Assistant Professor of Spanish

About

  • Office Hours:

    M 2:00 - 3:00 pm & W: 9:30-10:30 am

  • Role:

    Faculty

  • Position:

    • Assistant Professor of Spanish

  • Concentration:

    • Mexican Literature &
    • Culture
    • Latin American Literature - Emphasis on Brazil

  • Department:

    • Languages, Literatures and Culture

  • Education:

    • Ph.D Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Santa Barbara

  • Curriculum Vitae:

Biography

I am a researcher specializing in Mexican literature written by women and Latin American feminism. My published works showcase my deep engagement with narrative, poetry, and theater, where I inquire into rich storytelling, history, and emotional depth through the written word and performance. In addition to my primary focus, I also explore visual arts, especially photography from the Mexican Avant-Garde movement.

My current research project focuses on the contemporary work of two theater groups that recover women's political and Indigenous history in Yucatán during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Nominated for a 2024 Best Teacher Award

Lead organizer - Day of the Dead Event (2022, 2023 & 2024)

Hanal Pixan/Day of the Dead: A portal in time

“7 Latinx People on What Catrinas Mean to Them.” Glamour Magazine. October 2021

Publications

Recent Publications

Book Chapters

“The Scar of Writing Pleasure in El libro de Ana.” Carmen Boullosa In Between Brooklyn and Coyoacan, María del Mar López-Cabrales & María Rosario Matz.Vernon Press, May 2024.

Access Here

Forthcoming

“Unveiling Feminist Cartography in Yucatan. From the First Feminist Congress of 1916 to The First Women to Hold Elected Office in 1923.” Public History in Mexico: Memories, Displacements, and Intimacies. Mario Barbosa, Akuavi Adonon, María Moreno Carranco, and Maite Zubiaurre (Eds).  Routledge, TBD 2025.

Peer-reviewed Articles

“In K' áabae' María Uicab / Me llamo María Uicab. Dispositivo de memoria y resistencia en la Península de Yucatán, México.” Pirandante. Revista de Lengua y Literatura Hispanoamericana, no. 14, julio-diciembre 2024, pp. 112-133. Access Here

“La intuición en la poesía de Nadia Escalante Andrade.” Revista iMex. XXVI. Yucatán desde los discursos Literarios: cultura y representación, 2024/2 year 13, no. 26, pp. 78-94. Access Here

Book Reviews

Grieving. Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza. Translated by Sarah Booker. Latin American Literature Today, vol 1, no. 16, 2020. Access here

Mestizo Modernity. Race, Technology and the Body in Postrevolutionary Mexico by David S. Dalton. Hispanófila 121, Spring 2021.

Courses

  • LSPA 310: Approaches to Spanish Literature: Espacio, repetición y literatura

    Syllabus

    Literature is born of life itself. It approaches themes common to all human beings such as dreams, bodies, violence, nature, love and language. Thus, literature is made of the same words that we use daily, but with a special contract: everything is a lie. It is, therefore, a paradox, because thanks to these fictitious constructions we can imagine and make room for new worlds, ideas, and experiences that we did not know before. Literature is the only lie with creative power.
    LSPA 310 is an introductory course for students to know and become familiar with the main literary genres in Spanish from the pre-Hispanic and Middle Ages to the present in Spain and Latin America. The genres studied include poetry, drama, and narrative (short stories and a novel). Also, this course offers the fundamental basis (terminology, categories, etc.) for literary analysis. The five thematic axes (bodies, race, gender, extractivism, and community) serve to discuss the present, the past, and future projections of the aesthetic and cultural manifestations of literature in Spain and Latin America.
    At the end of the course, students are expected to recognize and critically reflect on the various literary genres in Spanish, analyze various aesthetic expressions, and contextualize the literary works that continue to shape the literature of Spanish-speaking countries.

  • LSPA 436. Issues in Hispanic Culture: Imaginación, memoria y tecnología

    The historiography origin of the term “Latin America” is bound to the process of Colonialism coming from the European Empires (Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy) tied to the Latin culture of the Romans. Many historians argue that the term is a French invention from Napoleon III’s leadership when trying to expand his domain towards Mexico in 1860. By 1870, the term “Latin America” was worldwide used [1]. So, writers like Chevalier argued that the Americans had two main lines of dominant cultures: the Romance and the Germanic traditions.
    From the beginning, Latin America (now known as LATAM or Global South) was a European invention that grouped more than 20 Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries; the indigenous languages and cultures were not even considered when creating this definition with substantial geopolitical consequences. The course in Advance Culture in Latin America deepens in four concepts currently experienced by the region and the Latinx communities in the USA with a heavy focus on Indigenous cultures: Neoextractivism (with a central point on the Environment), (loss of) Democracy, Touristification, and Resistance through the lenses of history, literature, film, and the arts, with emphasis on the Avant-Garde poetry and arts, cinema, performance, and theater.

    [1]https://journals.openedition.org/etudesromanes/5141