LATINA & LATINO STUDIES PROGRAM

Geraldo Cadava

Director, Latina and Latino Studies Program

Office location: Crowe Hall, Room 1131
g-cadava@northwestern.edu

Geraldo Cadava is an Associate Professor of History, and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University, and a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College. His first book, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013), was about the Arizona-Sonora border region since World War II. It won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, and was named a finalist for the David J. Weber-Clements Center Prize for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America. His second book, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (Ecco, 2020), is about Latino conservatism and outreach by the Republican Party from the 1960s to the Present. His writing on the topic has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, MSNBC, PBS Frontline, and elsewhere. Currently he’s at work on a new synthesis of Latino history. He teaches courses on Latinx History, Latin American migration to the United States, and the United States-Mexico borderlands.

Mérida M. Rúa

Professor

Office location: Crowe Hall, Room 1-148
mrua@northwestern.edu

Ana Aparicio

Associate Professor, Anthropology

Phone number: 847-491-5132
Office location: 1810 Hinman, #212
a-aparicio@northwestern.edu

Ana Aparicio is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on two major areas of research: 1- ethnographic research on the ways in which people of color (including immigrants and Latinos) and youth engage with and construct local politics, develop coalitions, and transform public space; and 2- analysis of the relationship between policy and racial/ethnic disparities in various sectors, including public health care. Her work has received support from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.  She is currently on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. She is the author of Dominican Americans and the Politics of Empowerment (part of the New World Diasporas series edited by Kevin Yelvington, University Press of Florida, 2006), which received the 2006 Association for Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award Honorable Mention.  One of the explicit goals of this work is to understand the dynamics of “community,” racial formation, and political citizenship in a contemporary urban, U.S., racialized, Latino/a, and Caribbean immigrant context.  She is also the co-editor of Immigrants, Welfare Reform and the Poverty of Policy (Greenwood, 2004).  Her most recent research – funded by the National Science Foundation – is an ethnography of race and public space in contemporary suburbia; more specifically, she is examining suburban Latino and immigrant populations, inter-group relations, and the transformation of suburban public spaces. Aparicio has also worked with city and nonprofit organizations examining racial and ethnic disparities; this work has covered areas such as healthcare, welfare reform, education, and the construction industry.

John D. Márquez

Associate Professor, African American Studies and Latina/o Studies

Phone number: 847-467-0503
j-marquez@northwestern.edu

John D. Márquez focuses on decolonization. Interests and Specializations: 

Critical Race/Ethnic Studies
The 3rd World Left and 3rd World Studies
Carceral Studies
Settler Colonial Studies
Postcolonial Studies
Abolitionism, Fugitivity, and Marronage
Social Movement Histories and Theories
Black Political Thought
Brown Political Thought
Expressive Cultures (music, fashion, visual art)
Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x Studies
The U.S. South
Nde Thought

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

Assistant Professor, Sociology & Latina and Latino Studies

Office location: 1810 Chicago Ave, Room 323
michael.rodriguez@northwestern.edu

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz was born and raised on Chicago’s northwest side. Prior to graduate school, he led and participated in several Puerto Rican-focused grassroots and activist projects in the Humboldt Park/West Town area. He received his PhD from Brown University, his MA from the University of Illinois-Chicago, and his BA from Northeastern Illinois University. Michael joined Northwestern’s Department of Sociology and Latina/o Studies Program in 2016. His first book is Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press), which is based on his award-winning dissertation. In addition, he has published on censuses, poverty knowledge, Latino identity formation, and the relationship between critical sociologies of race and science and technology studies.  He is currently engaged in a collaborative interview-based project on race and political trust. His next book project will explore the history and afterlives of political repression against Chicago’s anti-colonial Puerto Rican movements. This project involves efforts to create a community-based archive. He teaches courses on race and racial knowledge, qualitative/ethnographic methods, and Latino identity and politics, among others.

Elvia Mendoza

Assistant Professor of Instruction | Director of Undergraduate Studies

Office location: 1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall Room 1144
elvia.mendoza@northwestern.edu

Elvia Mendoza received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her research on the racial-sexual and gendered dimensions of state and juridical violence is based on ethnographic research and filmmaking.  Her extensive work with the exoneration efforts of four queer Chicana women (known as the San Antonio Four) falsely accused of sexually assaulting two young girls, and subsequently wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, sets the stage in her current work for investigating the ways in which the interlinking categories of race, sexuality, and gender are recalibrated through liberal discourses of state protection that rescript rationalities and practices of policing and surveilling Mexican/Chicanx subjects as a historical collective. The integration of different forms of alternative texts, such as film, photography, paintings, drawings, and performance, are central to her research and teaching methodologies.  She sees them as tools for conducting collaborative research and analysis, community-organizing, and as a means for affirming and building bridges of knowledge between academia and the community-at-large.  She is the field producer for Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio, an award-winning full-length film documentary based on the case of the San Antonio Four; filmmaker and producer of Nosotros Tambien Migramos, and other short film productions.  

Myrna García

Assistant Professor of Instruction, Latina and Latino Studies

Office location: 1908 Sheridan Road
myrna.garcia@northwestern.edu

Dr. Myrna García is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator interested in critical ethnic studies, race and ethnicity, Latina/o/x im/migration, Chicana/Latina feminism, Latino History, Latinas/os in the Midwest, and Latina/o Social Movements.  She is currently preparing a monograph entitled, “Pueblo Sin Fronteras [Community Beyond Borders]: Immigration, Labor, and Community Activism in Latina/o Chicago, 1965-1986.” She draws upon oral histories and archival research to document the youth activism undertaken by members of the Chicago chapter of the Center for Autonomous Social Action (CASA). Founded in Los Angeles in 1968, CASA is one of the most important transnational immigrant rights organizations to emerge from the Chicano Movement. CASA-Chicago youth in the 1970s conceptualized a “sin fronteras politics” as a transnational imagining that brought ethnic Mexicans together, regardless of birthplace, generation, or citizenship status. García’s study demonstrates how a sin fronteras politics was not only a precursor to the political ideology articulated in contemporary immigrant rights protests across the United States, but also a theoretical construct that grapples with both liberatory potentials and limitations for social change. Furthermore, the book is historicizes transnational Chicana/o~Latina/o youth activism as a continuum of a decolonial movement against state violence, global capitalism, racism, and labor exploitation. 

Jaime Dominguez

Assistant Professor of Instruction, Political Science

Phone number: 847-491-8916
Office location: 619 Emerson Road
j-dominguez@northwestern.edu

His research interests include race and ethnicity, urban and Latino and minority politics. He is one of the principal architects of the Chicago Democracy Project (CDP), a thirty-year (1975-2005) online political database that provides citizens, community groups, and religious organizations with information on campaign finance, electoral outcomes, government contracts, minority appointments and levels of public employment for the City of Chicago.

Emily Maguire

Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese

Phone number: 847-491-2340
Office location: 3-125 Crowe
e-maguire@northwestern.edu
Emily Maguire research focuses on literature of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diasporas. Her book Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (University Press of Florida, 2011) explores the ways in which Cuban writers in the first half of the twentieth century drew on both ethnography and literature in their re-valorization of Afro-Cuban culture as a source of Cubanness. Her publications include essays in Small Axe, Revista Iberoamericana, Estudios, Ciberletras, and The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Literature. She is currently at work on a second book project on Caribbean science fiction.

Monica Russel y Rodriguez

Senior Lecturer | Assistant Provost for Diversity & Inclusion
Associate Dean of WCAS

Phone number: 847-491-3277
Office location: 1918 Sheridan
mryr@northwestern.edu

Mónica Russel y Rodríguez is the Assistant Provost, Diversity and Inclusion. She is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and in Latina and Latino Studies. She earned her bachelor's degree in anthropology at Yale University and a doctorate in cultural anthropology at UCLA. At Northwestern she has served as Associate Dean for Teaching-Track and Visiting Faculty in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, as Weinberg faculty adviser, and as Interim Director of the Latina and Latino Studies Program. Dr. Russel y Rodríguez is an ethnographer with broad disciplinary interests that include Anthropology, Latinx Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies. She works primarily with US Latinx populations and larger questions of representation of Latinxs in academe, public policy, and the media. Her interests are gender, sexuality, race and class in Latina/o communities.  Her publications focus on Chicana feminist theory, theories and methods of ethnography, and questions of race and mixed race in Chicana/o communities. Her activism has centrally involved women's health and reproductive rights, particularly for under-served and undocumented Latinas. Her articles have been published in Voces, a Journal of Chicana/ Latina Studies, The Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, The Latino Studies Journal, including reprints of her work in The Journal of Latino/a Research and Policy (2000) and The Qualitative Inquiry Reader(2001). She was an Associate Editor of The Chicana/ Latina Studies Journal and most recently reviews articles for Journal of Gender Studies and International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Danforth Foundation, she has mentored faculty for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and she has received research funding from several associations including the National Science Foundation and UCMexus.

Frances Aparicio

Emeritus Professor, Latina and Latino Studies
Professor of Spanish & Portuguese

frances-aparicio@northwestern.edu

Frances Aparicio's research interests include Latina and Latino literary and cultural studies, the cultural politics of U.S. Latino/a languages, Latino/a popular music and dance, literary and cultural translation, cultural hybridity, transnationalism, Latinidad, and intralatino subjects. She is author of Listening to Salsa (1998) and has edited numerous anthologies, including Tropicalizations (1997), Musical Migrations (2003), Hibridismos culturales (2006), and The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2012).