UMass Boston

Dr. John C. Arroyo, Ph.D., AICP, Assistant Professor in Engaging Diverse Communities at the University of Oregon’s School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management (College of Design) and Director, Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice.

John C. Arroyo (BA, Public Relations, University of Southern California; Master in City Planning, Certificate in Urban Design, PhD Urban Planning, Policy, and Design, MIT) is a scholar and practitioner of urban planning, migration studies, and Latinx studies whose applied research focuses on the social and cultural dimensions of immigrant-centered built environments. His work has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Cityscape, and others. His current book project examines the transnational spatial effects and local-level policy implications of exponential Mexican migration in high-growth U.S. suburban “new immigrant destinations” in the U.S. South. The son of Mexican immigrants, his commitment to social justice is rooted in his experience being born and raised East L.A.

Dr. Arroyo is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Chicanx and Latinx Studies program at UC San Diego as part of the Latinx Cluster Hire Initiative.

Dr. Arroyo will work on the manuscript "Terror at the Traffic Stop: Immigration Federalism and Transnational Undocumented Mexican Transportation Patterns in the Nuevo South."

Juan Ignacio Mora, PhD. Postdoctoral Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington’s Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society.

Juan Ignacio Mora is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Latino Studies Program at IU, where he'll be teaching courses on Latinx History, migrant farmworkers, food studies, and the Midwest. His book, "Latinx Encounters: How Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans Made the Modern Midwest", is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. His writing can be found in The Nation and the Journal of American Ethnic History.

Dr. Mora will work on the manuscript "Sugar Beets Not So Sweet: Race, Citizenship, and the Truman Commission on Migratory Labor, 1948-1951.”

Dr. Raquel A. González Madrigal (Mount Holyoke College) and Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro (Smith College). The Institute awards two grants of $5,000 for the preparation of a scholarly manuscript focused on the experience of Latinos, Latinas and Latinx. A national committee of Latino scholars convened by the Gastón Institute has selected their proposals:

"Comparative Racializations in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Im/migrant Justice and Indigenous Struggles for Sovereignty” by Dr. Raquel A. González Madrigal (Mount Holyoke College)

"Garifunizando Nueva Yol’: Hemispheric Entanglements of Blackness / Indigeneity / Afro-Latinidad" by Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro (Smith College) 

Watch the video of the 2022 presentation.

Stephanie M. Huezo (BA, Wesleyan University; MA & PhD, Indiana University) is a historian of Latin American and Latina/o/x history whose work focuses on how communities organize to demand social and political rights using a critical pedagogy approach in both El Salvador its diaspora. Her research interests also include immigration, social movements, memory, and oral history. Dr. Huezo is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how Salvadorans in both El Salvador and the U.S. have used popular education as a survival strategy and tool of resistance against social oppression since the 1960s.

Carolina Alonso Bejarano (PhD Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University; MSc Gender and Social Policy, London School of Economics; Law Degree, Los Andes University) is an activist scholar and writer who teaches in the Law School at the University of Warwick. Her research interests lie at the intersection of decolonial feminism and migration studies, particularly as it relates to interethnic immigrants’ rights activism in the United States. She is the co-author of Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (Duke University Press, 2019), a book that explores the immigrants’ rights movement in New Jersey and the possibilities of using ethnography as a tool for decolonization. She is a collective member of Sangría Editora, a bilingual publishing house based in New York City and Santiago de Chile, and in her spare time she works as a DJ in the city of New York.

Junis Warren (Doctorate of Law and Policy from Northeastern University, College of Professional Studies; Masters of Arts in International Relations from New York University; and a Masters of Science from The New School in Management, International Affairs and Urban Planning) is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at York College, City University of New York. Her mother immigrated from Barbados in 1968 to the U.S.A in hopes of a better tomorrow for her children. Warren grew up in Brooklyn, NY, to a single mother with two sisters and a brother. “Hard work and education became a staple in my household. Attending college and working many years in any job that would allow me to continue my education was my focus. I have been teaching political science, international relations, American Government along with a host of other courses for over 15 years.”

Xavier Medina Vidal (BA Economics and Spanish, Chicano Studies minor and M.A. Political Science, University of New Mexico; PhD Political Science, University of California-Riverside) is the Diane D. Blair Professor of Latino Studies and an Assistant Professor of Political Science.  His research and teaching interests incorporate elements of Latin American and U.S. Latina/o Studies with a focus on questions related to identity, institutions, and transnationalism. Among his current projects are studies of the effects of home-country media use on Latina/o immigrant participation in the U.S., the role of social media in the development of Latina/o/Hispanic identity, immigration policy and public opinion in the U.S. South, and the development of transnational linked fate among Mexican Americans. 

Delia Fernández (BA, Grand Valley State University; MA & PhD, Ohio State University) is a historian of Latina/o history whose work focuses on how Latina/os use panethnic identity to garner more political, social, and economic rights in the twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests also include the intersections of race, ethnicity, and sexuality in American history. She is particularly interested in immigration, migration, labor, social movements and women’s history. Dr. Fernández is working on a book length manuscript that focuses on Latino migration, panethnic identity, community formation, and activism among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Grand Rapids, Michigan from the 1920s to the 1970s. Her article, "Rethinking the Urban and Rural Divide in Latino Labor, Recreation, and Activism in West Michigan, 1940s-1970s" was recently published in Labor History.