Roberto Arroyo, (Artist, Independent Researcher) The Champurria: New Identities in Mapuche-Huilliche Poetry of the 21st Century.
BIO: Roberto E. Arroyo was born in Temuco, Chile. In Chile, he was in charge of many different human rights organizations: Peace and Justice Service, Vicarage of Solidarity of Valdivia, and the National Corporation of Reparation and Reconciliation, among others. He also worked on a forensic team searching for disappeared and identifying the remains of people killed during the military dictatorship (1979-1995). Roberto received his PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Oregon in 2014 and works as an independent researcher. He has taught language and literature at the University of Oregon and at Willamette University. As an artist, he has held over 100 art shows in Chile, USA, Croatia, Germany and England and has illustrated several poetry and anthropology books. As a musician, he plays in different local Andean and Latin American music bands in Eugene, Oregon. His publications include: Retrato y autorretrato literario indígena: Resistencia y autonomía en las Américas, Editorial Pehuén, Chile (2016) and Memorias recientes de mi pueblo 1973-1990, Editorial UC, Temuco-Chile (1997).
Phillip Carrasco (Oregon AFL-CIO), Migrant Communities in Oregon.
Vicky Falcon (Instituto de Cultura Oregoniana), Latina Women in Oregon.
Pedro García-Caro (UO), Ex(tr)acting Justice: Cultural Debates over Latin American Ores.
BIO: Pedro García-Caro is the Director of the Latin American Studies Program and an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages. His publications include: Astucias por heredar un sobrino a un tío, de Fermín de Reygadas. Edición crítica, introducción y notas and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage and After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon. His work engages nationalism, postmodernity, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, US Hispanic literatures, Mexican literature, border literature, comparative American studies, transatlantic studies, satire, drama, translation.
Ramona Hernández (City College of New York), The Dominican People in the U.S.: Different Migrant Streams, Divergent Stories.
BIO: A native of the Dominican Republic, Dr. Hernández holds the positions of Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, Professor of Sociology at the City College of New York, and Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the Department of Sociology. Dr. Hernández is a member of the Editorial Board of Latinos/as in the Americas; Latino/a Sociology; Latinos: Exploring Diversity and Change; Latino Studies Journal; and Camino Real: Estudios de las Hispanidades Norteamericanas. She is a Trustee of the Sociological Initiative Foundation and the Instituto Global de Altos Estudios en Ciencias Sociales in the Dominican Republic, a member of the board of Directors of the Dominican Day Parade, and a member of the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Center for Women’s History at the New York Historical Society. Dr. Hernández has lectured at numerous universities, including Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, the Instituto Iberoamericano de Berlin in Germany, and the Sorbonne in France, among others. Dr. Hernández is currently writing a book about the Dominican immigrants who came through the famous port of Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 under contract with Columbia University Press.
Ana-Maurine Lara (UO) Riffiando: Dominican Artists in the House
BIO: Ana-Maurine Lara, Ph.D., is a national award-winning poet and fiction writer. She is author of the fictional works Erzulie’s Skirt (RedBone Press, 2006), When the Sun Once Again Sang to the People (KRK Ediciones, 2011), and Watermarks and Tree Rings (Tanama Press) and the poetry manuscript Kohnjehr Woman (RedBone Press, 2017). The first of her decade-long projects, Cantos, was released as a limited-edition letterpress collection in Fall 2015. She is currently working on the second decade-long project, “Love, Penelope” – a series of workshops centering the stories of migrants and queer folks of color. Her scholarly work has been published in Sargasso, Feminist Review, GLQ and soon to be, Small Axe. She is currently completing her first academic book, Bodies and Souls: Sexual Terror in God’s New World. Dr. Lara is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon.
Marta Maldonado (Oregon State University), Chair, Panel I.
BIO: Marta Maria Maldonado is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Ethnic Studies in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University. Prior to her appointment at OSU, Dr. Maldonado was Associate Professor of Sociology and US Latino/a Studies at Iowa State University. Her areas of scholarly focus include power and social inequality, the sociospatial politics of immigrant incorporation and integration, Latin@ Studies, and qualitative research methodologies. Her recent work has appeared in the journals Antipode, American Behavioral Scientist, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Maldonado serves on the editorial board of Rural Sociology and is Past-Chair of the Latin@ Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.
Gabriela Martínez (UO), Covering Women and Violence in Latin America.
BIO: Gabriela Martínez is associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, and director for the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies. Martínez’ research focuses on international and global communications, political economy of media, media and human rights, and media and memory. She is a documentary filmmaker whose documentary work addresses indigenous populations, women and gender issues, and human rights in the Americas. She has produced and directed over 15 documentaries, among the most recent ones Keep Your Eyes on Guatemala and Agents of Change: A Legacy of Feminist Research, Teaching, and Activism at the University of Oregon.
Jannes Martínez (Iyalocha, Lukumi priestess), Caribbean Migrant Experiences in the Pacific Northwest.
BIO: Jannes Martinez was born in Miami, Florida in the neighborhood of Little Havana. From the time she was born, she was told she had spiritual gifts and special energy but was always treated like a normal child. Jannes would tell her mom or grandmother when she would see “people” outside asking for water or cigars when in reality they were Spirits or Ancestors. At the age of two, she was initiated in the Afro-Cuban Lukumi Religion better known as “Santeria” to the Orisha Obatala. Ever since then, she has been on an amazing journey of spiritual progress as a medium and as a priestess. She was guided by an amazing godmother and community to learn that this was her journey. Even at this very young age she was able to provide spiritual remedies and channel advice for others. Jannes then began having her own godchildren and helping them connect with their own spiritual guides. With these gifts came a lot of responsibility but she considers herself beyond blessed that she was granted these amazing gifts. Being able to help others spiritually is a very important mission for her and she strongly feels that in order for us to progress we need to have that connection with our ancestors as well as our spiritual guides. She is here to help heal us all as a communal mother.
Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel (University of Miami/Rutgers University), New Directions in Latinx and Latin American Studies: Archipelagos Across the Caribbean and the Pacific.
BIO: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is Visiting Marta Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami and Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Program of Comparative Literature at Rutgers Uiversity. She received her BA from the University of Puerto Rico and her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (1999); Caribe Two-Ways?: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (2003), awarded the Second Prize, Category: Research and Literary Criticism, by the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña of the University of Puerto Rico in 2004; From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008), and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan- Caribbean Context (2014). She recently co-edited two anthologies: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2016) and Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (2016). She is co-editing an anthology with Michelle Stephens titled “Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations” and working on her fifth book project, Archipiélagos de ultramar: Rethinking Colonial and Caribbean Studies, which uses comparative archipelagic studies as a historical and theoretical framework to propose a different research agenda for the study of cultural productions in the Caribbean between 1498 and 2010. Her current project is Overseas Archipelagoes: Reframing Comparative Colonial Caribbean Studies.
Michelle McKinley (UO) Family Violence Laws in Peru.
BIO: Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School. McKinley has taught on the faculties of the University of Hawai’i, Universidad de los Andes, University of Kansas, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, and Princeton University. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016. The monograph was awarded the Judy Ewell Prize for women’s history and received an Honorable Mention from the J. Willard Hurst Prize for sociolegal history. Her articles appear in the Law and History Review; Slavery & Abolition; Journal of Family History, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice; Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power; Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left. She has received fellowships for her research from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library. In 2014, she was a fellow in residence at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.
Edwin Meléndez (Director, Center for Puerto Rican Studies), Puerto Rico Exodus Post Hurricane Maria.
BIO: Edwin Meléndez is a Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies. He has conducted considerable research in the areas of Puerto Rican and Latino studies, economic development, labor markets, and poverty. In addition to numerous scientific papers and other publications, he is the author or editor of thirteen books including State of Puerto Ricans 2017 (Centro Press), Puerto Ricans at the Dawn of the New Millennium (Centro Press, 2014) and Latinos in a Changing Society (Praeger, 2007). Professor Melendez has an extensive record of community and public service, including numerous appointments to government and community boards. Among other local and national organizations, he is a member of the Unidos US (National Council of la Raza) Board of Directors, and of the National Advisory Board of the John J. Heldrich Centerfor Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
Lanie Millar (UO), Nicolás Guillén, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Racial Mixing.
BIO: Lanie Millar is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Romance Languages. She specializes in contemporary Caribbean and African literature in Spanish and Portuguese. She has published a variety of articles about Cuban post-revolutionary literature and contemporary Angolan literature and is finishing a book titled Revolutionary Afterlives of the Cuban and Angolan Revolutions: A Poetics of Disappointment.
JoAnna Poblete (Claremont Graduate University), Collaborative Coalitions of Anti-Colonialism.
BIO: JoAnna Poblete is an associate professor of history at Claremont Graduate University. She got her Ph.D. in U.S. history from UCLA and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in History at UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to working at CGU, she worked for six years as an assistant professor of history at the University of Wyoming. Her first book, titled Islanders in the Empire: Filipinos and Puerto Ricans in Hawai’i, was published in 2014 through the Asian American Experience Series at the University of Illinois Press and came out in paperback in February 2017. Her current book project focuses on the interplay between indigenous and U.S. federal government ocean-use policies in American Sāmoa, currently titled Balancing the Tides of Change. She has also published articles in American Quarterly and the Pacific Historical Review.
Joyce Pualani Warren (UO), Liminal Citizens: Race, Diaspora, and Native Hawaiian Sovereignty.
BIO: Joyce Pualani Warren is the inaugural recipient of the University of Oregon’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnic American Literatures and Cultural Productions. Her research interests include American literature, Pacific Islands literature, indigeneity, diaspora, nationhood and citizenship, Native feminisms, critical race and ethnic studies, and critical mixed race studies. She received her PhD in English and a graduate certificate in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also completed her BA in American Literature and Culture, with a minor in Afro-American Studies. Her current research uses indigenous epistemology as a theoretical framework to analyze the intersections of contemporary Pacific Islands literature and US processes of racialization, exploring how figurative and physical blackness are used to articulate indigenous peoples’ struggles for cultural and political sovereignty.
Laura Pulido (UO), Latinas/os and White Supremacy
BIO: Laura Pulido is a Professor and Head in the department of Ethnic Studies and Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on political activism, racial politics, critical human geography, and environmental justice. She is the author of several books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest; Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles; and A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (co-authored with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng).
Alaí Reyes-Santos (UO), Symposium Coordinator.
BIO: Alaí Reyes-Santos is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Oregon. She is the author of Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles (Rutgers University Press, 2015), as well as academic publications, and digital and public scholarship on race, ethnicity, and gender politics in Caribbean communities found in Callaloo, Revista Estudios Sociales, Revue Européene des Migrationes Internationales, among other venues. She is currently leading the digital endeavor titled The UO Puerto Rico Project: Hurricane Maria and its Aftermath. She is also an award-winning educator, and equity and inclusion consultant on cross-cultural dialogue, and racial, ethnic, gender, and migrant inclusion, as well as a consultant for popular education projects and curriculum development.
Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva (University of Washington), The Politics of Storytelling in Imperial Island Formations.
BIO: Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva is Associate Professor in Latin American and Caribbean History at the University of Washington. She earned her BA at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras and her MA and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of the award-winning book Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, National Identities, and Colonialism in Puerto Rico and co-editor of the collection The Politics of Storytelling and Imperial Island Formations. Rodríguez-Silva is currently working on few other projects, among them a second monograph entitled Rearticulating US Empire: The Brown Middle-Class in Cold War Puerto Rico.
Mónica Rojas-Stewart (Director, Movimiento AfroLatino de Seattle), MÁS Visibilidad: The Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle (MÁS).
BIO: Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Monica Rojas-Stewart became a Peruvian national dance champion at the age of 17. She has a doctorate degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Washington. Her academic work focuses on race, identity, performance, ethnomusicology, African diaspora, Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean. Monica has collaborated as choreographer, cultural consultant, music and dance instructor, and guest artist with various K-12 schools, universities and community arts education programs throughout the Pacific Northwest. Monica is the founder and director of DE CAJóN Project and Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle (MÁS), two community arts organizations dedicated to educating about and raising awareness of the cultural contributions of people of African descent in Peru and Latin America respectively. A wife and a mother of two, she currently holds a position as the Assistant Director of the African Studies and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies programs at the University of Washington. Monica is a 2017 recipient of the Artist Trust Fellowship and she recently received The Tumi USA Award, the maximum recognition granted by the Peruvian community in the US “for having excelled in her career, community service, and her contributions to the betterment of society.
Gerardo Sandoval (UO), Chair, Plenary Session.
BIO: Gerardo Francisco Sandoval is an Associate Professor in the Department of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on the roles of immigrants in community regeneration, the urban planning interventions of governments in low-income immigrant communities, and the transnational relationships that exist within immigrant neighborhoods. Dr. Sandoval’s books include Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and Change in MacArthur Park, which received honorable mention for ACSP’s Paul Davidoff Award and Biking Justice and Urban Transformation: Biking for All? Dr. Sandoval has published in journals focused on urban planning and community development such as the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Urban Studies, Community Development, and the Journal of Urbanism. He received his PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley.
Judith Sierra-Rivera (Penn State), Angry Brotherly Love: Soldier Bodies and Affective Intellectual Debates in Puerto Rico.
BIO: Judith Sierra-Rivera is an Assistant Professor at Penn State, where she has developed her research and teaching on topics related to Latin American and Latinx intellectual history and history of ideas, the production of social space, and body politics of race, gender, sexuality, and emotions. Her book Affective Intellectuals: Spaces of Catastrophe and Emotional Discourses in the Americas (forthcoming, Ohio State University, 2018) demonstrates how contemporary literature is vital in fighting for social justice in the Hemispheric Americas. Sierra-Rivera weaves together five different contexts of crisis: “unnatural” disasters in Mexico, forced displacements between Central America and the United States, a whitewashed transition to democracy in Chile, colonialism and wars in Puerto Rico, and racism and patriarchy in Cuba. All of these scenarios share the common ground of the neoliberal space of catastrophe, which also generates new groups and forms of resistance. Affective Intellectuals argues that a new kind of intellectual emerges from these contemporary configurations to speak and act guided by the stories and desires of those who have been systematically pushed out of the public sphere: indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, immigrants, LGBTQ sexualities, and inhabitants of poverty. Her interest in intellectual dialogues and political resistances in the Americas has led her to the development a second book-length project, tentatively entitled Treacherous Males: Caribbean Masculinities and the Undoing of Patriarchy in the Islands and Their Diasporas.
Lynn Stephen (UO), Settler Colonialism, Multiple Masculinities, and Mam Women’s Transborder Territories.
BIO: Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Philip H. Knight Chair. Her interdiscipinary work focuses on indigenous social movements, autonomy, and migration in the Americas, gender, race, and transborder communities, Latinx and Latin American Studies, and critical legal studies of gendered justice systems. She has published 12 books and more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and chapters as well as produced films and digital ethnographies.
Analisa Taylor (UO), Mesoamerican Diaspora and Resistance to Agricultural Imperialism.
BIO: Analisa Taylor is associate professor of Spanish. She teaches courses in Mexican, Latin American, and Latinx literature, culture, and social movements. Her research explores contemporary indigenous and African-American peoples’ historical memories and creative forms of resistance to colonization in the Americas. As a first-generation college student, she got her start in these areas of study as an undergraduate Spanish and Sociology major at the UO, then went on to live, study, and work in Chile, Mexico, and Spain. She is the author of Indigeneity in the Mexican Cultural Imagination (University of Arizona Press, 2009). Her current projects include two books: Daughters of the Moon: True Life Stories from Mexico’s Lacandon Rain Forest, and Mesoamerican Stories and Strategies of Decolonization. Her presentation today draws from the latter of these two projects.
David Vazquez (UO), Latinx Literary Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial. BIO: David J. Vázquez is Associate Professor and Head of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity.
Judith Vega, Environmental Justice in Puerto Rican Communities.
Sarah Wald (UO), Latinx Literary Environmentalisms: Justice, Place, and the Decolonial.
BIO: Sarah D. Wald is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and English at the University of Oregon. She is the author of The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl.
Kristin Yarris (UO), Enfrentando Precariedades: Gender, Care, and Informal Humanitarianism.
BIO: Kristin Elizabeth Yarris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Studies at the University of Oregon. She has a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology, an MPH in Community Health, and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. Her research focuses on transnational migration and global mental health, particularly in Latin America (Mexico and Nicaragua). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Institute on International Education, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, as well as the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at UO. Her publications have appeared in journals such as: Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry; Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology; and International Migration. Yarris is a Steering Committee member for the UO Dreamers Working Group, which advocates for undocumented students, students from mixed status families, and other precariously-documented students at UO.
Rocío Zambrana (UO), Nicolás Guillén, Mário Pinto de Andrade, and the Trans-Atlantic Politics of Racial Mixing.
BIO: Rocío Zambrana is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her work examines conceptions of critique in Kant and German Idealism (especially Hegel), Marx and Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and Decolonial Thought. She is the author of Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (The University of Chicago Press, 2015), as well as articles on Hegel, Kant, and Critical Theory. She is currently writing a book entitled Neoliberal Coloniality, Critique, Resistance. Examining the debt crisis in Puerto Rico, the book considers the critical and political strictures of neoliberal coloniality through an engagement with critical theory, decolonial thought, and Puerto Rican social and political criticism.