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Keynote #1 鈥淩ecovering the Past, Creating the Future: Latino Writing in the US
Prof. Gabriela Baeza Ventura
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program
University of Houston
Dr. Gabriela Baeza Ventura is professor of Spanish with a specialization in US Latinx literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. She is deputy director at Arte P煤blico Press, the premier US Latino publishing house, director of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program and co-founder of the US Latino Digital Humanities center. Baeza Ventura has served on the committee of Next-Generation Historical and Scholarly Digital Editions by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She advised on US Latinx archives and data collecting to NHPRC and was appointed to the Mellon-ACLS funded Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship (2021-2023). Baeza Ventura has published on various aspects of US Latino literature and digital humanities including women, immigration, recovery works, language and YA and children's literary production. Her publications include the monograph: La imagen de la mujer en las cr贸nicas del 鈥淢茅xico de afuera;鈥� two anthologies on US Latino literatura Con otra Mirada. Cuentos hispanos de los Estados Unidos and US Latino Literature Today: Anthology of Contemporary Latino Literature; an edition of the collected works of Chicana renowned poet, Angela de Hoyos. She also co-edited and introduced three collections of essays on Central American literature, Recovering the US Hispanic Literature, and US Latino Journals and Newspapers.
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Respondents
Prof. Maria Windell
Department of English, CU 羞羞视频
Dr. Windell鈥檚 research and teaching emphasize ethnic and transnational US literatures and history. Her book, Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History (Oxford UP 2020), examines how writers of color and women writers used genre as a tool to navigate the racialized and gendered violence of the nineteenth-century Americas. Her current project uses nineteenth-century US naval writings as a connective thread to link the Middle East, Pacific, Caribbean, and US-Mexico borderlands. In so doing, it highlights US imperialism as a reactive force鈥攐ne shaped by the decisions, actions, and sovereignties of Pacific Islanders, Caribbean pirates, Dominican and Mexican women, Muslim immigrants, and Tejano Confederates. Her work has appeared in journals including J19, Studies in American Fiction, and American Literary Realism, and she co-edited, with Jesse Alem谩n, a special issue of English Language Notes on 鈥淟atinx Lives in Hemispheric Context鈥� (56.2).
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Prof. Kristie Soares
Department of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies, CU 羞羞视频
Kristie Soares is Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies. They are also a performance artist. Both their performance work and their research explore queerness in Caribbean and Latinx communities. They earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, 羞羞视频, and a BA in English and Women鈥檚 Studies from the University of Florida.
Professor Soares鈥� book, (University of Illinois Press, 2023), argues that joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As Soares shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds their analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy 驴Qu茅 Pasa U.S.A.?, az煤car in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull鈥檚 signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez鈥檚 use of silliness to take seriously political violence.
Professor Soares is also currently working on an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of disco and dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
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Dean John-Michael Rivera听
Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, CU 羞羞视频
John-Michael Rivera is a professor of English and humanities and the former director for the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the 羞羞视频. His first book, The Emergence of Mexican America, won the Thomas J. Lyon Best Book Award. His second book, UNDOCUMENTS, recently won the Kayden Award and Pope Award.
He has edited, introduced and translated two books for the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and has published widely in scholarship, essays, memoir, creative nonfiction and poetry. He was the curator of El Laboratorio, a literary space for Latinx writers, and co-creator of CrossBorders, an international collective of writers and artists engaging borders. He teaches creative nonfiction, writing studies, Latinx studies, 19th century American literature and culture and documentary studies.
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Jonatan Cant煤 Guerra
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, CU 羞羞视频
Jonatan is a PhD candidate from Ecuador, specializing in Latin American Literature. His work focuses on representation of patriarchy, gender identity, and hegemonic and counter hegemonic masculinity. He is currently writing his dissertation. Under the shadow of the patriarchal state: men identity, queer marginalization, and women othering in Chilean literary discourse. He completed his BA in Journalism with mention in literary studies at Pontificia Universidad Cat贸lica del Ecuador before earning his MA in Latin American literatures at CU 羞羞视频. Jonatan is passionate about researching how masculinities affect the formation of hierarchies in social environments.
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Keynote #2 鈥淒o you speak Spanish? Persian?鈥�
Prof. Shereen Marisol Meraji听听
School of Journalism UC Berkeley
Co-founder of NPR鈥檚 Code Switch
Shereen Marisol Meraji is an audio producer and reporter who has told stories with sound for over two decades. She was a founding co-host and co-creator of NPR鈥檚 critically acclaimed Code Switch podcast. On the Code Switch team, Meraji covered race, racism and racial identity formation. In 2020, while she was the host and lead producer, Apple Podcasts named Code Switch its first-ever podcast of the year. Currently, Meraji鈥檚 an assistant professor of race in journalism at UC Berkeley, educating the next generation of audio journalists while continuing to publish her own work. Her newest podcast drops in September 2024. It鈥檚 called How I Get It Done: twenty in-depth conversations with a diverse array of influential women about work and life beyond work. Her guest list includes Gretchen Whitmer, Ana de la Reguera, Yvonne Orji, and Orna Guralnik. Much of Shereen鈥檚 journalism explores the theme of belonging and is inspired by her experience growing up in California as the child of an Iranian father and Puerto Rican mother.
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Respondents
Prof. Javier Rivas
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, CU 羞羞视频
Javier Rivas is a Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at the 羞羞视频. His research focuses on syntactic variation, syntactic change and grammaticalization from a usage-based perspective. In this field, he has published studies on grammatical relations, complementation, word order and discourse markers. His work has appeared in Language Variation and Change, Lingua. An International Review of General Linguistics, Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and WORD, among other journals.听
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Prof. Jessica Ordaz
Department of Ethnic Studies, CU 羞羞视频
Jessica Ordaz is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the 羞羞视频. She received her doctorate from the University of California Davis in American History. Her first book, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, was released in March 2021. Her second project will explore the multifaceted history of veganism and plant based foods throughout the Americas, focusing on colonization, food politics, and social justice.
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Andrea Lopez Lopez听
Andrea is a first-generation student born and raised in Denver, Colorado, with roots in Jalisco, Mexico. She is double majoring in Sociology and Spanish for Professions, with a minor in Multicultural Leadership Studies (MLS). As a Daniels Fund scholar, she is attending CU on a full-ride scholarship and additional scholarships through CU directly.
In her involvement with the MLS program, Andrea assists with recruiting incoming freshmen, a role she has held for the past two years. She also works as a Peer Career Advisor through Career Services, providing one-on-one comprehensive feedback to undergraduate students. Last year, she collaborated with Dr. Tracy Quan as a Research Assistant on her research into developing Spanish Heritage Classes at CU through an internship sponsored by the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center (LALSC). This year, she is working with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), where she helps translate various documents and projects between English and Spanish.
Andrea is a senior, set to graduate in Spring 2025. After graduation, she plans to take a gap year before attending law school. Andrea is passionate about using her Spanish-speaking skills to bridge gaps within her community and intends to continue utilizing Spanish throughout her professional career.
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Maria G. Vielma
Maria G. Vielma is a first-gen Chicana and Ph.D. student in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice at the University of Colorado, 羞羞视频. She is also a graduate from the University of New Mexico, where she received her MA in Spanish Southwest Studies, as well as her BA in Criminology and Spanish. Her research largely centers the lived experiences of Latinas and Women of Color within higher education, specifically how WoC faculty embody intersectional femtorship values and practices that foster confianza among historically marginalized students. This work is greatly represented in her master鈥檚 Thesis, Creando la Confianza; Narratives on Mentorship of Latina Professors at the University of New Mexico, which received the 2024 Western Association of Graduate Schools and ProQuest award for Distinguished Master鈥檚 Thesis in the areas of Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, and Business. At CU 羞羞视频, Maria is a Miramontes Baca Doctoral Scholar, Graduate Research Assistant to the CU Dialogues Program, and the Graduate Student Lead for the School of Education鈥檚 Student of Color Collective.
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Prof. Gabriela R铆os
Department of English, CU 羞羞视频
Gabriela Raquel R铆os is an assistant professor of cultural rhetorics. As a Chicana rhetorician, her work focuses on rebuilding and reclaiming indigenous Chicanx/a/o rhetorics. Using decolonial and anticolonial frameworks, her published work has looked at how Indigenous peoples resist ongoing colonization and critically examines how indigeneity and indigenous knowledge circulates in social movements and public discourses. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as听Rhetoric Review听and听Rhetoric Society Quarterly听as well as several book collections such as听Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latino/a Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy;听Indigenous Pop: Contemporary Native American Music of the 20th Century鈥�; and Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching Indigenous Rhetorics鈥�.鈥嬏�She is currently work on a book project听titled听Indigenous Genres of the Human: Locating the Intersections of Indigeneity and Latinidad.
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鈥淯naccompanied Children: Stories and Imaginaries in Solito鈥� A discussion of Buffs One Read 2024-2025 Book
Prof. John Kennedy Godoy听
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, CU 羞羞视频
Dr. John Kennedy Godoy comes to CU from Western Carolina University where he served as the Director of the Latina/o Studies Minor Program. His work is published or forthcoming in Diacritics, Aztl谩n: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Latin American Literary Review. John鈥檚 community-oriented projects have been featured in People en Espa帽ol and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He is currently working on two book projects: one focused on unaccompanied childhood narratives, centering (US) Central American and Mexican (American) literature; and another on transborder poetics from Zoque, Maya, Garifuna, Pur茅pecha, and Binniz谩 writers that delve into histories of displacement, extractivism, and knowledge and ethics in Mesoamerica.
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Mike Alfaro
Mike Alfaro is the creator of "Millennial Loter铆a" a modern update to the classic Latino card game that became a #1 Best Seller and sold out at every Target store in America. With over 10 years of agency experience as an award-winning Creative Director, Mike also brings a wealth of industry knowledge and Latino insights to all his collaborations, including his skills as video creator, copywriter, and graphic designer. Past collaborations include work for Honda, Walt Disney Pictures, DC Comics, HBO, Target, and Maker's Mark Whiskey.
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