Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Today Speaker Series

Dr, Guerrero’s publications include the monograph Nuevo South: Asians, Latinas/os, and the Remaking of Place (University of Texas Press, 2017); “Yellow Peril in Arkansas: War, Christianity, and the Regional Racialization of Vietnamese Refugees,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies Vol.3, No. 2, Fall 2016; “Chicana/o History as Southern History: Race, Place, and the U.S. South,” in A Promising Problem: The New Chicana/o History edited by Carlos Kevin Blanton (University of Texas Press, 2016): 83-110; “A Tenuous Welcome for Latinas/os and Asians: States‚ Rights Discourse in Late 20th Century Arkansas,” in Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: Perspectives on the African American and Latino/a Experience edited by John Kirk (University of Arkansas Press, 2014): 141-151. Guerrero is the Director of Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland and an affiliate of the Asian American Studies Program, the Center for Global Migration Studies, and the Latin American Studies Center.

Specializing in race and ethnicity, immigration, political sociology, Latinx studies, Afro-Latinx studies, and Latin America and the Caribbean, Dr. Jones has published in such journals as Contexts, International Migration Review, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Latino Studies. She recently completed her first book entitled: The Browning of the New South (University of Chicago Press in 2019), which examines a case study of shifting race relations and the experiences of Mexican immigrants who have settled in the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina to explore regional racial change. In the book, Dr. Jones argues that in many locations throughout Southeast, Latinos are being situated alongside blacks as excluded minorities, who see African-Americans as allies rather than adversaries. Moreover, she posits that such changes have enormous implications for local, state, and national politics.

Dr. Fernández-Jones is a historian of Latinx life whose work focuses on intra-ethnic Latinx communities and pan-ethnic subjectivities among Latinx in search of greater political, social, and economic rights in the twentieth century. Her publications include “Finding MexiRican Placemaking in Michigan,” in Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2022), 86-108.  Her own book Making the MexiRican City: Migration, Placemaking, and Activism in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is forthcoming in 2023.

J. Gibran Villalobos has recently accepted a new role at IMLS to support of the forthcoming Latino National Museum. He was formerly an assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and has also worked for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Chicago Park District, and the Chicago Cultural Center. He chairs the Chicago Artists Coalition Board of Directors. He will discuss practices of artmaking that recycle and renew urban environments.

Fox is the author of Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minnesota, 2013) and The Fence and the River: Culture and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (Minnesota, 1999). With Omar Valerio-Jiménez and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, she edited The Latina/o Midwest Reader (Illinois, 2017). Her current research focuses on art and performance at heritage sites in the Americas. She will discuss small-town Iowa Latinx communities and social networks of survival.

Dr. Ortega’s research focuses on Women of Color Feminisms, in particular Latina Feminisms, 20th Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology (Heidegger), Philosophy of Race, and Aesthetics. She investigates questions of self, identity, as well as visual representations of race, gender, and sexuality. She has published in various journals including The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, International Philosophical Quarterly, Critical Philosophy of Race, Hypatia, Radical Philosophy Review, and philoSOPHIA. She is author of In-Between:  Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (SUNY, 2016) in which she presents a theory of multiplicitous selfhood informed by women of color theorizing, in particular Latina feminisms, and Heideggerian phenomenology. She is co-editor with Andrea Pitts and José Medina of Theories of the Flesh, Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation and Resistance (Oxford University Press 2019); she is also co-editor with Linda Martín-Alcoff of the anthology Constructing the Nation:  A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY, 2009). Her current research is at the nexus of aesthetics, photographic theory, race, and the epistemology of ignorance.  She is the founder and director of the Latina/x Feminisms Roundtable (formerly the Roundtable on Latina feminism), a forum dedicated to discussions of Latina/x and Latin American feminisms.

Dr. Rivera-Berruz’s main research interests lie in Latin American Philosophy and Latinx feminisms as well philosophy of race, gender, and sexuality. She recently co-edited an anthology: Comparative Studies in Latin American and Asian Philosophies (Bloomsbury 2018), and her publications appear in Hypatia, Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, and Essays in Philosophy. Originally from Bayamon, Puerto Rico, Dr. Rivera-Berruz has lived both inside and outside of the continental United States. She credits her migrations as inspirations for her interests in philosophies that explore myriad dimensions of identity. Her current research examines the philosophical thought of three lettered women in the Hispanophone Caribbean at the turn of the twentieth century.