CSRC FELLOWS & VISITING SCHOLARS 2018-2019

Angelica Becerra is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies and a 2018-19 IUPLR-Mellon dissertation fellow at the CSRC. Her dissertation project, “Envisioning a “Chicana Radical Aesthetic: Digital Artivism in the Twenty-First-Century” is a Chicana feminist analysis of the work and visual tactics of contemporary Chicanx digital activist-artists (artivists) in California from 2000-2015. Her research theorizes the “Chicana radical aesthetic” as praxis and theoretical lens through which to examine how these digital artivists are changing contemporary social justice efforts. She contextualizes her study by considering how, historically, visual artists have been instrumental in the articulation and advancement of national and transnational social justice movements.
 

Cindy Cruz is an associate professor of education at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests include LGBTQ street youth, critical ethnography, race in education, pedagogies of coalition, testimonio, digital literacies, intersectionality, youth resistance and infrapolitics, decolonial thinking, U.S. feminist of color theory, and Latinos in the education pipeline. While on sabbatical for the 2018-19 academic year, Cruz, an urban ethnographer, will continue her research on surveillance and safety pertaining to queer and trans youth at the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's Youth Center in Hollywood.

 

Oscar Arias Diaz is a PhD student in communications at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, and a visiting graduate researcher at the CSRC. During his residency he will be engaged in research, observation, and writing pertaining to his project “Lights, Camera and Action: An Approach from Grounded Practical Theory to Filmmaking Practice in Chicanx and Latinx Filmmakers.” He will be conducting his research at the CSRC Library and the UCLA Film and Television Archive, as well as on production sets.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is an independent curator and a 2018-19 CSRC research scholar. Her current research project is XicanXperimental Body, a forthcoming multidisciplinary art exhibition that looks at Chicanx art and culture through experimental art in Los Angeles and other US cities, plus border zones with Mexico, from the 1970s to the present. The exhibition aims to complicate the dominant understanding of Chicanx art and culture by focusing on the conceptual and experimental nature of visual practices utilizing the body, from self- to collective representation. Artists include Asco, Judith F. Baca, Barbara Carrasco, Isabel Castro, Rafa Esparza, Ken Gonzales-Day, Esther Hernández, Yolanda López, Celia Muñoz, Sylvia Salazar Simpson, Shizu Saldamando, John Valadez, Pattsi Valdez, and Ricardo Valverde, among others. XicanXperimental Body is co-curated by Fajardo-Hill and Selene Preciado, and organized by the Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition will open at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami in summer 2021.

 

Rocío R. García is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA Department of Sociology. Through her dissertation project,  “Latinx Feminist Thought: Visions of Reproductive Justice, Anti-Colonization, and Utopias”
she seeks to forge a new path in feminist-of-color theory by examining the origins and distinguishing features of a pan-ethnoracial Latinx feminist framework, and the implications of this framework for intersectional movements for global justice. Her thesis is based on a three-year ethnographic study engaged with the California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (a nonprofit organization engaged in intersectional activism); analysis of key texts authored by Latinx feminists in the humanities and social sciences from 1960 to the present; Latinx feminist podcasts, oral histories with Latinx academics, everyday conversations with Latinx women and queer people not identified as academics; and the voices
of Latinx feminist singers, poets, and artists

 

Raúl Pérez is a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow. He is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Denver, where his research centers on the intersections of race, racism, and humor and their connections to social inequality and social movements. Pérez will spend his fellowship year at UCLA completing his first book project, “The Racial Power of Humor,” in which he argues that racist humor, its political and discursive evolution, and organized opposition to it have played a critical role in shaping Americans’ thoughts and actions in regard to race over the past two centuries. Pérez uses ethnography, discourse analysis, content analysis, and archival research in his investigation. 
 

Roy Pérez is the 2018-19 Institute of American Cultures visiting scholar at the CSRC. He is an associate professor of English and ethnic studies at Willamette University, where he teaches U.S. Latina/o culture from the colonial encounter to the present, contemporary Latina/o media, creative writing, literary and performance studies, critical race analysis, and queer studies. During his fellowship year, Pérez will complete his current book project, “Proximities: Queer Configurations of Race in Latina/o Culture.” The project examines cross-racial representation in art by and about Latina/os to better understand how Latinx identity has been shaped and influenced by other racial formations—including Asian American-ness and African American–ness or blackness—through art, literature, and performance. Pérez will research the work of Laura Aguilar for a chapter that discusses artists’ approaches to fatness, desire, and physical closeness or distance, and he will also examine cultural representations of the Los Angeles River, which connects disparate cultural enclaves.

 

Jennifer Ponce de León is a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English and faculty in Latin American and Latino studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she serves as the associate director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique, which takes place every summer at the Sorbonne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Ponce de León is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research focuses on cultural production and antisystemic movements in the Americas since the 1960s. During her fellowship year she will complete her manuscript “Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Radical Politics across the Arts of the Americas," which theorizes aesthetics as an integral force in contemporary social struggles by examining the experimental and paradisciplinary art practices of Argentine, Mexican, Chilean, and Chicana/o artists and writers. Additionally, she will write about the work of L.A.-based writer Ricardo A. Bracho as it relates to contemporary immigration politics and securitization.