2019-20 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Dr. Leigh-Anna Hidalgo joins Yale as an Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Hidalgo engages in critical and creative digital humanities research focused on contemporary urban and labor struggles. She developed Augmented Fotonovelas, a digital humanities research method that both informs and invites – founded on ethnography and visual research methods. She earned her PhD from the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the UCLA with certificates from the Community Scholars Program and the Urban Humanities Initiative.

Dr. Isis Campos is currently the Laura C. Harris Scholar-in-Residence at Denison University. Isis studied in the Hispanic Studies department at the University of Houston. Her research focuses on U.S. Latino literature, specifically examining the rise and development of Central American women’s identities and subjectivity in the U.S. through their representation in literature. Additionally, she was an Inter-University Program for Latino Research/Mellon Fellow from University of Chicago Illinois for 2019-2020, a research fellow at Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Program at Arte Público Press from 2016 to 2019 and a HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) scholar 2018-2020 involved in the development of US Latina/o Digital Humanities projects.

Dr. Ana Isabel Fernández de Alba is a Mexican writer, filmmaker, and independent scholar. Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1984, she moved to the United States in 2012 to pursue a PhD in American Studies and an MA in Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin. She earned her PhD in May 2021. As a researcher, she has written extensively on folklore literature from Los Altos de Jalisco (Jalisco Highlands), as well as Latinx art in Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of several academic scholarships, including the CONACyT Mexican scholarship and the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellowship. She is currently preparing a literary history of Lagos de Moreno, her family’s hometown. Ana Isabel is also a writer and filmmaker. In collaboration with Juan Pablo Gonzalez and Ilana Coleman, she wrote Dos Estaciones, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2022) and which won the Grand Jury Prize Screenplay at the Outfest Film Festival. Her first book, 366,  is under contract with Tedium Vitae (Mexico), and is expected to be out by fall 2023. The book is a collection of personal moments that go, day by day, from January 16, 2020 to January 15, 2021.

Dr. José Ángel Navejas earned his PhD in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. His research focuses on local Spanish-language literary production. His dissertation, “The Chicago Latin American Literary Movement: Toward a Spanish-language Literature of the United States” examines contemporary Latin American immigrant writing in Chicago. Because it originally emerged in the iconic Mexican barrio of Pilsen, he identifies the movement as literature of place of destination, which eventually evolves and becomes a truly immigrant Latin American phenomenon of Chicago, distinct from both traditional Latin American and US Chicano/Latino literatures. José Ángel is the author of Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Palabras migrantes: 10 ensayistas mexican@s de Chicago (editor, El BeiSMan, 2018), Un mojado en Chicago y tres discursos inaugurales (forthcoming by katakana editores, 2020), and La música en mi vida (El BeiSMan, 2019).

Dr. Carlos Rivas obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Art History at UCLA where he researched colonial to contemporary Central American visual culture. He completed his dissertation in 2022. Titled “Aerial Views of Central America’s Río Lempa Basin in the Descripción Geográfico-Moral de la Diocesis de Goathemala, 1767-1770,” it examined cartography in a colonial Central American manuscript and reflected upon how Central American identities have been shaped by colonial constructions of space and time, even in the diaspora. Carlos was a recipient of the 2019-2020 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellowship and was awarded an Edward A. Dickson History of Art Fellowship (2016-2018) at UCLA. Currently, Carlos is co-authoring a paper examining the origins and future trajectory of Central American Studies in the United States with major scholars in the field and is working on his book manuscript which will be an extension of his dissertation work.

MENTORS 2019-20

Dr. Kency Cornejo is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico where she teaches Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art Histories. She received her PhD in Art History and Visual Studies from Duke University, her MA from UT Austin, and her BA from UCLA. She is also a proud first-gen and community college transfer student. Born to Salvadoran immigrant parents and raised in Compton, California, Dr. Cornejo’s experience with Imperialism, institutional racism, and forced migration inform her political and academic endeavors. Her research and pedagogy focus on art of Central America and its US-based diaspora, visual politics and activism in the Americas, and decolonizing methodologies in art and art history. Specifically, she explores creative responses to femicide, immigration, prisons, captivity, transnationalism, gangs, and Indigenous rights in Central America, as well as the role of art and visuality in coloniality and decoloniality.

Dr. Madelaine Cahuas is Assistant Professor in Geography, Environment & Society at the University of Minnesota. She is a human geographer whose teaching and research interests lie at the intersections of urban geography, Latinx Studies, health geography, feminist scholarship, critical race, and anti-colonial theory. She recently defended her dissertation in September 2018 in Geography at the University of Toronto. Her research explores how urban racialized migrant communities collectively organize to advance social justice, and focuses on Latinx urban life and politics in Toronto, Canada’s largest and most “diverse” city. She was awarded a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship from 2014-2017 to complete this research.

Dr. Yajaira M. Padilla is an Associate Professor of English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her research centers on Central American cultural and literary studies and Central Americans in a US Latino context. She is the author of Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives (SUNY 2012) and has published articles: Latin American Perspectives, Latino Studies, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature. Currently, she is working on a new project on the politics of Central American “belonging” and “non-belonging” in the United States. This new manuscript examines how Central American immigrants and subsequent generations construct collective identities within the US, thereby fostering a sense of “belonging” as an ethnic minority group and as “Americans,” as well as the different ways in which dominant discourses of US nationhood, based on exclusionary notions of citizenship, construe Central Americans as “not-belonging” or “undesirable” subjects, largely due to their undocumented status and criminalization, their gender, race, ethnicity, and/or their sexuality.

Dr. Alejandro Ramírez Méndez is a specialist in Mexican, Mexican American and Chicano/a literature and cultures. He completed his Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UCLA (2018). Prior to starting his doctoral studies, he received a B.A. in Literature and Language Sciences at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana (Mexico, 2007), and a M.A. in Literary Studies (Literatuurwetenschap) at Leiden University (The Netherlands, 2010). His research agenda scrutinizes Mexican and Mexican-American urban narratives (literature, graphic novels, public art, and music) that disclose how the sociopolitical conditions of the twentieth century dialogue with the cultural, gender and ethnic circumstances in the current period of global neoliberalism. His book project, Trans-Urban Narratives: Literary Cartographies and Global Cities in the Urban Imagination of Mexico and the US, proposes a method of literary analysis by interconnecting two or more urban environments across the socioeconomic boundaries of Mexico and the U.S., a process that he calls “trans-urbanity.” He suggests that trans-urban narratives, a cultural phenomenon of the twenty-first century, portray the internal reality of immigrant subjects who inhabit mayor global centers from the Third World (Mexico City) and the First World (Los Angeles, Chicago and New York) in the age of neoliberal migratory policies.

Dr. Olga U. Herrera is an art historian, independent curator, and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois Chicago. She previously served as director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR) Washington Office and held positions at the University of Notre Dame, and the Smithsonian Institution. While at IUPLR she was the director of the Summer Institute for Latino Public Policy (2005-2013) and was involved in hemispheric and national research humanities initiatives in Latino Studies including the organization of the conference series Siglo XXI and Latino Art Now!