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The Limits and Possibilities of Cross-border Latinidades & Indigeneities
April 24 / 12pm-5pm / Ford Lecture Hall, JSMA
The Limits and Possibilities of Cross-border Latinidades & Indigeneities symposium will bring together interdisciplinary Latinx and Indigenous scholars and researchers studying settler colonialism, transnational Indigeneities, and race through archival and ethnographic approaches. The conference will explore the boundaries between Indigeneity and Latinidad, both historically and in the present. It examines shifting borders and interactions of Indigenous and Latine people and diasporas, focusing on regions that are now California, Texas, Oregon, Mexico, and Central America.
12pm-1pm: Conference Opening and Keynote
Presenters: María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (New York University); Moderated by Chris Chavez (SOJC, University of Oregon); Special remarks by Jason Younker, Assistant Vice President, Advisor to the President on Sovereignty and Government-to-Government Relations, Chief, Coquille Tribe
1pm-2pm: Pre-1848 Mexican Borderlands: Californio Ranchero Culture and Indigenous California
Presenters: Yvette Saavedra (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Oregon) and Naomi Sussman (History, University of Oregon); Moderated by Laura Pulido (Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, University of Oregon)
2pm-3pm: Media, History and Citizenship of Indigenous and Latinx Peoples: Contested Lands and Identities across the Borderlands
Presenters: Ramón Resendiz (Indiana University, UO Anthropology) and Rachel Nez (Navajo Diné Nation, Fort Lewis College); Moderated by Gabe Sanchez (Anthropology, University of Oregon)
3pm-4pm: Building Comunidad and Transborder Territories in Indigenous Diasporas From Mexico and Guatemala
Presenters: Daina Sanchez (UC Santa Barbara) and Lynn Stephen (Anthropology, University of Oregon); Moderated by Jason Younker (University of Oregon)
4pm-5pm: Closing Remarks and Conversation
Closing remarks from Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez (Philosophy, University of Oregon) and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo (New York University)
5pm-6pm: Post-conference Reception
Mingle with presenters and enjoy complimentary food and refreshments. All are welcome!
Questions? Email cllas@uoregon.edu
About the Presenters
Dr. Christopher Chávez (PhD, University of Southern California) is the Carolyne S. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Advertising and Director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) at the University of Oregon. Based in the School of Journalism and Communication, Chris research focuses on the intersection of globalization, media and culture. Chris is the author of Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language Ideology and Practice (2015), The Sound of Exclusion: NPR and the Latinx Public (2021), and the forthcoming Isle of Rum: Havana Club, Cultural Mediation, and the Fight for Cuban Authenticity (2024).
Dr. Rachael Nez (Diné Nation) is a researcher, educator, and advocate dedicated to Native storytelling, the arts, and language reclamation. She is the Director of All Our Kin Collective and a faculty member at Fort Lewis College. She engages in academic and community discussions on Native representation in media, the role of Native languages in the arts, and self-representation as empowerment. Through language revitalization and media, Dr. Nez plays a vital role in ensuring Native voices and languages are heard and preserved.
Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching focuses on Latin American and Africana decolonial philosophy that occurs in the Americas, and how this entanglement contributes to understanding gender-race constructions under coloniality. The main sources for these investigations are political and aesthetic theories and practices that critique colonial forms of self-understanding and expression and contribute to new epistemologies of resistance. He is currently working on two book projects, Decolonial Aesthetics: Theory and Praxis from the Americas, and Fundamentals of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought.
Laura Pulido is the Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon and Centennial Professor in Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. She studies race, environmental justice, Chicanx Studies, and cultural memory. Prior to moving to Oregon she taught at the University of Southern California for over 20 years. She has published six books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona, 1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California, 2006); A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng) (University of California, 2012), and most recently she worked with Jordan Camp to posthumously complete Clyde Woods’s, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restoration in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia, 2017). She has received numerous honors, including the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society, the Presidential Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers, as well as Ford and Guggenheim fellowships. Her current work on landscapes of historical commemoration, Monumental Denial: US Cultural Memory and White Innocence is forthcoming with the University of California Press. (197)
Ramón Resendiz is an incoming faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His research examines how historical institutions, visual culture, and documentary media shape perceptions of Latinx and Indigenous histories and citizenship in the United States. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society and the IU Media School, where he is completing his forthcoming book, Archival Resistance: Memory, Documentary Media, and Refusals from the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands, along with an accompanying documentary film, Between Memory and Resistance: A documentary about the labor of Refusing to Forget (2026).
Lynn Stephen, Philip H. Knight Chair and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology, focuses her research on immigration and asylum, gendered violence, race, transborder communities, Latinx and Mesoamerican Indigenous Communities in Mexico, Guatemala and in diaspora in California and the Northwest. Her current research explores access to justice for survivors of gendered violence, the impact of COVID-19 on farmworker health and well-being, and mapping Mesoamerican Indigenous languages and communities in diaspora in the U.S. She is the author of 15 academic books and many articles and chapters. Social justice and collaboration are at the center of her research and teaching. Empowering students and co-researchers and people she works with to put forward their own critical questions, answers, and telling their own stories is a top priority. She has a strong commitment to research projects that produce findings accessible to the wider public and her work includes films, websites as well as scholarly publications. She serves as an expert on immigration, asylum and gendered asylum in the U.S.
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is a professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Department & the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. Her book, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Duke UP 2016), received the 2019 Casa de Las Americans Literary Prize in Latino Studies; the 2017 ASA John Hope Franklin Book Prize; and the 2017 NACCS Book Award. With thirty articles, in English and Spanish, on revolution, subaltern politics, indigenous peoples, racial formation, migration, narco-economies, and Latin American and Latinx cultural studies, her most recent include “Indians Have Always Been Modern: Roma, The Settler Colonial Paradigm & Latinx Temporality” (Aztlán, Fall 2020), which rethinks decolonialism from a Latin American perspective; and “The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees: The U.S. and Central America,” which explores the integral role gendered labor and violence play in the drug economy (Social Text, Fall 2019). She is the Chairwoman of the Coalición Mexicana, an immigrants’ rights organization, and an expert witness for Central American asylum cases with legal aid agencies internationally.
Daina Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara with expertise in transnational migration and children of immigrants and identity and community formation, who draws on deep ethnographic engagement in Los Angeles, California and Oaxaca, Mexico.
Naomi Sussman is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on Native Studies, community-engaged, and ethnohistorical methodologies to narrate the Indigenous histories of California and the Southwest. Her current book project, “Between the River and the Sea: Relational Sovereignty in California’s Native heartland, 1769-1931,” reimagines the California interior as a Native heartland by exploring how the Cahuilla, Kúpangaxwicham, Kumeyaay, and Payómkawichum used relationships to sustain their sovereignty over the longue durée. These four Nations’ relational politics reveal that Native people, not missionaries or miners, shaped the region’s destiny over the long nineteenth century. This inheritance of power and resistance animates contemporary Native resurgences in California and North America more broadly. She also seeks to translate histories of Indigenous power into formats that serve contemporary Native sovereignty work. She is currently collaborating with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to develop and implement archival trainings for Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and other Native cultural resource management professionals. While a researcher with the NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project, she also partnered with Indigenous historians and law students to craft an amicus brief that buttressed the Indian Child Welfare Act during the US Supreme Court case Brackeen v. Haaland.
Jason Younker is the Associate Vice President and Advisor to the President on Sovereignty and Government-to-Government Relations at the University of Oregon and Chief of the Coquille Indian Tribe. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the UO (2003) and returned to Oregon after teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology for a decade. Younker received the prestigious Ely S. Parker Award in from the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (2014) for his work with tribal governments and students in higher education. He is the Past-President of the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists and is originally from Charleston, Oregon.