OUR TEAM

Ariana Ruiz, Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa. She is interested in Latina/o cultural studies, travel literature, critical race theory, cultural geography, and youth culture studies. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Claire Fox, Co-Principal Investigator; Professor of English/Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa. Her research is on Latinx visual cultures, cultural centers, and heritage sites in Iowa and surrounding states. She focuses on institutional histories of cultural centers and their partnerships with other organizations. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Delia Fernandez, Assistant Professor, History, Michigan State University. Her research is on the collaborations between Mexican American and Puerto Rican communities in Michigan on creating community centers and community initiatives. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Emiliano Aguilar, Graduate Student, History, Northwestern University. He is interested in Latinx Indiana, primarily the “politics of protest” during the 1970s by groups such as the Youth Advisory Board and Concerned Latins Organization. His work seeks to present these civil rights groups in conflict not only with discrimination but also political corruption as they fought for representative inclusion into their cities. Click here to access his webpage and contact information.

Gerry Cadava, Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University. His research focuses on US and Latin American history, looking at Latinos in the United States and the US-Mexico border. Click here to access his webpage and contact information.

Karen Mary Davalos, Professor, Chicano and Latino Studies, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her research focuses on Twin Cities Latinx cultural centers, and ephemeral pop-up projects, installations, and exhibitions that artists are and have created in the Twin Cities. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Laura Fernandez, PhD Student, Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University. She is specializing in Latinx Literature and Culture and is interested in Latinx literature in the Midwest. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Associate Professor, American Culture, Latina/o Studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research will focus on Fausto Fernós, Puerto Rican drag, the Feast of Fun podcast in Chicago, and the web series Cooking with Drag Queens, highlighting the convergence between Latinx queer performance aesthetics and new media platforms. Click here to access his webpage and contact information.

Leila Vieira, PhD student, Spanish and Portuguese, The Ohio State University. She is interested in research on composition of Latinx communities in Midwest with particular focus on how or whether Brazilian and/or “other” Latinx groups, such as Peruvian-American, etc., become incorporated into Latinx ethnic/racial gatherings. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Marie Lerma, PhD student, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University. She is interested on Latinos in the Central Valley of California and Latino youth. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Ramón Rivera-Servera, Co-Principal Investigator; Associate Professor, Performance Studies, Northwestern University. His research will focus on contemporary performance projects across the Midwest focusing site-specificity to address issues of Latino labor and the environment. He will examine artists such as Joel Valentin-Martínez (Chicago), Anita González (Michigan), and Erica Mott (Chicago). Click here to access his webpage and contact information.

Sandra Ruiz, Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies and English, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign. Her research on “Unearthing Central Time: The Midwestern Latinx Avant-Garde” will focus on the profound and evocative history with sound and performance art in Latinx Chicago, Detroit, and Iowa City, from improvisation jazz to punk and noise music, and endurance to earth-body art. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.

Sergio Gonzalez, Graduate Student, History, UW-Madison. His research is on religious spaces as sites of cultural production imagined through faith — including churches, missions, festivals, social justice events/actions — with a focus on transnational interaction in the specific case of the Sanctuary Movement in Wisconsin and the interethnic context of its activity. Click here to access his webpage and contact information.

Sophie Delacruz, Undergraduate senior at Grand Valley State University, majoring in Communication Studies and Spanish, with a minor in Latin American Studies. She was primarily involved in this project in the summer of 2017, gathering observations and helping in the beginning stages of the interviews at Latinx ethnic festivals, through the Summer Research Opportunity Program (SROP) at The Ohio State University.

Theresa Delgadillo, Co-Principal Investigator; Professor of Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University. Research will address contrasts between nature/natural environments and built, urban, and industrial environments in Latinx fiction and poetry about life in the Midwest to consider emergent paradigms of sustainability. Drawing on intersectional studies of performance, spatiality, placemaking, racialization, and gender, she is also leading a research team of graduate and undergraduate scholars examining Latinx placemaking in Ohio through research on Latina/o ethnic festivals throughout the state. The team — which includes Laura Fernandez, Marie Lerma, Leila Vieira, Sophie Delacruz, and Genevieve Arce — visited eleven ethnic festivals in Ohio in 2017 and are currently at work analyzing data. Click here to access her webpage and contact information.