Skip to main content Skip to secondary navigation

Michelle Ha

Main content start

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2023 - 2024 Academic Year

Henequén Plant/Fiber Classification & Decortication in the Yucatán Peninsula

Trade and Migration

This project combines archival and ethnographic research to chart out Maya/Indigenous and western scientific agave taxonomy alongside agave fiber classification schemes. It aims to recover information on the range of agave species that were abundantly growing and cultivated in the Yucatán Peninsula up until the nineteenth century and examine agave morphology and cultivation methods to explain the logic of and challenges associated with plant/fiber categorization. Doing so will allow me to study how category confusion impacts the historiography of the Yucatecan agave fiber economy and its connection to and position within the global hard fibers trade.


Michelle Ha, Department of Modern Thought and Literature

Michelle Ha

Michelle Ha (she/her) is a third-year PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature researching early twentieth century Korean indentureship on Mexican agave plantations. Witnessing how agave fibers ‘disappear’ among commodity histories, along with the racial and colonial dimensions of the history of Korean contract labor within migration studies, has led her to consider questions of plant fiber classification, technology, and materiality and their relationship to knowledge production. Before coming to Stanford, she was based in the Yucatán Peninsula as a visiting researcher at el Benemérito Instituto Campechano in Campeche, Mexico, supported by a 2020-2021 Fulbright-García Robles fellowship. She was also awarded Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship funding to study Yucatec Maya. She received an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, a JD from Harvard Law School, and a BA in Government from Dartmouth College.

Return to past recipients of graduate student research funding