We at CLLAS are proud to announce our 2024 Graduate Award Recipients and want to honor and celebrate this year’s incredible group of graduate award recipients! This year we received a lot of amazing candidates, who stemmed from their highly accomplished academic backgrounds regarding their PhD studies. Having shared their fascinating research, from Musicology to Romance languages, CLLAS has had the chance to support these amazing students who seek to solve and address these complex issues.
Graduate Award Recipients
Abraham Landa – Black Mexico: Music, Dance, and Construction of Afrodescendencia in Costa Chica
Abraham Landa, a PhD student researching musicology with a specialization of ethnomusicology, was awarded a CLLAS Outstanding Graduate Award. Abraham was able to interview members of the organization Mexico Negro A.C., a primary group that advocates for Afrodescendent issues in Mexico. This project primarily focuses on the scholarly discourse surrounding the Afro-Mexican cultures as well as key insights surrounding parallel topics such as: identity formation, cultural resistance, and the intersections of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism in Mexico. The primary observation took place within the patron saint festival of Santiago Apostol, where dance performances take place and Abraham was able to interview members of.
This research highlights the importance of music and dance as an expression of blackness within a socio-political context, which amplifies Afro-Mexican voices. By challenging stereotypes and advocating for policies & initiatives that promote cultural diversity, while also advocating for cultural recognition, this project is delivering significant insights towards fostering understanding within these communities. To restore and bring awareness towards the historical presence of African descendants in Mexico and their amazing contributions towards their nation is key to fostering better levels of understanding and empathy towards a community that wishes to be heard.
Beatriz Sprada Mira – Reporting on the Brazilian Atlantic Forest: Centering Culture in Environmental Journalism
Beatriz Mira, a Communications & Media Studies PhD candidate, was awarded a CLLAS Outstanding Graduate Award for her brilliant work surrounding intersectional topics regarding environmental communication, journalism studies & Latin American studies. Ms. Mira has a highly impressive academic track record, and has already been recognized for her scholarships. She has received a Columbia Graduate Scholarship for Academic Excellence, the Rafi & Zoreh Scholarship for International Students, and the University’s Promising Scholar Award.
Ms. Mira grew up in Paraná, the largest remaining stretch of the critically endangered Atlantic Forest, while hosting a myriad of environmental threats. Due to the increasing nature of vulnerability surrounding the locals, it is now exceedingly important to learn how to communicate culturally sensitive issues through a conducted manner that allows access to news media professionals. The project focuses on trends in how journalism addresses perspective and issues varied throughout the communities due to interpretation. However, one issue arose within local journalism which was that locals still felt frustrated by a lack of representation in terms of accuracy of how they felt and were represented. Local journalism also tended to steer away from addressing larger issues such as illegal land grabbing. Participants for this project were primarily selected through the use of in-depth interviews via snowball sampling along the coastal municipalities in Paraná & Curitiba. This project will eventually be used in the co-creation of a culturally situated environmental journalism research guide designed with, but not for, the local communicators. Preliminary findings will be used in the development of a prototype guide during the summer of 2024 for the evaluation of Brazilian research participants.
Audrey Sileci – Understanding the impact of a culturally-specified, school-based child protection program for caregivers in Honduras
Audery Sileci, a PhD student that is studying Prevention Science, recieved the CLLAS Outstanding Graduate Award for previously engaging with Latino families in ongoing parent studies and has volunteered with the Center for Equity Promotion. During the ongoing research development, Audrey has studied the multi-modal intervention model Miles de Manos (Thousands of Hands), which was developed in 2012. Miles de Manos is based on a social learning theory by bringing in key adults into elementary-aged children’s lives to positively impact the protection of children’s rights to safety and healthy development. Audery’s dissertation will focus on her journey to Tegucigalpa Honduras, in which she will interview the main team responsible for implementing Miles de Manos as well as the primary caretakers to see the full intended and unintended effects of this unique model of learning and care.
Gloria Macedo – Narratives in Resistance- Andean Women in the discourses of political violence: Literature, Cinema & Testimony
Born and raised in Lima, Peru, Gloria is a PhD student at the University of Oregon researching Romance Languages alongside a bachelors of arts for education, has received the CLLAS Outstanding Graduate Award. She has over ten years of teaching and editing. Gloria has also accomplished an amazing feat such as having a publication called Canto de sirena: oralidad y memoria, as well as a variety of articles in highly accredited academic venues. This project primarily focuses on the scholarly discourse surrounding the Andean women’s testimonies experiences in the context of Peru’s dictatorship under Alberto Fujimori and during the 20-year internal conflict in the final decades of the twentieth century. This research highlights the importance of understanding women’s testimonies about their lives and experiences in the context of human rights abuses. By leading key insights surrounding parallel topics such as: indigenous gender studies and Quechua cosmology to help us understand how these testimonies, fictional text, and films serve as a collective repository for experiences of human rights violations and gendered violence.
Liesl Cohn De Leon – Migrant Memories of Guatemalan Maya Women in Oregon: Community and Identity Building in a New Territory
Liesl Cohn De Leon is a current PhD student studying cultural anthropology from the University of Oregon has received the CLLAS Outstanding Graduate Award, with a highly accredited record of academic accomplishments. Born and raised in Guatemala, Liesl Cohn De Leon attended the top public university, University of San Carlos, within Guatemala and still currently holds a teaching position. Liesl also went on to complete two recent masters degrees from Oregon State University on a Fulbright Fellowship. During her masters thesis, Liesl built an amazing network with Mayan women as well as an organization that works with Indigenous Mayan people within Oregon- she also is fluent in spanish and is highly knowledgeable of several Mayan languages.
This project explores how Mayan women in diaspora, a population largely made out of workers and community members that are invisible towards the public eye, actively rebuild their intersectional identities and reconstruct communities within Oregon. These efforts are framed within the context of multigenerational trauma and expulsion linked to internal conflict in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996. This also includes parallel topics regarding poverty, insecurity and violence generated by organized crime. Regarding the extensive networks of Mayan women residing Corvallis and Newport, it is also important to note that this project will illuminate how gendered memory and identity constructions move across borders, generations, and can be re-embedded in new contexts. Liesl is also involved in a secondary project dedicated to documenting the languages, community presence and knowledgeable contributions of Indigenous people in diaspora in Oregon from Mexico & Guatemala.
Salma Valadez-Marquez – Amor Propio: Mexican Food and Culture Beyond the Fictions We’ve Been Fed
Salma is a current PhD student studying Romance Languages and Folklore, has received the CLLAS Outstanding Graduate Award. She hopes that this research challenges what is considered as ‘traditional,’ as well as ‘traditional’ in the context of cultural practices regarding food. This project aims to understand how Mexican cuisine has shaped, and has been shaped by the stories people have told about their gender, race, sexual and class identities particularly at different historical junctures in the Industrial Revolutionary Parties 71 year rule from 1929-2000. Food is a form of cultural, political and environmental resistance to hegemonic forces. It can also offer a counternarrative to oppressive power structures that challenge the status quo. This research highlights the invisible voices through the close reading and analysis of specific ingredients, methods of preparation and presentation of Mexico’s best dishes through the examination of appropriation, de-indigenization, and the ethics of cultural ownership.