CSRC Fellows and Visiting Scholars, 2021-22
Vicente Carrillo, PhD candidate
Vicente Carrillo is a PhD candidate in the César E Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and the CSRC's 2021-22 IUPLR-Mellon Dissertation Fellow. His dissertation project, “Queer Latinx Regeneration: Boyle Heights and the Geographies of Gentrification,” explores queer-of-color belonging alongside the revitalizing barrio landscape of Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. Tracing the contestations that arise from gentrification and queer-of-color emplacements, Carrillo's research highlights queer-of-color ascendancies, mobilities, intracommunal negotiations and cultural representations within the barrio landscape. Carrillo is recipient of a Gold Shield Alumni Scholarship, a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, and UCLA graduate research mentorship fellowships. Outside of academia, Carrillo is a practicing artist/painter.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, PhD
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a 2021-22 CSRC research scholar. She is an independent curator and art historian based in Southern California and New York. As a CSRC research scholar, Fajardo-Hill will continue working on the realization of the upcoming touring exhibition Xican-a.o.x. Body (2022) and its related publication for which she serves as contributor and editor. A 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, she will be working on a study of Patssi Valdez’s pioneering performative photographic work focusing on the East LA underground community in the 1970s and 1980s. Fajardo-Hill will be a Clark Fellow in residence at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown in Fall 2021, and 2021-22 Central American Visiting Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University. She is currently researching a book on decolonial Latin American, Latinx, and Chicanx art history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with a particular focus on feminism and gender, ethnicity, indigeneity, African heritage, and popular culture.
Daniel Millán, PhD
Daniel Millán is a 2021-22 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of American Cultures and the CSRC. Daniel earned a PhD in sociology with an emphasis in Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He has researched immigrant families and the experiences of undocumented young adults. His current research explores the consequences of a prolonged lack of inclusive immigration policy for members of Latina/o mixed-status immigrant families.
Stevie Ruiz, PhD
Stevie Ruiz is an associate professor of environmental justice, critical race theory, and Chicana/o studies at California State University, Northridge, and the Institute of American Cultures visiting scholar at the CSRC for 2021-22. During his residency, he will be completing his current book manuscript, “Stewards of the Land: Race, Space, and Environmental Justice,” a study of the racial origins of the Environmental Justice Movement prior to the 1960s in the U.S. Southwest. The book is under contract with University of North Carolina Press.
Uriel Serrano, PhD candidate
Uriel Serrano is a PhD candidate in sociology and critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, and a 2021-22 Ford Dissertation Fellow and UC President's Dissertation Fellow based at the CSRC. His dissertation project, "Youth in The City of Inmates: Carceral Seepage, Gender, and Resistance," examines how police violence, criminalization, community-based organizations, and social movements shape the lives of inner-city Black and Latinx young men. Serrano’s mixed-qualitative research explores how criminalization intersects with gender ideologies and emotions. Moreover, he elucidates the contexts and social processes across institutions that mediate and buffer carceral violence and its impacts. While in residence at the CSRC, Serrano will complete his dissertation and document youth-based movements in Los Angeles to defund school police.