Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists
2025 Award Winners
We’re thrilled to share our heartfelt congratulations to the remarkable winners of the 2025 ALLA Awards! Your achievements are truly inspiring, and we celebrate your success with great enthusiasm!
2025 ALLA Book Awards
The ALLA Book Awards are given for the best books in anthropology published from June 1, 2022, to June 1, 2024, on Latinxs and their communities. The winners are selected based on the originality of the research, the quality of the writing, and the importance of the topic for understanding the Latina/o experience in the United States or transnational communities linked to the U.S.
We would also like to extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. Christopher Loperena, Dr. Hector Beltrán and Dr. Vanessa Díaz for their dedicated service on the 2025 Book Award Committee.
2025 Senior Book Award
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Ph.D. is a cultural and social anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States, and police officers and Black and Brown communities affected by police violence in the United States. Her research and teaching span the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Afro-Latinx circulations. Dr. Beliso- De Jesús’ work contributes to cultural and media studies, anthropology of religion, critical race studies, Black and Latinx transnational feminist and queer theory, African diaspora religions, and studies on police and militarization.
Book Description: Charles Wetli—a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions—identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. In Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.
Daina Sanchez, is an Associate Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. She was previously the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research agenda focuses on race, migration, and Indigenous youth.
Book Description: Her first book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (Stanford University Press), examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both Mexico and the U.S. to erase their Indigenous identity or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identities through practices of el goce comunal (“communal joy”) in their new homes.
For more information on The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border , visit the following link.
–Congratulations Dra. Sanchez!
2025 Honorable Mention Book Award
Petra Rivera-Rideau researches Latin music and racial politics. She specializes in Latin music and US Latinx popular cultures. Dr. Rivera-Rideau has a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in African American Studies from Harvard University. She has taught at Wellesley College since 2016, and she is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the American Studies department. Prior to this, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech until 2012. Dr. Rivera-Rideau held a postdoctoral fellowship in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond from 2010-2012.
Book Description:As a fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fan base of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In Fitness Fiesta! Dr. Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving. Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love. Closely examining videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable “south of the border”-style vacation. She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racist and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America but also what that relationship means for the limits and possibilities of multicultural citizenship today.
For more information on Fitness Fiesta!Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, visit the following link.
–Congratulations Dra. Rivera-Rideau!
2025 Nuevas Direcciones ALLA Award
2025 Junior Scholar 2025 Nuevas Direcciones Award
2025 Outstanding ALLA Junio Scholar Award for Outstanding Scholarship & Engagement
2025 Award Winners
We’re thrilled to share our heartfelt congratulations to the remarkable winners of the 2025 ALLA Awards! Your achievements are truly inspiring, and we celebrate your success with great enthusiasm!
2025 ALLA Book Awards
The ALLA Book Awards are given for the best books in anthropology published from June 1, 2022, to June 1, 2024, on Latinxs and their communities. The winners are selected based on the originality of the research, the quality of the writing, and the importance of the topic for understanding the Latina/o experience in the United States or transnational communities linked to the U.S.
We would also like to extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. Christopher Loperena, Dr. Hector Beltrán and Dr. Vanessa Díaz for their dedicated service on the 2025 Book Award Committee.
2025 Senior Book Award
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Ph.D. is a cultural and social anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research with Santería practitioners in Cuba and the United States, and police officers and Black and Brown communities affected by police violence in the United States. Her research and teaching span the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Afro-Latinx circulations. Dr. Beliso- De Jesús’ work contributes to cultural and media studies, anthropology of religion, critical race studies, Black and Latinx transnational feminist and queer theory, African diaspora religions, and studies on police and militarization.
Book Description: Charles Wetli—a Miami-based medical examiner and self-proclaimed “cult expert” of Afro-Caribbean religions—identified what he called “excited delirium syndrome.” Soon, medical examiners began using the syndrome regularly to describe the deaths of Black men and women during interactions with police. Police and medical examiners claimed that Black people with so-called excited delirium exhibited superhuman strength induced from narcotics abuse. It was fatal heart failure that killed them, examiners said, not forceful police restraints. In Excited Delirium, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús examines this fabricated medical diagnosis and its use to justify and erase police violence against Black and Brown communities. Exposing excited delirium syndrome’s flawed diagnostic criteria, she outlines its inextricable ties to the criminalization of Afro-Latiné religions. Beliso-De Jesús demonstrates that it is yet a further example of the systemic racism that pervades law enforcement in which the culpability for state violence is shifted from the state onto its victims. In so doing, she furthers understanding of the complex layers of medicalized state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States.
For more information on Excited Delirium, visit the following link.
–Congratulations, Dra. Beliso-De Jesús!
2025 Junior Book Award
Daina Sanchez, is an Associate Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. She was previously the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research agenda focuses on race, migration, and Indigenous youth.
Book Description: Her first book, The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border (Stanford University Press), examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form racial, ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homeland. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork between Los Angeles, California and San Andrés Solaga, a Zapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, The Children of Solaga centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world, and adds a much-needed transnational dimension to the study of Indigenous immigrant adaptation and assimilation. Sanchez, herself a diasporic Solagueña, argues that the lived experiences of Indigenous immigrants offer a unique vantage point from which to see how migration across settler-borders transforms processes of self-making among displaced Indigenous people. Rather than accept attempts by both Mexico and the U.S. to erase their Indigenous identity or give in to anti-Indigenous and anti-immigrant prejudice, Oaxacan immigrants and their children defiantly celebrate their Indigenous identities through practices of el goce comunal (“communal joy”) in their new homes.
For more information on The Children of Solaga: Indigenous Belonging across the U.S.-Mexico Border , visit the following link.
–Congratulations Dra. Sanchez!
2025 Honorable Mention Book Award
Petra Rivera-Rideau researches Latin music and racial politics. She specializes in Latin music and US Latinx popular cultures. Dr. Rivera-Rideau has a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in African American Studies from Harvard University. She has taught at Wellesley College since 2016, and she is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the American Studies department. Prior to this, she worked as an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech until 2012. Dr. Rivera-Rideau held a postdoctoral fellowship in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond from 2010-2012.
Book Description: As a fitness brand, Zumba Fitness has cultivated a devoted fan base of fifteen million participants spread across 180 countries. In Fitness Fiesta! Dr. Petra R. Rivera-Rideau analyzes how Zumba uses Latin music and dance to create and sell a vision of Latinness that’s tropical, hypersexual, and party-loving. Rivera-Rideau focuses on the five tropes that the Zumba brand uses to create this Latinness: authenticity, fiesta, fun, dreams, and love. Closely examining videos, ads, memes, and press coverage as well as interviews she conducted with instructors, Rivera-Rideau traces how Zumba Fitness constructs its ideas of Latinx culture by carefully balancing a longing for apparent authenticity with a homogenization of a marketable “south of the border”-style vacation. She shows how Zumba Fitness claims to celebrate Latinx culture and diversity while it simultaneously traffics in the same racial and ethnic stereotypes that are used to justify racist and xenophobic policies targeting Latinx communities in the United States. In so doing, Rivera-Rideau demonstrates not only the complex relationship between Latinidad and neoliberal, postracial America but also what that relationship means for the limits and possibilities of multicultural citizenship today.
For more information on Fitness Fiesta! Selling Latinx Culture through Zumba, visit the following link.
–Congratulations Dra. Rivera-Rideau!
2025 Nuevas Direcciones ALLA Award
2025 Junior Scholar 2025 Nuevas Direcciones Award
2025 Outstanding ALLA Junio Scholar Award for Outstanding Scholarship & Engagement
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