Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists
Current Board
President (2025-2027)
Dr. Guillermina G. Núñez-Mchiri is Dean of San Diego State University (SDSU) in the Imperial Valley and full professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Núñez received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California Riverside. Her research has focused on various aspects of the US -Mexico border, including rural-urban dynamics in colonias; food, culture and community building; Latina leadership; Mexican and Chicana feminism; Chicana/Latina theater; political ecology; housing, immigration, and human rights; community engagement and service learning; COVID-19 and food production workers, and global empathy. As a higher education leader, she specializes in community engagement as a high impact practice in higher education and community-university partnerships.
Dr. Núñez-Mchiri has taught courses on ethnographic and feminist research methods, urban anthropology, the Anthropology of Food, Gender, and Society; applied anthropology; and death, dying and bereavement. Her publications include From Yo Soy Teatro to Ya Basta: Honoring our Chicana and Latina Feminist leaders and Unmasking Gender-based Violence via Community Based Theater on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2024), Food and Caring during the Times of COVID-19 on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2023);Leadership, Education, Advocacy, and Development (LEAD): A Latina Leadership and Community Engagement Model (2021); Hopelighting (2021), a book written by mothers and siblings of special needs children in El Paso, TX; and Community Engagement as a High Impact Practice in Higher Education (2018), promoting partnerships and collaboration among university and community based organizations.
President-Elect (2027-2029)
Dr. Santiago Guerra, a cultural, medical, and legal anthropologist at Colorado College, focuses his research on the social construction of illegality, criminality, and policing along the South Texas-Mexico Border in the context of the War on Drugs. His acclaimed dissertation, “From Vaqueros to Mafiosos,” examines the impact of drug trafficking on a rural South Texas border community. Currently, he is writing a book titled “Narcos and Narcs,” delving into drug policy’s effects on border communities, while also studying the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and its impact on marijuana tourism and the medical marijuana industry.
Secretary-Treasurer (2023-2025)
Cecilia Vasquez is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Riverside. Her research focuses on grassroots responses to sanctuary policies, detention, and community care in the Inland Empire. Her broader interests include citizenship and belonging, accompaniment, and abolition. As an activist-engaged scholar, she is dedicated to public scholarship. She has led community art projects, organized public conferences, choreographed dance pieces, and developed educational events addressing migration, detention, and accompaniment. As Secretary/Treasurer of ALLA, she is committed to advancing the organization’s mission of professional development, community, and equity.
Graduate Student Representative (2025-2027)
Position currently open!
Communications Team
Daiana Rivas-Tello (she/her/ella) is an anthropological archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at Brown University. She received her M.A. in Anthropology from McMaster University in 2017. Her research explores the intersections between craft production, labor policies, and Indigenous persistence in the Andes. With support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and by employing archaeological, archival and collaborative research, she traces how potting communities in Amazonas (Peru) adapted to shifting political regimes from the Late Horizon period (ca. 1470-1535) under Inka rule, to the Spanish Colonial period and into the present. Through this work she examines the strategies of resilience employed by Andean potters and considers the role crafting played in maintaining community identity and memory.
Thelma Dietrich-Rivera (she/her) is a cultural anthropologist and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine in the department of Criminology, Law, and Society. Her research examines the transnational experiences of displacement and migration among Central Americans, with a specific focus on Nicaraguans—both exiles in Costa Rica and the US, and those who remain in the country—since the 2018 sociopolitical uprising. Thelma analyzes how these experiences serve as an alternative approach to otherwise existence, providing a means to remember and archive survival and care against the realities of authoritarian political repression. She combines critical feminist ethnographic and oral history methods with Transnational Feminist Theory, Decolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, and Black Studies to archive the complex, intersecting experiences of survival, understood through an interrogation of race, gender, migration, and power.
Members at Large
Dozandri C. Mendoza, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). They teach courses on the structure of English, sociolinguistics, language and embodiment, and language, gender, race, and sexuality.
As a sociocultural linguist at the intersection of dance studies/dance anthropology, Puerto Rican Studies, Black Studies, and semiotics, they are passionate about curating creative research-based interventions with students through their pedagogy and research projects. Their classes engage students in photographic, performatic, and sonic methods to researching sociolinguistic variation and sociolinguistic power.
Their research agenda is grounded in community-based participatory arts research in collaboration with the kiki/Ballroom scene in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Their work explores the semiotics of memory/ancestry, colonial tensions of language, verbal art traditions such as throwing shade/reading, and the enregisterment of embodied and danced signs in vogue performance. They also think about how dance and performance can be profound sites through which to examine the effects of and resistance to colonialism, empire, and race/class/gender-based oppression inspired by their time collaborating/walking in kiki/Ballroom spaces. Their work has been supported by fellowships from the Center for LGBTQ+ Studies, Society for Visual Anthropology, and SAPIENS Magazine/Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Dozandri’s published work has appeared in Gender and Language, The Bad Bunny Enigma: Culture, Resistance, and Uncertainty (Lexington Press), SAPIENS Magazine, and Penn Working Papers in Linguistics.
Anthropology News Editors
Sergio Lemus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Previously, Lemus was part of the inaugural ACES Fellow cohort class of 2019. In his research agenda, Lemus documents the centrality of labor processes in driving cultural transformations among Mexican migrants and the politico-historical changed that gives rise to a working-class formation—Los yarderos. This research is slated to be published as a book at the University of Illinois Press under Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series with the title, “Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Neoliberal Chicago.” Lemus’ second research project examines the lives of Mexican, working-class immigrants and their cultural experience living with cancer. This research acutely points to the neoliberal, necropolitical, and cultural forms that give rise to the Latino/a cancer patient as a manageable population in the United States. In general, Lemus’ projects emphasize the study of immigration along three lines of investigation: a) Mexican transborder subjectivity, b) cultural production and reproduction, and c) health and disease as these relate to class, gender, and unstable state regimes.
Current Board
President (2025-2027)
Dr. Guillermina G. Núñez-Mchiri is Dean of San Diego State University (SDSU) in the Imperial Valley and full professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Dr. Núñez received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California Riverside. Her research has focused on various aspects of the US -Mexico border, including rural-urban dynamics in colonias; food, culture and community building; Latina leadership; Mexican and Chicana feminism; Chicana/Latina theater; political ecology; housing, immigration, and human rights; community engagement and service learning; COVID-19 and food production workers, and global empathy. As a higher education leader, she specializes in community
engagement as a high impact practice in higher education and community-university partnerships.
Dr. Núñez-Mchiri has taught courses on ethnographic and feminist research methods, urban anthropology, the Anthropology of Food, Gender, and Society; applied anthropology; and death, dying and bereavement. Her publications include From Yo Soy Teatro to Ya Basta: Honoring our Chicana and Latina Feminist leaders and Unmasking Gender-based Violence via Community Based Theater on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2024), Food and Caring during the Times of COVID-19 on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2023);Leadership, Education, Advocacy, and Development (LEAD): A Latina Leadership and Community Engagement Model (2021); Hopelighting (2021), a book written by mothers and siblings of special needs children in El Paso, TX; and Community Engagement as a High Impact Practice in Higher Education (2018), promoting partnerships and collaboration among university and community based organizations.
President-Elect (2027-2029)
Dr. Santiago Guerra, a cultural, medical, and legal anthropologist at Colorado College, focuses his research on the social construction of illegality, criminality, and policing along the South Texas-Mexico Border in the context of the War on Drugs. His acclaimed dissertation, “From Vaqueros to Mafiosos,” examines the impact of drug trafficking on a rural South Texas border community. Currently, he is writing a book titled “Narcos and Narcs,” delving into drug policy’s effects on border communities, while also studying the legalization of recreational marijuana in Colorado and its impact on marijuana tourism and the medical marijuana industry.
Secretary-Treasurer (2023-2025)
Cecilia Vasquez is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Riverside. Her research focuses on grassroots responses to sanctuary policies, detention, and community care in the Inland Empire. Her broader interests include citizenship and belonging, accompaniment, and abolition. As an activist-engaged scholar, she is dedicated to public scholarship. She has led community art projects, organized public conferences, choreographed dance pieces, and developed educational events addressing migration, detention, and accompaniment. As Secretary/Treasurer of ALLA, she is committed to advancing the organization’s mission of professional development, community, and equity.
Graduate Student Representative (2025-2027)
Position currently open!
Communications Team
Daiana Rivas-Tello (she/her/ella) is an anthropological archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate in the Anthropology Department at Brown University. She received her M.A. in Anthropology from McMaster University in 2017. Her research explores the intersections between craft production, labor policies, and Indigenous persistence in the Andes. With support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and by employing archaeological, archival and collaborative research, she traces how potting communities in Amazonas (Peru) adapted to shifting political regimes from the Late Horizon period (ca. 1470-1535) under Inka rule, to the Spanish Colonial period and into the present. Through this work she examines the strategies of resilience employed by Andean potters and considers the role crafting played in maintaining community identity and memory.
Thelma Dietrich-Rivera (she/her) is a cultural anthropologist and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine in the department of Criminology, Law, and Society. Her research examines the transnational experiences of displacement and migration among Central Americans, with a specific focus on Nicaraguans—both exiles in Costa Rica and the US, and those who remain in the country—since the 2018 sociopolitical uprising. Thelma analyzes how these experiences serve as an alternative approach to otherwise existence, providing a means to remember and archive survival and care against the realities of authoritarian political repression. She combines critical feminist ethnographic and oral history methods with Transnational Feminist Theory, Decolonial Studies, Latin American Studies, and Black Studies to archive the complex, intersecting experiences of survival, understood through an interrogation of race, gender, migration, and power.
Members at Large
Dozandri C. Mendoza, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). They teach courses on the structure of English, sociolinguistics, language and embodiment, and language, gender, race, and sexuality.
As a sociocultural linguist at the intersection of dance studies/dance anthropology, Puerto Rican Studies, Black Studies, and semiotics, they are passionate about curating creative research-based interventions with students through their pedagogy and research projects. Their classes engage students in photographic, performatic, and sonic methods to researching sociolinguistic variation and sociolinguistic power.
Their research agenda is grounded in community-based participatory arts research in collaboration with the kiki/Ballroom scene in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Their work explores the semiotics of memory/ancestry, colonial tensions of language, verbal art traditions such as throwing shade/reading, and the enregisterment of embodied and danced signs in vogue performance. They also think about how dance and performance can be profound sites through which to examine the effects of and resistance to colonialism, empire, and race/class/gender-based oppression inspired by their time collaborating/walking in kiki/Ballroom spaces. Their work has been supported by fellowships from the Center for LGBTQ+ Studies, Society for Visual Anthropology, and SAPIENS Magazine/Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Dozandri’s published work has appeared in Gender and Language, The Bad Bunny Enigma: Culture, Resistance, and Uncertainty (Lexington Press), SAPIENS Magazine, and Penn Working Papers in Linguistics.
Anthropology News Editors
Sergio Lemus is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Previously, Lemus was part of the inaugural ACES Fellow cohort class of 2019. In his research agenda, Lemus documents the centrality of labor processes in driving cultural transformations among Mexican migrants and the politico-historical changed that gives rise to a working-class formation—Los yarderos. This research is slated to be published as a book at the University of Illinois Press under Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest series with the title, “Los Yarderos: Mexican Yard Workers in Neoliberal Chicago.” Lemus’ second research project examines the lives of Mexican, working-class immigrants and their cultural experience living with cancer. This research acutely points to the neoliberal, necropolitical, and cultural forms that give rise to the Latino/a cancer patient as a manageable population in the United States. In general, Lemus’ projects emphasize the study of immigration along three lines of investigation: a) Mexican transborder subjectivity, b) cultural production and reproduction, and c) health and disease as these relate to class, gender, and unstable state regimes.
Follow Us!