After her first year as an elementary school teacher, Dana Velasco Murillo and her husband went to Mexico and took the bus to Zacatecas to visit her relatives. After 11 hours winding through terrain that was often barren and desert-like, she recalls how suddenly "out of nowhere this beautiful vibrant city appears."

Dana spent nine weeks in and around the old silver mining town, a UNESCO world heritage site that is now home to ten museums. Although she had come to visit her parents' families, she left with the kernel of a research question: What was Zacatecas like as it grew from a mining camp to a mecca for Spaniards seeking silver and for those who saw an opportunity to profit from the Spanish quest?

This summer, Dana returned to Zacatecas with a much more refined set of questions and a growing kit of historian's tools. Supported by a Ford Fellowship, she did research in the various state and church archives that record what life was like in the region during the 1600s.

More than a decade of time elapsed between Dana's two trips. Dana is the youngest of seven children of Mexican immigrant parents, short on financial resources but powerful in urging their children "to make our fortune through education." Graduating from Loyola-Marymount University with a bachelor's degree in history, she needed to make herself financially independent and to help her family. Because she had received grants and scholarships over the years, she also felt she "owed the community," and she took a job as a Spanish-speaking teacher in a public school "right around the corner from my old home."

But while she was teaching, her passion for learning never faltered. While acquiring a master's degree in English literature at Cal State Northridge "kind of as a hobby," Dana came under the wing of English Professor Sandra Stanley, "who helped me get back into the academic swing." Professor Stanley also told Dana about a predoctoral scholarship, which she used to work one summer with Kevin Terraciano, associate professor in UCLA's History Department.

Dana's research had already led her to Professor Terraciano, "a pioneer in working with colonial Mixtec language sources to generate a history of the colonial period," focusing on the Mixtecs of Oaxaca. Dana is hoping to do the same thing for the various indigenous peoples who were drawn to Zacatecas.

Some came from central Mexico, attracted by the opportunity to work for wages instead of laboring in the traditional tribute system. The Spaniards encouraged their migration, hoping that their "model indigenous communities" would help to transform what the Spaniards saw as "northern barbarians," indigenous nomads who were hostile to the Spanish intrusion. The area was also home to African slaves, former English sailors, and others who were simply hiding out.

Dana plans to look at how this ethnic diversity played out and whether indigenous people and women enjoyed any greater freedoms "in the backwoods" of 17th-century Zacatecas than in Mexico City. Frontier towns are often notable for relatively lax authority and for tolerating behaviors that might not be acceptable elsewhere. "To me, that's all fascinating," she says.

Not long after her summer of research with Professor Terraciano, Dana applied for graduate studies in history at UCLA and, at about the same time, for a Ford Fellowship. While UCLA accepted her, Ford turned her down on that first try. Enrolled at UCLA in Fall 2003, Dana took her husband's advice and reapplied, this time earning the fellowship. "I recommend tenacity," she says.

This coming year, she'll apply for a Fulbright Fellowship to support research in the archives of Madrid and Seville, which is her next destination. Ten years ago, Dana "worried that economic necessity was going to rob me of my dream." Now, she's well on her way, full of energy and determination to complete her work: "After you've been in the workforce for 13 years and get to go do something that was a dream for you," she says, "you definitely have a different attitude."

Published in Fall 2005, Graduate Quarterly