About

CSRC Fellows & Visiting Scholars 2015-2016

Mercedes Álvarez San Román, MA
Álvarez San Román is a doctoral student at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She has an MA in gender and diversity from Oviedo University, Oviedo, Spain, as well as an MA in journalism. Her dissertation is focused on representations of gender and nation in Spanish contemporary animated films, and she will use her time at the CSRC to study how Spanish animation has reacted to the discourses transmitted by representations of Latinos in Hollywood films. Her research includes addressing issues pertaining to immigration, conquest, and territory in the United States, Mexico, and Spain.

Carlos M. Haro, PhD
Haro, assistant director emeritus of the CSRC, will continue his multiyear research into Chicano education, oral histories, and comparative and international education. Haro organizes the CSRC’s annual Latina/o Education Summit series, which assesses the critical issues facing Latinas/os in the education pipeline from kindergarten through graduate studies. The tenth annual summit will take place on November 6, 2015.

Juanita Heredia, PhD
Heredia holds a doctorate from UCLA in Hispanic languages and literatures and is a professor of Spanish and global languages and cultures at Northern Arizona University. She will use her time as a visiting scholar to explore the literature and cultural production by U.S. Latinas with South American backgrounds between 1983 and 2014. She will examine how these authors have contributed to U.S.–South American relations through their writings on gender and sexuality and their transnational travel. Heredia is researching the Tatiana de la Tierra Papers, which is part of the CSRC Library’s LGBT and Mujeres Initiative. Heredia was the IAC visiting researcher at the CSRC in 2012-13.

Robb Hernández, PhD
Hernández, this year’s IAC visiting researcher at the CSRC, is an assistant professor in the Department of English at UC Riverside. His time at the CSRC will be used to finish his book manuscript “Finding AIDS: Archival Body/Archival Space and the Chicano Avant-garde.” Hernández will also organize talks on the theme “BiblioAzteca: On the Chicano Library’s Ruins” with the intent to “shift the discourse from the Chicano library’s neutralizing arrest to its subversive potentiality in origin, formation, and relevance in our current era of paperless libraries.” Hernández, who earned his MA at UCLA, is the author of the scholarly essay in two publications from the CSRC Press’s Chicano Archives Series: The Fire of Life: The Robert Legorreta–Cyclona Collection (2009) and VIVA Records, 1970–2000: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles (2013).

Yvette Martinez-Vu, PhD candidate
Yvette Martinez-Vu is a doctoral candidate in theater and performance studies at UCLA and a 2015-16 IUPLR-Mellon dissertation fellow at the CSRC. Her dissertation project, "Transindigenous Affinities: Gender, Indigeneity, and Objects in Mexicana and Chicana Performance," examines the function of ceremonial and/or quotidian objects within Mexicana Chicana performances that address issues of gender and indigeneity.
 
Maria de Lourdes (Marilu) Medrano, PhD candidate
Marilu Medrano is a doctoral candidate in the UCLA Department of English and a 2015-16 IUPLR-Mellon dissertation fellow at the CSRC. Her dissertation project examines the ways in which representations of mixed race, or creole and mestizo, bodies in literary works by Mexican-American writer Maria Cristina Mena, Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, Cuban writer Mayra Montero challenge the idea of a monolithic US national history while at the same time revealing the global context of the Américas colonial history.
 

Leonard Melchor, PhD
Melchor is an adjunct instructor at East Los Angeles College in the history and Chicana/o studies departments. He employs interdisciplinary research methodologies to unfold the complicated relationship between historical and contemporary cultural practices among Mexicans living in West Los Angeles. His primary research endeavor is to understand the relationship between community formation and cultural activities. His dissertation, “Mexican in Four Images: Cinema, Self and Soccer in the Creation of Real and Imagined Mexicans,” focuses on the first soccer clubs created by Mexicans in West Los Angeles and argues that soccer clubs were crucial to the formation of stable social circles for postwar Mexican immigrants that had exited the Bracero Program and settled in West Los Angeles. His time at the CSRC will include curating a photo exhibition and organizing a public presentation on surfing and soccer organizations among Mexicans in West Los Angeles.

Lindsay Pérez Huber, PhD
Pérez Huber holds a doctorate from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is an assistant professor of social and cultural analysis of education in the College of Education at California State University, Long Beach. Her research and publications use interdisciplinary perspectives to analyze racial inequities in education, the structural causes of those inequities, and how they mediate educational trajectories and outcomes of students of color. Pérez Huber is co-coordinator of the CSRC’s tenth annual Latina/o Education Summit, which will take place at UCLA on November 6, and she is co-author of the CSRC Policy and Issues Brief and the CSRC Research Report that have been published for the conference. Pérez Huber assisted with the planning of the first summit in 2006.