Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists
Current Board
President (2025-2026)
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 (2025-2026)
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 (2023-2025)
Nicole Hernández is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Arizona State University, holding a Master’s in Visual Anthropology from USC. Her research focuses on the Puerto Rican diaspora in California, particularly their early 20th-century history. She is a Digital Archive Fellow at the Diaspora Solidarities Lab for ‘Survival of a People,’ supported by the Mellon Foundation. Focusing on diasporic subjectivity and community memory practices, Nicole’s work employs traditional and digital archives, exploring how technology aids in cultural remembering and resistance. She co-founded Puerto Ricans in Action – Los Angeles in 2016, and her work can be further explored at the California Puerto Rican Archive.
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 (2022-2025)
Miguel Díaz-Barriga (Stanford University, 1991 PhD anthropology) is the author of numerous publications on Mexican American Culture, Visual Anthropology, Border Security, and Social Movements. From 1989 to 2010, he was a professor at Swarthmore College where he also served as a Department Chair and from 2010 to 2018 he was a professor of anthropology and Department Chair at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. During the 2014-2015 academic year, Díaz-Barriga was awarded the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College. He was also named an Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. At the national level, he was elected President of the Association of Latino and Latin Anthropologists and was chosen to be Chair of the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology. He has also served on the Executive Board and worked as the Section Convener of the American Anthropological Association. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the National Science Foundation as well as the Hewlett and Ford Foundations. He is currently completing a book with anthropologist Margaret E. Dorsey on the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, Fencing in Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship and the Security State (Duke University Press, January 2020).
Manuel Galaviz-Ceballos is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CSU, Fullerton. His research is broadly inspired by his training in urban and borderlands anthropology. More specifically, his experience as a construction worker and his undocumented youth in Southern California motivate his ethnographic inquiries. Manny is currently writing a monograph titled, Entanglements of Mobility and Militarized Ecologies, which puts life histories of Mexican-U.S. migrations between the 1980s and 2000s in conversation with the U.S. expansion and production of militarized border landscapes across the California-Mexican borderlands. He is also developing an ethnographic research project that examines gentrification, displacement, and alienation through the lens of undocumented construction labor. He currently volunteers with #LibroMobile Arts Cooperative in Santa Ana, California. Manny is also the host and editor of the LM Voices Scholar Holler Podcast, a series focused on first-generation graduate student and faculty experiences.
Almita Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a cultural geographer and anthropologist specializing in legal and feminist geographies, race/ethnicity, gender, (im)migration, citizenship, transnationalism, Latinx ethnography and life history methodologies in the U.S. Midwest and Mexico. Her current book project, Living in Legal Limbo, examines the experiences and resistance strategies of Mexican mixed-status families and return migrants as they navigate U.S. immigration laws and the threat of family separation across three administrations. Miranda is also the co-founder of the Wisconsin Latinx History Collective and of the community-based project, ¡Presente!: Documenting Latinx History in Wisconsin—a 10-year project that aims to highlight Latinx histories and contributions to the state through an open access bilingual digital edition, featuring oral histories, archival collections, scholarly essays, and educational resources for researchers, students, and the public. Combining her research and teaching interests, Miranda teaches classes on Legal Geographies: Borders and Migration, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Latinx in the Midwest, and Latinx Feminisms, among others.
Dozandri C. Mendoza, M.A. (they/them/elle) is a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They hold an M.A. in Linguistics from Florida International University and a B.A. in Linguistics from Macalester College with a minor in Russian Studies.
Their master’s thesis is titled: “That /s/ tiene tumbao: Investigating Acoustic Correlates of Queer Femme-ness in Bilingual Latinx Miami.” They also completed graduate coursework in higher education administration and worked as a diversity & inclusion student affairs professional at public institutions in Tennessee and Utah. Serving as a 2021 Duberman-Zal Fellow with the Center for LGBTQ+ Studies (CLAGS) in New York, their current research explores discourses of embodiment, cross-modal interplay between gesture, the lexicon, and voice, and linguistic innovation in the Puerto Rican Ballroom scene, tracing Ballroom’s emergence in the archipelago back to the diaspora in Black/Latinx Harle
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 (2025-2026)
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 (2025-2026)
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 (2023-2025)
Nicole Hernández is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Arizona State University, holding a Master’s in Visual Anthropology from USC. Her research focuses on the Puerto Rican diaspora in California, particularly their early 20th-century history. She is a Digital Archive Fellow at the Diaspora Solidarities Lab for ‘Survival of a People,’ supported by the Mellon Foundation. Focusing on diasporic subjectivity and community memory practices, Nicole’s work employs traditional and digital archives, exploring how technology aids in cultural remembering and resistance. She co-founded Puerto Ricans in Action – Los Angeles in 2016, and her work can be further explored at the California Puerto Rican Archive.
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 (2022-2025)
Miguel Díaz-Barriga (Stanford University, 1991 PhD anthropology) is the author of numerous publications on Mexican American Culture, Visual Anthropology, Border Security, and Social Movements. From 1989 to 2010, he was a professor at Swarthmore College where he also served as a Department Chair and from 2010 to 2018 he was a professor of anthropology and Department Chair at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. During the 2014-2015 academic year, Díaz-Barriga was awarded the Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College. He was also named an Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. At the national level, he was elected President of the Association of Latino and Latin Anthropologists and was chosen to be Chair of the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology. He has also served on the Executive Board and worked as the Section Convener of the American Anthropological Association. He is the recipient of numerous grants, including from the National Science Foundation as well as the Hewlett and Ford Foundations. He is currently completing a book with anthropologist Margaret E. Dorsey on the construction of the US-Mexico border wall, Fencing in Democracy: Border Walls, Necrocitizenship and the Security State (Duke University Press, January 2020).
Manuel Galaviz-Ceballos is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CSU, Fullerton. His research is broadly inspired by his training in urban and borderlands anthropology. More specifically, his experience as a construction worker and his undocumented youth in Southern California motivate his ethnographic inquiries. Manny is currently writing a monograph titled, Entanglements of Mobility and Militarized Ecologies, which puts life histories of Mexican-U.S. migrations between the 1980s and 2000s in conversation with the U.S. expansion and production of militarized border landscapes across the California-Mexican borderlands. He is also developing an ethnographic research project that examines gentrification, displacement, and alienation through the lens of undocumented construction labor. He currently volunteers with #LibroMobile Arts Cooperative in Santa Ana, California. Manny is also the host and editor of the LM Voices Scholar Holler Podcast, a series focused on first-generation graduate student and faculty experiences.
Almita Miranda is an Assistant Professor of Geography and Chican@ and Latin@ Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a cultural geographer and anthropologist specializing in legal and feminist geographies, race/ethnicity, gender, (im)migration, citizenship, transnationalism, Latinx ethnography and life history methodologies in the U.S. Midwest and Mexico. Her current book project, Living in Legal Limbo, examines the experiences and resistance strategies of Mexican mixed-status families and return migrants as they navigate U.S. immigration laws and the threat of family separation across three administrations. Miranda is also the co-founder of the Wisconsin Latinx History Collective and of the community-based project, ¡Presente!: Documenting Latinx History in Wisconsin—a 10-year project that aims to highlight Latinx histories and contributions to the state through an open access bilingual digital edition, featuring oral histories, archival collections, scholarly essays, and educational resources for researchers, students, and the public. Combining her research and teaching interests, Miranda teaches classes on Legal Geographies: Borders and Migration, U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Latinx in the Midwest, and Latinx Feminisms, among others.
Dozandri C. Mendoza, M.A. (they/them/elle) is a Ph.D. student in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They hold an M.A. in Linguistics from Florida International University and a B.A. in Linguistics from Macalester College with a minor in Russian Studies.
Their master’s thesis is titled: “That /s/ tiene tumbao: Investigating Acoustic Correlates of Queer Femme-ness in Bilingual Latinx Miami.” They also completed graduate coursework in higher education administration and worked as a diversity & inclusion student affairs professional at public institutions in Tennessee and Utah. Serving as a 2021 Duberman-Zal Fellow with the Center for LGBTQ+ Studies (CLAGS) in New York, their current research explores discourses of embodiment, cross-modal interplay between gesture, the lexicon, and voice, and linguistic innovation in the Puerto Rican Ballroom scene, tracing Ballroom’s emergence in the archipelago back to the diaspora in Black/Latinx Harle
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.
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