2022-23 IUPLR/UIC Mellon Fellows

Luz Acosta (she/her/ella) was born and raised in Little Village, Chicago to immigrant parents from Durango, Mexico. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Criminology, Law and Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her research and teaching interests include the carceral state, race and the criminal legal system, the criminalization of marginalized folks, crimmigration, surveillance studies, mass incarceration and racial justice issues. Her dissertation project examines the hyper-criminalization of Latinx folks in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood of Chicago. She has taught at Governors State University and was a recipient of the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois Fellowship (2017-21) and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy Dissertation Research Grant (2021-22). As a proud first generation Mexican-American, she hopes her dissertation “The Hyper-Criminalization of Latinx Folks” provides a lens into the lived experiences of Latinx communities in the USA.

Luz Acosta’s mentor was Dr. Jennifer Ortiz at Indiana University Southeast.

Lisa Jahn (she/her) is a first-generation Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was born and raised in New York City. Her research interest includes dispossession and resettlement, migration, diasporic populations, social inequalities and racialization, health disparities, and disasters/recovery. Her dissertation “‘Everything Reminds me of What I Lost’: Displacement in New York City and Puerto Rico” focuses on how Puerto Ricans arriving in New York City post-Hurricane Maria navigate and adapt to bureaucratic neglect, structural violence, and second-class citizenship and how disaster case managers–the first point of contact–create alternative forms of recovery in the absence of adequate state support. Her undergraduate education was formative. There she witnessed the classroom politics that devalued and delegitimized Black, Latinx and other racialized populations’ knowledge and quotidian experiences. As an instructor at Brooklyn College, CUNY her pedagogical approach draws from non-canonical knowledge to design anti-racist curriculums.

Lisa Jahn’s mentor was Dr. Rosalyn Negrón at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Brenda Selena Lara (she/they/ella) is a doctoral candidate at UCLA’s Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies. Born and raised in Huntington Park, CA, Brenda is a first-generation student, raised by a strong, hardworking Mexican mother who taught her feminist values. Her upbringing influences her historical and theoretical research analyzing LGBTQ+ Latinxs’ lives, knowledge, deaths, and cultural depictions. Her dissertation “Epistemic Hauntings: Queer Latinx Ghosts in Academia” theorizes the significance of epistemic haunting as a framework for understanding queer Latinxs’ knowledge and the social violence they face. Lara’s projects have been awarded the Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies Fellowship, UCLA’s Dissertation Year Fellowship, and the IUPLR/UIC Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. Alongside her graduate work, she is a councilmember for UCLA’s First-Generation Graduate Student Council and the editor for Queer Cats: A Journal of LGBTQ Studies.

Brenda Lara’s mentor is Dr. Yvette J. Saavedra at the University of Oregon.

Valentina Jager Lopezllera is a visual artist, writer, and translator from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Her artistic practice, developed mostly in sculpture, performance, and writing, is material-oriented and site-specific. A Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Houston, her current research titled “Field Guide to Sam Houston National Forest” studies the intersection of prison geographies, administered natural space, and tourism by walking throughout the surrounding forests of the city of Huntsville, Texas. She holds an M.A. in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts, focusing on public art, public memorial culture, and artistic research as a practice and methodology. Since 2012 when she first encountered it, Valentina has become a Butoh enthusiast.

Valentina Jäger Lopezllera’s mentor was Dr. micha cardénas at the University of California Santa Cruz.

M. Roxana Loza is from Mexico City and came to the U.S. (documented) when she was eleven years old, the same age as Gaby, one of the characters in the middle grade books she analyzes in her dissertation “Shelter(ed) Childhoods: Mental Health and Immigration in Latinx Children’s and Young Adult Literature.” A doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, Roxana’s dissertation project connects fictional narratives of immigration with contemporary immigration policies and builds upon scholarship from disability studies, mad studies, and trauma studies. She earned her M.A. in Children’s Literature from Kansas State University and her B.A. in English, French, and Psychology from Rice University. She has loved books since arriving in the U.S. because they were easier to understand than English-speaking peers and has taught public school Spanish Kindergarten.

Roxana Loza’s mentor was Dr. Cristina Rhodes at Shippensburg University.

Arón Montenegro (he/him/winaq) focuses on the role of visual and performance art in addressing intergenerational trauma among migrant communities. As a street artist who creates murals, ‘zines, screen prints and theatre skits, his research is informed by creative practices facilitated outside of institutional settings. Prior to attaining his PhD in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA, Arón was an independent journalist covering land conflicts in Central America and successfully stopped the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in his hometown of El Monte, CA. As a survivor of physical and psychological abuse by the U.S. trained military in Honduras, Arón uses art to work through his personal traumas. Collective memory and intracommunal solidarity are themes used consistently through his creative and scholarly endeavors. His dissertation “Entre Flor y Fusil: Caribbean and Central American Cultural Memory in the Late and Post-Cold War Era (1968-2020)” was completed in Spring 2023. He is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society. His latest project is developing the Peoples’ Cafe, a hybrid soup kitchen and community arts space in his local neighborhood.

Arón Montenegro’s mentor was Dr. Macarena Gomez-Barris at Brown University.