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 (2026-2028)
Darío Valles is an Associate Professor in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies (CHLS) at California State University, Long Beach. Utilizing community-engaged cultural, linguistic and digital ethnographic methods, Valles’ work expands queer, feminist and migration studies and speaks to the ways Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran migrants shape new horizons of transnational solidarity and citizenship, including through repurposing technology. The short film Valles produced, a participatory documentary entitled No Separate Survival on the global asylum crisis converging in Mexico, won best documentary at the 2025 San Diego Film Festival. In addition, he is revising a book manuscript examining comadre kinship formations and labor organizing among Central American caregivers in Los Angeles, mobilizing follow-up research alongside California’s childcare union with the support of the UCLA Latina Future Fund. He has taught various undergraduate and graduate courses at Brown, Columbia and UCLA, and his research has gained recognition from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) and funding from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. His work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropology Review among other journals. In the most recent book chapter on online identity and digital storytelling methods in collaboration with queer and trans asylum seekers was featured in Exploring Digital Ethnography (Routledge, 2025).
Graduate Student Representatives (2025-2027)
Olga Natasha Hernandez Villar (She/Her/Ella) is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where she specializes in Culture and Teaching with a minor in International Education. Her dissertation research examines the role of mestizaje ideology and racial discourse in Mexico’s sixth-grade social science curriculum, drawing on SEP textbook and teacher interviews to illuminate how national identity is reproduced through formal education.Natasha holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in Mexico City, where she specialized in Urban Anthropology. Her interdisciplinary formation spans Latin American and East Asian studies, migration, and anthropology of education, and has taken her from Mexico City to Dharamsala, India, where she served as a Mary Tjosvold Graduate Fellow at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astro College, supporting the modernization of student-centered teaching methods.
At the University of Minnesota, Natasha has taught undergraduate courses in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, including CHLS 3374: Immigrant Farmworkers, where she integrates structural analysis of labor justice with student-centered pedagogy. She has also served as Co-President of the Council of International Graduate Students and as an elected Graduate Student Representative in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
Nathalie Sofia Martinez (she/her/ella) is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of hemispheric Indigenous theories and methods; decolonial, collaborative, and community-based methods and ethics; and multimodal approaches with a focus in sound studies. As a queer Latina woman, with roots from what is currently known as Colombia and El Salvador, she approaches her work with an engaged humility and a deep commitment to building ethical collaborations.
Communications Team
2025-2027
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.
2026-2028
Sophia Rodriguez (she/her/ella) is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist PhD candidate at UCR in medical anthropology. She is part of Unidas por Salud, a community academic partnership with promotoras that aims to advance health equity in the Eastern Coachella Valley region. Her research documents the embodiment of toxic processes through cartography, ethnography and oral narratives and identifying how residents cope with their chronic illnesses. Her commitment to health justice extends to her service work in humanitarian aid at the CA-Mexico border, clinical service delivery, and organizing in LA.
Members at Large
Vanessa Castañeda (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American Studies at Davidson College. My research centers on the baianas de acarajé, predominantly older, working-class Black women who are street vendors in Salvador, Brazil, that sell typical regional foods with culinary origins in West Africa. They also have come to exist as central icons of the African heritage tourism and cultural figures of regional and national Brazilian identity. Using interdisciplinary methodologies, including archival research and twenty months of community-based ethnographic fieldwork with the National Association of Baianas (ABAM), Castañeda’s work reconceptualizes the baianas as political agents of Black feminism for self and collective liberation. I show how the women have mastered navigating their mobility in accessing multiple spaces of power, both figuratively and spatially.
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.
Jerry Hernandez is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on how urban BIPOC youth define and experience a “good meal” within underfunded school systems. His work examines the intersections of food, identity, and structural inequality, with attention to how young people navigate institutional food environments and articulate care, dignity, and belonging through everyday eating practices. He employs ethnographic, sensory, and participatory methods, including collaborative media and cognitive mapping, to center youth perspectives in conversations about food justice and educational equity.
STANDING COMMITTEES
ALLA Junior Scholar OutstandingScholarship and Engagement Award Committee
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 (2026-2028)
Darío Valles is an Associate Professor in the Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies (CHLS) at California State University, Long Beach. Utilizing community-engaged cultural, linguistic and digital ethnographic methods, Valles’ work expands queer, feminist and migration studies and speaks to the ways Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Honduran migrants shape new horizons of transnational solidarity and citizenship, including through repurposing technology. The short film Valles produced, a participatory documentary entitled No Separate Survival on the global asylum crisis converging in Mexico, won best documentary at the 2025 San Diego Film Festival.
In addition, he is revising a book manuscript examining comadre kinship formations and labor organizing among Central American caregivers in Los Angeles, mobilizing follow-up research alongside California’s childcare union with the support of the UCLA Latina Future Fund. He has taught various undergraduate and graduate courses at Brown, Columbia and UCLA, and his research has gained recognition from the Society of Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) and funding from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. His work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropology Review among other journals. In the most recent book chapter on online identity and digital storytelling methods in collaboration with queer and trans asylum seekers was featured in Exploring Digital Ethnography (Routledge,
2025).
Graduate Student Representatives (2025-2027)
Olga Natasha Hernandez Villar (She/Her/Ella) is a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where she specializes in Culture and Teaching with a minor in International Education. Her dissertation research examines the role of mestizaje ideology and racial discourse in Mexico’s sixth-grade social science curriculum, drawing on SEP textbook and teacher interviews to illuminate how national identity is reproduced through formal education.Natasha holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) in Mexico City, where she specialized in Urban Anthropology. Her interdisciplinary formation spans Latin American and East Asian studies, migration, and anthropology of education, and has taken her from Mexico City to Dharamsala, India, where she served as a Mary Tjosvold Graduate Fellow at the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical & Astro College, supporting the modernization of student-centered teaching methods.
At the University of Minnesota, Natasha has taught undergraduate courses in the Department of Chicano and Latino Studies, including CHLS 3374: Immigrant Farmworkers, where she integrates structural analysis of labor justice with student-centered pedagogy. She has also served as Co-President of the Council of International Graduate Students and as an elected Graduate Student Representative in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
Nathalie Sofia Martinez (she/her/ella) is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of hemispheric Indigenous theories and methods; decolonial, collaborative, and community-based methods and ethics; and multimodal approaches with a focus in sound studies. As a queer Latina woman, with roots from what is currently known as Colombia and El Salvador, she approaches her work with an engaged humility and a deep commitment to building ethical collaborations.
Communications Team
2025-2027
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.
2026-2028
Sophia Rodriguez (she/her/ella) is an interdisciplinary scholar-activist PhD candidate at UCR in medical anthropology. She is part of Unidas por Salud, a community academic partnership with promotoras that aims to advance health equity in the Eastern Coachella Valley region. Her research documents the embodiment of toxic processes through cartography, ethnography and oral narratives and identifying how residents cope with their chronic illnesses. Her commitment to health justice extends to her service work in humanitarian aid at the CA-Mexico border, clinical service delivery, and organizing in LA.
Members at Large
Vanessa Castañeda (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American Studies at Davidson College. My research centers on the baianas de acarajé, predominantly older, working-class Black women who are street vendors in Salvador, Brazil, that sell typical regional foods with culinary origins in West Africa. They also have come to exist as central icons of the African heritage tourism and cultural figures of regional and national Brazilian identity. Using interdisciplinary methodologies, including archival research and twenty months of community-based ethnographic fieldwork with the National Association of Baianas (ABAM), Castañeda’s work reconceptualizes the baianas as political agents of Black feminism for self and collective liberation. I show how the women have mastered navigating their mobility in accessing multiple spaces of power, both figuratively and spatially.
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.
Jerry Hernandez is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research focuses on how urban BIPOC youth define and experience a “good meal” within underfunded school systems. His work examines the intersections of food, identity, and structural inequality, with attention to how young people navigate institutional food environments and articulate care, dignity, and belonging through everyday eating practices. He employs ethnographic, sensory, and participatory methods, including collaborative media and cognitive mapping, to center youth perspectives in conversations about food justice and educational equity.
STANDING COMMITTEES
ALLA Junior Scholar Outstanding Scholarship and Engagement Award Committee
Julie Torres, Almita Miranda
Book Award Committee
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, Petra Rivera-Rideau, Daina Sanchez
Graduate Student Paper Prize Committee
Ámbar Reyes, Lupe Flores, Miguel Díaz-Barriga
Nuevas Direcciones Award Committee
Miguel Díaz-Barriga, Margaret Dorsey, Lisa Cuéllar
Bylaws Review Committee
SPECIAL COMMITTEE
Committee for AAA Recommendations
Santiago Guerra, Nathalie Sofia Martínez, Margaret Dorsey
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