient life through material culture, investigating possible trade networks, and ritual sites, and how this affects the social organization of the ancient Maya civilization. Keywords: Spatial Orientation, Maya Civilization, Maya Architecture, Mesoamerican Cosmology, Solar Alignment, Lunar Alignment

Mestizaje is a concept with a five-hundred-year history in the Americas and an origin story that is overrepresented as the only viable model of conceptualizing our sense of who ‘we’ are and what ‘we’ can know and say about the world. Alongside scholars working at the transdisciplinary intersections of Ethnic Studies, American Indian Studies, and Black and Indigenous Feminisms, I argue that the dominant story of Mestizaje adheres to a calculus of racial difference that violently cuts intimate relationality out of our political imaginary. My work offers the possibility of a different origin story, one that, following Reid Gomez, enacts multiplicity and nonlinearity as a decolonial method of story to move away from oppositional frameworks and toward a more fluid poetics of relation. While a dominant story of Mestizaje addresses a hi(story) of racial formation through the miscegenated body, my work attends to the bodies that are not only mine, an analytic that centers the elaborate connections that exist between racialized bodies of people, land, water, and literature. What might be possible when we think in terms of relations and not others? How might storytelling, with the ability to drift across multiple hi(stories), languages, and allegiances, restore this relationality? The contributions of this study aim at the horizon of an elaborate story structure – one that might interrupt the still-unfolding hi(stories) of violence that reinscribe Mestizaje, and instead, challenge us, as storytellers, to realize relations and capacities that have been here all along.

This project explores intersectionality in the context of the trad wife phenomenon on the Internet analyzing the influences of race, class, and gender through examining the societal norms and individual experiences of the women who are taking on this traditional role at home. The goal of the study is to determine how interviewees (whether they identify as trad wives or not) view the trad wife phenomenon and how an intersectional approach can reveal the racial, political, religious, socioeconomic, and other factors that influence the articulation of trad wife identities.