Giovanna Alcantar is a doctoral student in the political science department at the University of California, Irvine. As a product of SoCal’s public education system, she is invested in the politics of higher education and radical teaching practices rooted in love. Giovanna’s current research project explores the experiences of undocumented and immigration-impacted Latinx students in the U.S., particularly within the University of California system. Specifically, it examines the intersections of identity, immigration status, and formal education focusing on themes of care, belonging, and resistance. Raised in the hoods of Long Beach, CA she enjoys warm weather and semi-cloudy days. Her chargers consist of traveling (preferably with her son), hiking national state parks, sunrises, sunsets, and at least one daily mid-day nap.

Marina M. Álvarez is a Ph.D. student in Art History where she studies Chicanx, Latinx, and Modern Mexican art. Her article, "Monumentality and Anticolonial Resistance: Feminist Graffiti in Mexico" was published with Public Art Dialogue in 2022. She is also a curator. From 2021-2023 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Visual Arts Curatorial Assistant at the National Museum of Mexican Art, and in 2019, she was a Latino Museum Studies Fellow through the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, DC. Her research interests include feminist methodologies, critical race theory, museum pedagogies, and decoloniality in art and visual cultures. Marina holds an M.A. in Spanish Language and Literatures from Loyola University Chicago, and an M.A. in Museum and Exhibition Studies from UIC.

Francisco Carrillo (He/Him/Él) is a doctoral student in Spanish Literature and Culture in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. He earned a B.A. in Spanish with an emphasis in Culture at Fresno Pacific University (2015) and an M.A. with distinction in Spanish at California State University, Fresno (2019). Francisco is a first-generation Chicane with roots in Michoacán México who has worked in higher education for eight years. Francisco’s research focuses on Chicane/Latine queer performatividad in autobiographical texts, oral storytelling, and visual art and examines the formation of the Chicane/Latine queer subject across three different generations: X, Millennials, and Z. He loves to be involved in the community and is currently collaborating with Plumaje, a nonprofit organization based in Phoenix mainly educating first-generation parents of queer Latines.

Joselin Castillo is a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Born to a Guatemalan mother and raised in Los Angeles, her research trajectory is influenced by her family’s history with migration and the U.S. Central American experience. She earned her BA in Anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate fellow, she developed the project titled “The Pedagogy of Central American Mothers” which pioneered her future work. This project celebrates the ways women serve as culture bearers through their mothering practices. She earned her MA in Latin American Studies at UNM. Her dissertation research investigates the role of language in the media and immigration policy in reinforcing anti-Central American sentiment. While she works with testimonio and ethnography, her latest project looks towards the archives to describe how the term “Northern Triangle” became a popular and negative term describing migration from the region.

Alejandro del Castillo Garza is a writer, publisher, and translator. He holds a degree in Literary Studies from The Autonomous University of Queretaro (Graduated with Honors) and an EMA from The University of Melbourne (Endeavor Leadership Award). He is the author of the novel Irineo (winner of the International Novella Award Rosario Castellanos 2019) and of the book of poetry Residencia Permanente (winner of the City of Melbourne Quick Response Arts Grant 2021). As a translator, he holds the International Book Latino Award 2023 (Silver Medal) for Best Nonfiction Translation. As a publisher, he is the founder of Revarena press (www.revarena.com). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

Lillian A. Cervantes (she/ella) is a Tejana doctoral student from the west side of San Antonio. She is entering her third year at the University of Texas at Austin’s Mexican-American and Latina/o/x Studies department. She graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a B.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies and a B.P.A in Public Administration and Policy. Her research interests revolve around the intersections of identity, girlhood, and Latinidad. She is specifically interested in how schooling environments and school-sanctioned enrichment programs impact the identity formation of adolescent girls of color, particularly in the landscape of an Austin “single-gender” campus, where she has served as a program facilitator for Archiving for Preteens sessions.

Ana Silvia Cervantes is currently a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University. She is a Mexican academic whose research focuses on Latino/a studies, Chicano/a studies, archival studies, and Latin American literature. Cervantes is particularly interested in gender representations in art, culture and literature in the XXI century. She published academic articles on ecofeminist Chicana poetry, sexual violence in Latin American literature and women representations in Mexican archives. Finally, Cervantes studies the Latina/o imaginary and figures such as the witch, monsters, and demons as a measure of women's oppression and resistance through literature.

Claudia Chiang-Lopez (they/she) is a Queer and multiply-disabled first-generation scholar and Mexican-Chinese immigrant. They are a PhD student in Multicultural Education and a Graduate Certificate student in Program Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and hold a masters in Communication. They are a Point Foundation scholar, AACTE Holmes Scholar, and an American Association for Hispanics in Higher Education Fellow. Their research focuses on the relationship between abolitionist teaching, liberatory access, and dis/ability critical race studies. They have been published in Race, Ethnicity, and Education, and Sociological Focus, and have served as an editorial assistant for the Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs. They are also a zine and collage artist.

Pedro Freire is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Master’s in Labor Studies at The City University of New York School of Labor and Urban Studies and his Bachelor’s in Political Science and Philosophy of Law at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. His fields are critical theory, Latinx studies, and global labor studies. Within these fields, he is interested in radical political economy, unequal exchange, world systems, dependency theory, imperialism, and anti-imperialism. His research seeks to understand the unique conjuncture of Latinx workers in the Inland Empire in relation to workers in the global South. Pedro’s interest in questions of Latinx labor struggles stems from his steadfast study of critical theory, his experience as the son of Ecuadorian and Taiwanese migrants, and his participation in labor struggles in New York City and California. He is an associate editor for the Journal of Labor and Society, formerly known as WorkingUSA.

Odalis Garcia Gorra is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research explores diasporic Latinx identities, specifically of Caribbean descent, and how these digital cultures become pathways for diasporic cultural expression, identity formation, and push against the commodification of a homogenized Latinx identity. Her work thinks through how race, spirituality, colonialism, embodied practices and capitalism articulate Caribbeanness within digital networks. She is a graduate research fellow in the Border Tech Lab, also at UT Austin. She received a master’s degree in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a bachelor’s degree from The New School in Journalism. Her master's thesis, "Las que te tienen temblando de noche y de día: A (social) media analysis of IRL #Brujas (not witches) of Instagram" investigated the rising popularity of brujas on Instagram and how their activism enables digital sacred space. She has written for publications such as NCR Online, LatinoUSA, Film Cred and LatinaMediaCo.

Joseline González-Ajanel (she/her/ella) is a first-generation Ph.D. student in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. Her research projects focus on contemporary literature by U.S. Central Americans who center transnational human rights and counter hegemonic U.S. imaginaries of Central-Americanness. She is further interested in literary testimonios told by U.S. Central Americans, Undocu-queer communities, and migrant children’s perspectives and their use of aesthetics through debris and rasquachismo. Joseline received her B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Chicana/o/e Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH). She was also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow at CSUDH from 2019-2021. Joseline is a proud Los Angeles native and daughter of Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrant parents.

Jennifer Gottlieb (they/them) is a queer Jewish Peruvian American doctoral student at the University of California Santa Cruz’s Latin American and Latino Studies Program. They received their MA in Chicano/a Studies from CSU San Jose and their BA in Humanities from CSU Monterey Bay. Their master’s thesis “Reflections of LGBTQ+ Latinx/Chicanx Peoples in Maintaining Culture, Identity, and Community throughout a Global Pandemic” interviews LGBTQ+ Chicanx/Latinx peoples in order to reflect and understand how these communities struggled, persevered, and created new networks of belonging amidst closure of physical queer spaces and times of uncertainty. Their current research looks to migrations of queer Cubans to the U.S. and how sexual migration shaped the experiences of Latine people living in the U.S. today via music, tourism, and performance.

Bryan Guichardo is a first-generation Afro-Dominican and Puerto Rican from the Bronx, New York. He is currently a Ph.D. student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He holds an M.A. in History from the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. in Anthropology and Black Studies from City College of New York. His research interests center on the intellectual and political histories of Afro-Latino/a/x communities in the 19th and 20th centuries and their struggles with race, nation, and ideology. His current research focuses on the journalistic and political writings of Afro-Cuban journalist and activist Rafael Serra during and after his 20-year exile in the United States and his engagement with Black American political thought.

Nina Hernandez de la Cerda Clinton (she/her/ella) is a third-year doctoral student in Counseling Psychology, currently immersed in the Latinx Mental Health & Resiliency Lab at Texas Tech University. Nina is a first-generation Ph.D. student with roots in the city of Mexico City (Ciudad de México), Mexico. She earned her dual degrees—a B.S.A. in Biology and a B.A. in Hispanic Studies—from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016, followed by an M.Ed. in Educational Psychology and a graduate portfolio in Integrated Behavioral Health from the same institution in 2020. Amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nina served as a Bilingual Behavioral Researcher at Dell Medical School's Health Innovation Lab under Dr. Kasey Claborn's leadership. Nina's research interests span Latinx mental health, language brokering, substance use, bicultural and bilingual development of Latinx youth, acculturation, the immigrant paradox, and immigration policy.

Noel Hernandez is a musician, educator, and second-year PhD student at Florida International University. He holds a BA in music from Florida Atlantic University, an MA in History from Florida International University and is a former music data analyst for Universal Music Group. His current research focuses on the intersection between Latin/x/o/a identity, musical culture, and the U.S. music industry in the early 20th century. In addition to his academic pursuits, Noel remains an educator, active musician in South Florida and amateur photographer.

Jered Mabaquiao (he/him) is a Filipino-American, 2nd year PhD student at the University of Texas at Arlington. He teaches rhetoric and composition and serves as an executive board member for the Dallas Asian American Historical Society. His research interests include comparative and intersectional approaches to race, ethnicity, class, and gender specifically within literary criticism, film and media, and critical theory. Jered’s previous projects interrogate racial melancholia, identity, and trauma in Asian American narratives. He has also held a position with the Mellon Data Rangers Digital Humanities concerning black literary and oral tradition, hip-hop, visualizing and constructing data storytelling. Currently, Jered’s research in Latinx studies examines transnational representation and (re)formation of cultural identities in popular U.S. culture and media. He seeks to trace the way ethnic, racial, and political identity is portrayed through genres, involving horror and science fiction.

El Paso native Ernest McClure is pursuing a Ph.D. in History at UTEP. Ernest's research focuses on the study of Paño Arte, a unique art form originating among Mexican American prisoners in the early 20th century. This handkerchief art, deeply embedded in ChicanX culture, provides a lens through which the experiences and expressions of incarcerated individuals in the Southwestern United States are understood and analyzed. Ernest enjoys engaging students and colleagues in critical discussions about culture, history, and society. At the same time, his work illuminates overlooked aspects of ChicanX culture and encourages a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding marginalized voices in historical narratives.

Michele Mileusnich was born in the United States. She earned her bachelor's degree in Spanish from Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, and her master's degree in Language, Literacy, and Culture Education from Indiana University and a master's degree in Spanish from Florida International University. Presently, Michele is working towards her Ph.D. in Spanish and is President of the Modern Language Graduate Student Organization at Florida International University. Her research interests include Food and Cuban National Identity in the Exile Community.

Sujaila Miranda is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Houston. She is a Mexican writer and a graduate with honors in Hispanic Literature and Language from UNAM. She ran the first tutorial for cases of gender violence based on the UNAM protocol. She has published short stories, journalist articles, and literary essays in the cultural supplement of the magazine Siempre!, altaïr Magazine, and Revista de la Universidad, and on the websites of the Fundación Gabo and Aristegui Noticias. She was Project Assistant at the Journalistic Investigation Unit of the Department of Cultural Dissemination, Cultura UNAM, and was on the team translating Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh from Farsi into Mexican Spanish.

Emma Newman (she/her) is a doctorate student in the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University. Emma’s research focuses on borderlands (theory, enforcement, and policy) and migration along the U.S./México border. Her current work is based in South Texas and incorporates historical, ethnographic, and forensic approaches in contemporary border studies and the archaeology of migration. Emma’s master’s thesis (2023) examined top-down necropolitical interactions between state agents and clandestine migrants based on participant-as-observer search and recovery fieldwork at the U.S./México border. Emma is interested in raising public awareness of how legal policy impacts physical migrant bodies and is the proud creator of Beyond Borders/ Más allá de fronteras, a bilingual, multimedia, museum exhibition based on her master’s research. Emma looks forward to continually engaging with intersectional analyses that centralize the LatinX migrant experience in her dissertation work.

Nathaly Ortiz is a doctoral student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She was raised in Pittsburg, California by her parents who immigrated from Guadalajara, Jalisco and settled in the East Bay Area. Her research explores the ways in which memory-making is mobilized across multiple geographies and landscapes of grief in the wake of death. By focusing on memory and transnational community archives, she interrogates how these visual, sonic, and literary bilingual productions challenge or succumb to a liberal feminist analytic of the U.S. military-industrial complex and how they index the evolving necropolitical order of militarized regimes of power.

Michael A. Parra is a third-year English Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), with doctoral emphases in Global and Feminist studies. He received his B.A. in English, African American Studies minor, from UC Berkeley (UCB) and his M.A. in English Literature from San Francisco State University (SFSU). His doctoral research broadly centers on the tensions between empirical reality, world-making, and identity formation as part of a critical masculinity studies analysis of cultural productions from the Americas produced by male authors and about men who just so happen to desire homosocial intimacies. That is, I examine both gay (open and not) as well as a broad array of male cultural workers who exist and/or navigate along a complex sexual continuum between 1940-2001.

Carolina Pérez (she/her/ella) is a doctoral candidate in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University. She received her M.A. in Integrated Marketing Communication and completed a B.A. In Media and Communication Studies and a B.A. in International Affairs at Florida State University. Her research interests include issues of representation and identity formation through media, narratives across the Latinx community, feminist media studies, and critical cultural & pop culture studies. Her dissertation hopes to examine how second-generation Latiné's from the Caribbean make sense of their own culture while navigating identity negotiations across liminal spaces and fluid cultural contexts. She hopes her research insights can shed light on issues of social justice and empower communities by uplifting their voices.

Mikaela Razo (she/her/ella) is a Mexican-American doctoral student at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Department of Anthropology. She is an archaeologist and curator with a B.A. in Classics and an M.A. in Anthropology, concentrating in Archaeology and Museum Studies. Her interdisciplinary background and professional knowledge, combined with her life experiences, informs her current interests in the relationships between community-based and Indigenous approaches, archives and memory, and the politics of recognition and sovereignty. She aims to explore how one grassroots Indigenous organization in San Antonio builds a community archive to (re)define notions of recognition and sovereignty and how this process, in turn, impacts how locals navigate intersecting and complex identities.

Adrianna Ríos is an English PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She holds an Interdisciplinary Sciences BS from the University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras and an English MA from Brooklyn College. During her master’s, she specialized in nineteenth-century American literature. Her MA thesis analyzed Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, and its depiction of the Gilded Age marriage market. Her current research delves into nineteenth-century Puerto Rican literature authored by women, with a particular emphasis on gender portrayal and its intersections with race and class. Besides her academic pursuits, Adrianna serves as an undergraduate composition instructor at Baruch College, CUNY.

Dominique Rodríguez is a second-year doctoral student and instructor in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of New Mexico. A generational Nuevomexicana born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she holds an MA in Spanish with a concentration in Hispanic Linguistics. Her research interests in Chicana and Chicano Studies include examining the role of gendered power dynamics in Chicana/o/x spiritual beliefs, cultural norms, and traditional medicine practices. Her current research examines how Chicanx spiritual healers in the U.S. Southwest exercise personal power in performing their identities as Queer, Trans, and/or female in their practice of Curanderismo and/or Brujería. She is particularly interested in how spiritual healing practices serve as a point of resistance to systems of oppression.

Lisa Rodriguez (she/her/ella) is a second-year doctoral student in the department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida. She is a proud first-generation college graduate and holds a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from California State University Sacramento. Lisa is a disaster scholar, her current research surrounds community organizing and disaster recovery in Puerto Rico. Her work is informed by feminist decolonial theories and stems from her experiences growing up in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. She is a Research Assistant at the Puerto Rico Research Hub, where she works with an interdisciplinary team to investigate and provide solutions to social issues impacting Puerto Ricans in Florida. Outside of academia, Lisa is an animal lover and enjoys spending time in nature.

Sophia Rodriguez (she/her/ella) is the daughter of Peruvian and Mexican parents and was born and raised in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with degrees in neuroscience, public health, Latin American studies and is currently pursuing a PhD at UC Riverside in medical anthropology. Her research interests include medical and environmental humanities, anticolonial studies and racial capitalism. By centering communal and embodied knowledge, her research aims to understand how Latine and Indigenous Mexican residents in the Eastern Coachella Valley make sense of their environmental afflictions and how they practice strategies of refusal towards una vida con dignidad. As an activist-researcher, she is also involved in humanitarian aid in the eastern San Diego-Mexico border and in outdoor education advocacy for BIPoC youth in Los Angeles.

Carina Saiidi is a doctoral student and language instructor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation research project focuses on representations of addictions, particularly, alcoholism, intergenerational trauma, and healing practices in Mexican and Chicano literature and culture. Her research seeks to demonstrate the healing power of writing, storytelling, and community building. Carina was born and raised in Los Angeles but spent a few years of her childhood in Mexico where she developed strong roots and appreciation for Mexican culture. She earned her B.A. in History with a minor in Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA and her Master’s in Education at Loyola Marymount University. Before pursuing her PhD, Carina was a high school Spanish teacher in inner city schools of Los Angeles, teaching in predominantly Latino communities. She hosts a podcast and YouTube channel called “Carina Spanish” where she helps students and teachers analyze Spanish Literature.

Briana Salas studies urban history, specifically the institutionalization of police in schools. She hopes to return to Texas after her PhD to rejoin the good fight to preserve local history. At UIC, as elected co-chair, she mentored undergraduates through collaborative planning of Latinx Heritage Month events. In Texas, she managed the Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project, was an archival researcher for Texas Christian University's Race and Reconciliation Initiative, and conducted oral history research for Fort Worth’s Poly neighborhood. She received her Bachelor’s degree at the University of North Texas with an academic certificate in Latina/o and Mexican American Studies, and her Master’s at TCU with an academic certificate in Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies.

Edward Salazar Celis is a doctoral student in the Latin American & Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with an intended designated emphasis in History of Arts and Visual Cultures. He holds a bachelor's degree in Sociology from the National University of Colombia and received an M.A. in Cultural Studies from Los Andes University in Colombia. He specializes in Latinx and Latin American fashion, arts, and visual cultures. His work straddles public humanities and academia within critical fashion studies through questions of coloniality, class, race and whiteness, representation, and materiality. His current research looks at the politics of Latinx fashion archives and creative production in hegemonic and counter-cultural spaces amid the racial and modern/colonial legacies of fashion from a hemispheric perspective.

Alejandra Valencia Medina (she/her/ella) is a doctoral student in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a Posse Scholar, she received her B.A. from Pomona College in Chicanx/Latinx Studies. Her current research focuses on complicating notions of Latina sexuality using intersectional, interdisciplinary, and multi-methodological approaches. Specifically, she is exploring Latina sexuality through a feminist analysis of cultural text and through plática methodology. Her dissertation project seeks to contribute to existing feminist scholarship engaging questions of desire, power, and agency.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator, and an Associate Professor in English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the 2017 National Translation Award. He has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. At UIC he directs the Center for Latinx Literature and the Americas.

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is Associate Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Cultural Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A Cuban-born scholar of contemporary Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies, she received her Ph.D. in Art and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2002 and taught at the University of Connecticut, before joining Penn in 2019. Her current scholarship is centered on Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx cultural production and epistemologies. She is the author of Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (Vervuert, 2013); Una casa en Los Catskills (1st edition, La Secta de los Perros, 2012, and 2nd edition, Letras Cubanas, 2016) and is working on three book projects: Birthing Ourselves: Black Womanhood and Epistemological Marronage in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Production; n Black Ink: Writings From the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman; On Being Blacks: Self-Identification and Counter-hegemonic Knowledge in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Cultural Production.

Dolores Inés Casillas is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute and Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. She is the author of the award winning book Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014) and co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UCSB) of Feeling It: Language It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge, 2018), her current manuscript, under contract with New York University Press, explores the politics of language learning and language play as heard through different sound media technologies. She is a Principal Investigator in the Crossing Latinidades Research Working Group Latinx Sound Culture.

Elizabeth Cerejido is a curator and scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art, with a specialization in the visual arts production and cultural politics of Cuba and its diaspora. Cerejido received her PhD in Art History from the University of Florida in Gainesville and earned her Master’s of Arts in Latin American Studies at University of Miami. In 2014, Cerejido was awarded a Knight Foundation Arts Challenge grant for “Dialogues in Cuban Art,” a multi-year project that brought together Cuban and Cuban American artists and curators through cultural exchanges and symposia in both Miami and Havana. She recently curated Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art From the 1980s for the Lowe Art Museum and contributed several essays for the exhibition catalog. Dr. Cerejido was named the Esperanza Bravo de Varona Chair of the Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) of the University of Miami Libraries in 2018. She currently serves as the CHC’s Curator for Cuban Collections.

Faculty Profile: Elizabeth Cerejido | University of Miami Libraries

Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021).

Esther Díaz Martín, Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at UIC, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (2018). She is a first-generation campesina migrante from Jalisco raised in Central California (entre las vacas y los files). Her scholarship bridges Chicana Feminist Studies, Latinx Cultural Studies, Radio/Podcasting, and Sound Studies. Her research has been published in Chicana/Latina Studies, Diálogo, Spanish and Portuguese Review, and Sounding Out! Essays on the politics of knowledge-making are published in Voices from the Ancestors and Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities. Her book Latina Radiophonic Feminism(s) (forthcoming UT Press) theorizes a feminist/nepantlera listening attending to the political sound work of Latina voices. A forthcoming chapter in Y Yo También: Latinas Respond to #MeToo discusses the sound of feminist rage in Chicana/Latina podcasting. She is a principal investigator in the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies-Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative working group.

Héctor Duarte was born in 1952 in Caurio, Michoacan, Mexico. He studied mural painting at the workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1977. Since moving to Chicago in 1985, Duarte has participated in the creation of more than 50 murals. He has exhibited his paintings and prints in solo and collective shows at such venues as the National Museum of Mexican Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the State of Illinois Gallery, the Chicago Historical Society, and Casa Estudio Museo Diego Rivera in Mexico among others. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 2008, Artistic Production Awards from the Secretary of Culture of the state of Michoacán in 2005 and 2007, the Chicago Bar Association Award for best work of public art in 1995, and National Endowment for the Arts project grant a 1995. In 2006 he was invited to exhibit at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Duarte is the co-founder of the Julio Ruelas Print Workshop in Zacatecas, Mexico, La Casa de la Cultura in Zamora, Mexico, and the Mexican Printmaking Workshop in Chicago.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and is the Directora of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofila, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations. Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a Duke University Mellon SITPA Fellow, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow. She is the PI and co-director of the 2022-2024 Andrew W. Mellon funded “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies.

Olga U. Herrera is an art historian, scholar, independent curator, and currently Managing Director of the UIC Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalization, networks of cultural production, and circulation of modern and contemporary art of the Americas. She is the author of American Interventions and Modern Art in South America (University Press of Florida, 2017) winner of the 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication; Toward the Preservation of a Heritage: Latin American and Latino Art in the Midwestern United States (University of Notre Dame, 2008); and editor of the books Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic (AMA, 2019); iliana emilia García: The Reason/The Object/The Word (AMA, 2019); and María Luisa Pacheco: Geographies of Abstraction: Madrid, La Paz, New York (AMA, 2024) as well as essays and interviews. Herrera earned a Ph.D. in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and theories of globalization from George Mason University.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Escenas transcaribeñas: ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (Isla Negra Editores, 2018), and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and coeditor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press, 2017). His books of fiction include Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails and Abolición del pato. Larry performs in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010 and has appeared in several episodes of the YouTube series Cooking with Drag Queens. He is currently writing a book on contemporary Puerto Rican performance.

Albert Sergio Laguna is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests include transnational Latinx literatures and cultures, comparative ethnic studies, performance studies, and popular culture studies. His award-winning work has been published in Latino Studies, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Research Review, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, Diario de Cuba, The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and on CNN.com. Laguna’s first book, Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America, was published by NYU Press in 2017.

Deanna Ledezma (she/her) is the Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/UIC Mellon Program. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois Chicago and specializes in the history and theory of photography and Latinx art and visual culture. She is also a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches in the Departments of Art History and Liberal Arts. She is currently completing her book manuscript Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography. Previous publications include essays, articles, and reviews in Art Journal, Photography & Culture, caa.reviews, Latin American Art and Visual Culture, and the book Reworking Labor. Forthcoming scholarly essays will be published in two edited volumes: The Routledge Handbook of American Material Culture Studies and Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships. Green Lantern Press and Walls Divide Press have distributed her nonfiction essays. Complementing her research practice, she collaborates with artists on creative projects, including an artists’ publication and exhibition with Josh Rios and Anthony Romero at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Fall 2024. For more information, please visit her website https://www.deannaledezma.com

Sara Veronica Hinojos (ella/her) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and serves on the advisory board of the Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) Program at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on representation of Chicanxs and Latinxs within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial, visual, and sonic function of “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US. She has published in Aztlán: Journal of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Latino Studies, and in the compilation, Thinking With An Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice from UC Press.

Amalia Pallares serves as the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence at Arizona State University and is a professor in the School of Transborder Studies. She is the former Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Engagement at the University of Illinois Chicago. A scholar of social movements and political identities in Latin America and the United States, she is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research examines the co-naturalization of language and race as an organizing dynamic within modern governance, tracking colonially structured interrelations among racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and institutional inequity. He collaborates with schools and communities to understand these phenomena and develop tools for challenging the forms of vulnerability to which they correspond. Rosa is author of the award-winning book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of the volume, Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision.

María de los Ángeles Torres is University Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and Principal Investigator of Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and has taught at DePaul University from 1987 to 2000 and since then has taught at UIC. She is the former Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR). Dr. Torres is the author of The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US and the Promise of a Better Future (Beacon Press, 2004); In the Land of Mirrors: The Politics of Cuban Exiles in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 1999); and The Elusive Present: Democracy and Time in Cuban Thought: The Elusive Present (University of Florida, 2024) as well of co-editor of several books and author of many chapters and essays.

Lourdes Torres is Vincent de Paul Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. She served as editor-in-chief of Latino Studies from 2012 to 2023 and is co-series editor of the Global Latin/o American Series of the University of Ohio Press. Her research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, Spanish in the U.S., and queer Latinidades. She is the author of Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb, co-author of Spanish in Chicago and co-editor of Latino Studies: A 20th Anniversary Reader, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, and Tortilleras: Hispanic and the Latina Lesbian Expressions. She is currently working on a history of LLEGÓ, The National Latino/a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization that ran from 1987 to 2004 and advocated for queer Latinx issues.