Association of Latina/o and Latinx Anthropologists
Current Board
President (2024-2026)
Dr. Guillermina G. Núñez-Mchiri is Director of Women and Gender Studies and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Núñez received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California Riverside in 2006, her MA in Latin American Studies in 1998, and her BA in International Business in 1994 from San Diego State University. Dr. Núñez-Mchiri began teaching at UTEP since 2004-2005. She teaches courses in Ethnographic research methods; Interdisciplinary Feminist theory and Methods, Anthropology of Food, Gender, and Culture for the College of Liberal Arts and Culture. She also teaches an online course on Death, Dying, and Bereavement for the College of Health Sciences. Her classes incorporate research and community engagement opportunities through service learning. She received the UT Regents Outstanding Teaching Award in 2012.
Dr. Núñez-Mchiri is an applied anthropologist who promotes service learning and engaged scholarship efforts on the U.S.-Mexico Border. She is the academic partner to Wise Latina International, a non-profit organization that empowers Latinas through the arts and entertainment. She is currently Co-Chair for the L.E.A.D. project, an executive leadership program that prepares women with the skills and tools necessary for them to launch projects and initiatives that support the development of Latinas, their families, and community. Dr. Núñez-Mchiri has a 7 year partnership with the City of El Paso’s Park and Recreation Department working with older adult athletes who are seeking to challenge the stigmas of aging through active living and competition in physical activities. She specializes on ethnographic research on the U.S.-Mexico border region and has published on a number of topics related to colonias, immigration and human rights, housing and social justice, Latina identity, Latinas in STEM fields, immigrant youth and education, and the applications of Ethnography and Service Learning in higher education. Her most recent publication addresses women negotiating food insecurity in colonias in the El Paso del Norte border region.
President-Elect (2024-2026)
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
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 (2024-2026)
Dr. Guillermina G. Núñez-Mchiri is Director of Women and Gender Studies and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Núñez received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California Riverside in 2006, her MA in Latin American Studies in 1998, and her BA in International Business in 1994 from San Diego State University. Dr. Núñez-Mchiri began teaching at UTEP since 2004-2005. She teaches courses in Ethnographic research methods; Interdisciplinary Feminist theory and Methods, Anthropology of Food, Gender, and Culture for the College of Liberal Arts and Culture. She also teaches an online course on Death, Dying, and Bereavement for the College of Health Sciences. Her classes incorporate research and community engagement opportunities through service learning. She received the UT Regents Outstanding Teaching Award in 2012.
Dr. Núñez-Mchiri is an applied anthropologist who promotes service learning and engaged scholarship efforts on the U.S.-Mexico Border. She is the academic partner to Wise Latina International, a non-profit organization that empowers Latinas through the arts and entertainment. She is currently Co-Chair for the L.E.A.D. project, an executive leadership program that prepares women with the skills and tools necessary for them to launch projects and initiatives that support the development of Latinas, their families, and community. Dr. Núñez-Mchiri has a 7 year partnership with the City of El Paso’s Park and Recreation Department working with older adult athletes who are seeking to challenge the stigmas of aging through active living and competition in physical activities. She specializes on ethnographic research on the U.S.-Mexico border region and has published on a number of topics related to colonias, immigration and human rights, housing and social justice, Latina identity, Latinas in STEM fields, immigrant youth and education, and the applications of Ethnography and Service Learning in higher education. Her most recent publication addresses women negotiating food insecurity in colonias in the El Paso del Norte border region.
President-Elect (2024-2026)
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
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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