CSRC Fellows & Visiting Scholars 2013-2014

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
Dr. Fajardo-Hill is a British-Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art. Currently based in Southern California, she has a PhD in art history from the University of Essex, and an MA in twentieth-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She served as the chief curator and vice president of curatorial affairs at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, from 2009 to 2012. Previously she was the director and chief curator of the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, and the general director of Sala Mendoza, an alternative space for contemporary art in Caracas. She has curated and organized numerous group and solo exhibitions of international artists and has published broadly on contemporary art and artists from Latin America. Drawing from the Ricardo Valverde Digital Image Collection at the CSRC, she will curate a retrospective of Valverde's work at the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College in spring 2014.
 
Carlos M. Haro
Dr. Haro, Assistant Director Emeritus of the CSRC, will continue his multi-year research into Chicano education and the history of Chicanos and the schools, oral histories, and comparative and international education. Dr. Haro is responsible for CSRC’s annual Latina/o Education Summit series at UCLA, which assesses the critical issues facing Latina/os in the education pipeline from kindergarten through graduate studies.
 
Juan Carlos Herrera
Dr. Herrera received his PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2013.  During his postdoctoral tenure at the CSRC he will expand his current research for his book manuscript Politicizing Care: The State, Philanthropy, and the Making of the Latino Nonprofit Sector. In his dissertation project, Herrera argued that nonprofit organizations are a powerful vehicle in the remaking of contemporary racial subjectivities and citizenship. As critical community-based organizations, they negotiate how urban racial subjects relate to the state and social movements. His book manuscript expands his dissertation with a geographically and racially comparative framework grounded in additional archival research. This analysis will examine the role of the Ford Foundation in relationally guiding African American and Latino nonprofits. Dr. Herrera will also critically analyze the archival sources contained in the Latinas and Latinos in Politics Oral History Collection as well as the Edward Roybal Papers located at UCLA, which relate to Los Angeles-specific organizations and activism.
 
Jacqueline Hidalgo
Dr. Hidalgo holds a PhD in religion from Claremont Graduate University.  She is assistant professor of Latina/o studies and Religion at Williams College.  Dr. Hidalgo will pursue archival research at the Chicano Studies Research Center that will contribute to the completion of her book Scriptures and (No) Place: Aztlán, the New Jerusalem, and Utopian Imaginations of California.  The project draws upon utopian theory because the term utopia yields anambivalent slippage between "good" and "no place" that sheds light on the work that scriptures do as sites of identity formation, contestation, and negotiation.  As part of her research plan, Dr. Hidalgo will examine how the Chicana/o movement conceptualizations of Aztlán in 1960s and 1970s, paying particular attention to El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán (El Plan).  She is a current recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship.
 
Lindsay Perez Huber
Dr. Huber holds a doctorate from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Her work examines the perpetuation of nativism in California’s education policies.
 
Maurice Magana
Dr. Magana is the Institute of American Cultures (IAC) Post-Doctoral Researcher for the 2013-14 academic year at the Chicano Studies Research Center.  He recently completed his doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon. He is a member, among other organizations, of the Society for Urban National & Transnational Global Anthropology, the Latin American Studies Association, and the Association of Latina & Latino Anthropologists.  He has also been the recipient of a Ford Dissertation Fellowship, and received the honorable mention by the American Anthropology Association, Minority Dissertation Fellowship.  Dr. Magana’s project, Communities in Movement: a Transnational Perspective on Mexican and Chicano Youth Activism, looks at the intersectionality of hip-hop, the Latino diaspora, and social movements.  His research will examine how a particular Mexican social movement--the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO)--captured the revolutionary  imagination of  Chicano and Oaxacan youth in the US, many of whom have travelled to Oaxaca to work with youth collectives formed out of the experience of 2006.  He will expand on his work dealing with the combination of indigenous epistemologies, the organization of practices and identities within the use of social media technologies, and hip-hop culture as a way to construct emergent political subjectivities, new cultures of participation and novel forms of social organizing, a conceptual metaphor known as the “hip-hop sample.” During his time at the CSRC, Dr. Magana will explore this conceptual “sampling” metaphor in the transnational space of Mexico and the Mexican diaspora in the US, how it compares to the activism of indigenous urban youth in Mexico, how the current generation of youth mobilize ethno-political identities (Chicano/Mexican/Oaxacan/Indigenous), and what we can learn about the future of Latino Coalition politics.
 
Atsuko Niitsu
Atsuko Niitsu is a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, pursuing her degree in Latin American Studies.  In 2012 she was the recipient of a three-year research fellowship for doctoral students from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Her work focuses on art in the public sphere, particularly in public spaces.  During her time at the Chicano Studies Research Center, she will interview Chicano muralists and conduct participant observation through activities at Chicano community art centers. Her doctoral thesis will integrate her field research with the materials available at the CSRC library concerning Chicano mural movements and their history.