Latinx Studies in the Midwest and Beyond Speaker Series

An interdisciplinary historian, Dr. Awartani’s research, publications, and teaching focuses on twentieth-century U.S. social movements, interracial solidarities, policing, and American global power, with special attention to Latinx and Arab American radicalisms. Her first book project, Solidarities of Liberation, Visions of Empire: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and American Global Power (under contract with University of North Carolina Press) chronicles a globally expansive story of Palestine liberation, Puerto Rican radicalism, and the United States’ efforts to weaponize and police those freedom dreams.

As a scholar in the fields of immigration and sociology, Dr. Toro-Morn has always been curious about why people move, how, and what are the consequences of their movements thus she has devoted a significant part of her career to studying migrations in a global perspective. She began to address the complexities of migration while researching the social class and gender dimensions of Puerto Rican migration to Chicago. She is part of a generation of scholars that has taken on that task of exploring the gender specific qualities of contemporary migrations, work that has contributed to the historicizing Latino immigration to the Midwest and to making the experiences of women immigrants across diverse geographies visible.

A historian of education interested in issues of race/ethnicity, historical research in education, and gender and sexuality, Mirelsie Velázquez teaches courses on education, critical race theory, Latina feminism, oral history, and Puerto Rican Studies. Her book, Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940-1977 (University of Illinois Press 2022), chronicles the Puerto Rican community’s response to the urban decay in which they were forced to live, work, and especially learn. Velázquez is completing research on the history of Black and Indigenous education in both the Oklahoma and Indian Territories, from the mid-19^th century until statehood in 1907.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a scholar of American and ethnic studies, queer/LGBT Hispanic Caribbean (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican) studies, and U.S. Latina/o/x and Latin American literary, cultural, and performance studies. His recent book, Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), focuses on migration, transvestism, and performance and argue that drag can serve not only to question gender and sexuality but also to explore commodification, cyberspace, diasporic displacements and reenactments of home, ethnicity, the human/animal divide, monstrosity, politics, poverty, race, and racial passing. He is currently working on a book on contemporary performance in Puerto Rico.

Zorimar Rivera-Montes studies Caribbean Latinx cultural literatures and popular cultures of the late 20^th and 21^st century. Her research focuses on Puerto Rican cultural texts under the combined forces of neoliberalism and coloniality, studying the impacts of colonial neoliberalism on aesthetic products. Her teaching interests include Latinx studies as a critical pedagogy, contemporary Latinx literature and popular culture, migration, borders and diaspora, popular music and performance, Caribbean decolonial thought, and labor and late capitalism in popular culture. She is currently Chair of the Puerto Rico Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and has served on the board of the Puerto Rican Studies Association.

Dr. Villanueva’s research interests include Urban Political Economy, Legal & Carceral Geographies, Historical Geography, Caribbean Geographies, Race, Class, & Social Theory. Dr. Villanueva is currently working on a book manuscript project that explores the Puerto Rico Planning Board in the mid twentieth century and its relation to today’s Puerto Rican debt crisis. He served as the President of the Puerto Rican Studies Association from 2020-2022.  At Gustavus Adolphus College, he teaches classes on world regional geography; introduction to human geography; urban geography; political geography; geographies of peace, crime, and violence; and sports geography.

Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo’s research interests include borderlands, women’s health and reproductive justice, Latina/o/x studies, and social justice movements. She is currently completing her first history manuscript titled Fighting for Control: Reproductive Care, Race, and Power in the U.S-Mexico Borderlands.  Other projects include a study of how “fears of white demographic decline” have translated into a hostile legal and social environment for pregnant women and people in the last two centuries, and a biography of the little-known abortion rights activist Patricia Maginnis, who in the years before Roe v. Wade established an organized abortion network across the U.S.-Mexico border.