LATINA & LATINO STUDIES PROGRAM

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).

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.

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 & 2016), 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. He is now completing his second book, Los Conservadores: The Untold Story of the Hispanic-American Political Tradition, about the making of a Hispanic conservative movement since the 1960s. He teaches courses on Latinx History, Latin American migration to the United States, and the United States-Mexico borderlands.

Héctor Carrillo

Associate Professor, Sociology and Gender & Sexuality Studies | ON RESEARCH LEAVE DURING 2020-2021 ACADEMIC YEAR
Co-director of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)

Phone number: 847-467-0516
Office location: 1808 Chicago Ave, Room 101
hector@northwestern.edu

His areas of specialization are Latino culture and ethnicity, sexuality, migration, and health. He is the author of The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of AIDS  (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which received the Ruth Benedict Prize from the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists of the American Anthropological Association. Most recently, Prof. Carrillo has studied the sexual migration of Mexican gay men to the United States. He is currently investigating the enabling and limiting aspects of the modern concept of sexual identity, specifically by examining the sexualities of men who do not fit neatly in the categories “straight,” “bi,” or “gay.” Prof. Carrillo teaches courses on the sociology of sexuality and Latino culture and ethnicity.

John Alba Cutler

Associate Professor, English | ON LEAVE DURING 2020-2021 ACADEMIC YEAR

Phone number: 847-467-1783
Office location: University Hall Room 328
john-cutler@northwestern.edu

John Alba Cutler (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2008) specializes in US Latino/a literatures, multiethnic American poetry, contemporary American literature, and print culture studies. His book Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford, 2015) examines how Chicano/a (Mexican American) literary works represent assimilation, and what those representations can teach us about race, gender, and the nature of literary discourse. Ends of Assimilation argues that Chicano/a literature illuminates and critiques the history of assimilation sociology, which has been blind to its own work as a cultural discourse, examining and illuminating by contrast the myriad ways that Chicano/a literature imagines cultural change.

Professor Cutler is now working on a project examining the prodigious literary output of US Spanish-language serials in the early twentieth century. Daily newspapers, weekly magazines, literary reviews, and anarchist journals were the primary literary institutions for Latinx communities during this time period, publishing tens of thousands of original and reprinted poems, short stories, and crónicas. Professor Cutler’s work illuminates an entire field of Latinx modernism that these serial publications sponsored at the intersections of Latin American and US Latinx identity and thought.

Professor Cutler has published articles in English Language Notes, American Literary History, American Literature, MELUS, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, among other places. He is a core faculty member of the Latina and Latino Studies Program and a member of the Latina and Latino Literature Executive Committee for the Modern Language Association, as well as the Board of Directors of the Recovering the US-Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. He is active in the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium, and serves as a series editor for the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. He received the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013.

Essays

 “At the Crossroads of Circulation and Translation: Rethinking US Latino/a Modernism,” Modernism/modernity Print Plus volume 3, cycle 3 (2018): https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0069

“Rubén Darío: Latino Poet,” part of special issue on “Latinx Lives in a Hemispheric Context” edited by Maria A. Windell and Jesse Alemán, English Language Notes 56.2 (2018): 71-89.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Elvia Mendoza

Visiting Assistant Professor | 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.  

Ramón Rivera-Servera

Associate Professor, Performance Studies

Phone number: 847-491-3275
Office location: 70 Arts Circle Drive Room 5-157
r-rivera-servera@northwestern.edu
Ramón H. Rivera-Servera's research focuses on contemporary performance in North America and the Caribbean with special emphasis on the ways categories of race, gender, and sexuality are negotiated in the process of (im)migration. His work documents a wide array of performance practices ranging from theatre and concert dance to social dance, fashion, and speech.

His teaching ranges from seminar courses on Latina/o and queer performance, sound and movement studies, and visual cultural studies to workshop courses on social art practices, the performances of non-fiction, ethnographic research methods, and performance art.

He is author of Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2012), a study of the role performance played in the development of Latina/o queer publics in the United States from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. The book received the 2013 Lambda Book Award in the LGBT Studies, the 2013 Book Award from the Latino Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association, the 2013 Outstanding Publication Award from the Congress on Research in Dance, and a Special Citation for the 2012 de la Torre Bueno Book Prize in Dance Studies from the Society of Dance History Scholars.

He is currently conducting research for two book projects: Exhibiting Performance: Race, Museum Cultures, and the Live Event, which looks at the ways race has been collected and exhibited in North America and the Caribbean since the mid-1990s andChoreographing the Latina/o Post-Modern: Puerto Rican Moves in the New York Dance Avant-Garde, a cultural history of Puerto Rican participation in the New York City experimental dance scene since the 1980s.

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

Assistant Professor, Sociology & Latina and Latino Studies

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

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is a sociologist of knowledge and race, born and raised in Chicago. His areas of specialization include: the politics of ethnoracial knowledge, Latino/a identity formation, and contemporary Latino civil rights politics. Michael received his PhD from Brown University in 2015.​

Mérida M. Rúa

Professor

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

Monica Russel y Rodriguez

Senior Lecturer
Associate Dean of WCAS

Phone number: 847-491-3277
Office location: 1918 Sheridan
mryr@northwestern.edu
Dr. Russel y Rodríguez is a cultural anthropologist interested in race and mestizaje, modes of resistance to social inequality, and Chicana/Latina feminist theory. Selected published works include, “Accounting for MeXicana feminisms” (2008), American Ethnologist.