LATINA & LATINO STUDIES PROGRAM

Ana Aparicio

Director, Latina and Latino Studies Program

Phone number: 847-491-5132
Office location: 1810 Hinman, #212
a-aparicio@northwestern.edu

Ana Aparicio is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on two major areas of research: 1- ethnographic research on the ways in which people of color (including immigrants and Latinos) and youth engage with and construct local politics, develop coalitions, and transform public space; and 2- analysis of the relationship between policy and racial/ethnic disparities in various sectors, including public health care. Her work has received support from the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation.  She is currently on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. She is the author of Dominican Americans and the Politics of Empowerment (part of the New World Diasporas series edited by Kevin Yelvington, University Press of Florida, 2006), which received the 2006 Association for Latina and Latino Anthropologists Book Award Honorable Mention.  One of the explicit goals of this work is to understand the dynamics of “community,” racial formation, and political citizenship in a contemporary urban, U.S., racialized, Latino/a, and Caribbean immigrant context.  She is also the co-editor of Immigrants, Welfare Reform and the Poverty of Policy (Greenwood, 2004).  Her most recent research – funded by the National Science Foundation – is an ethnography of race and public space in contemporary suburbia; more specifically, she is examining suburban Latino and immigrant populations, inter-group relations, and the transformation of suburban public spaces. Aparicio has also worked with city and nonprofit organizations examining racial and ethnic disparities; this work has covered areas such as healthcare, welfare reform, education, and the construction industry.

Audrey Silvestre

Assistant Professor

Phone number: 847-467-0891
Office location: Crowe Hall 2-148
audrey.silvestre@northwestern.edu

Audrey Silvestre (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary scholar and community organizer from Southeast Los Angeles, CA. Audrey received her BA in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach and a PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. Has research and teaching interest in aesthetics and politics, sound studies, feminist and queer studies, and audio cultural studies.

Elvia Mendoza

Associate Professor of Instruction

Office location: 1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall Room 1144
elvia.mendoza@northwestern.edu

Elvia Mendoza received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.  Her research on the racial-sexual and gendered dimensions of state and juridical violence is based on ethnographic research and filmmaking.  Her extensive work with the exoneration efforts of four queer Chicana women (known as the San Antonio Four) falsely accused of sexually assaulting two young girls, and subsequently wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, sets the stage in her current work for investigating the ways in which the interlinking categories of race, sexuality, and gender are recalibrated through liberal discourses of state protection that rescript rationalities and practices of policing and surveilling Mexican/Chicanx subjects as a historical collective. The integration of different forms of alternative texts, such as film, photography, paintings, drawings, and performance, are central to her research and teaching methodologies.  She sees them as tools for conducting collaborative research and analysis, community-organizing, and as a means for affirming and building bridges of knowledge between academia and the community-at-large.  She is the field producer for Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio, an award-winning full-length film documentary based on the case of the San Antonio Four; filmmaker and producer of Nosotros Tambien Migramos, and other short film productions.  

Geraldo Cadava

Wender-Lewis Teaching and Research Professor

Office location: Harris Hall, Room 210
g-cadava@northwestern.edu

Geraldo Cadava is an Associate Professor of History, and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He received a Ph.D. in History from Yale University, and a B.A. in History from Dartmouth College. His first book, Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland (Harvard University Press, 2013), was about the Arizona-Sonora border region since World War II. It won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, and was named a finalist for the David J. Weber-Clements Center Prize for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America. His second book, The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (Ecco, 2020), is about Latino conservatism and outreach by the Republican Party from the 1960s to the Present. His writing on the topic has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, MSNBC, PBS Frontline, and elsewhere. Currently he’s at work on a new synthesis of Latino history. He teaches courses on Latinx History, Latin American migration to the United States, and the United States-Mexico borderlands.

Jaime Dominguez

Associate Professor of Instruction, Political Science

Phone number: 847-491-8916
Office location: 619 Emerson Road
j-dominguez@northwestern.edu

His research interests include race and ethnicity, urban and Latino and minority politics. He is one of the principal architects of the Chicago Democracy Project (CDP), a thirty-year (1975-2005) online political database that provides citizens, community groups, and religious organizations with information on campaign finance, electoral outcomes, government contracts, minority appointments and levels of public employment for the City of Chicago.

Myrna García

Associate Professor of Instruction, Latina and Latino Studies

Office location: 1908 Sheridan Road
myrna.garcia@northwestern.edu

Dr. Myrna García (she/hers) holds a doctorate in ethnic studies from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in education from Fordham University. She teaches Latinx Studies courses, including “Latinx Chicago: Positionalities, Community Histories, & Academic Knowledges.” Her research draws upon oral histories, archival research, and ethnographic methods to document youth activism undertaken by members of the Chicago chapter of the Center for Autonomous Social Action (CASA), one of the most important transnational immigrant rights organizations to emerge from the Chicano Movement. CASA youth in the 1970s conceptualized a “sin fronteras politics” as a transnational imagining that brought ethnic Mexicans and other Latinas/os together, regardless of birthplace, generation, or citizenship status. García demonstrates how sin fronteras politics was not only a precursor to the political ideology articulated in contemporary immigrant rights protests across the United States, but also a theoretical construct with liberatory possibilities for social change.

García received the Daniel I. Linzer Award for Faculty Excellence in Diversity and Equity in 2021. Her commitment to undergraduate success and mentorship drives her work with the Emerging Scholars Program, Undergraduate Research Program, and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, as well as her role as Faculty Chair of the Residential College of Cultural and Community Studies. Moreover, García has a rich record of community engagement. She served as a coach for Next Steps for Transformation, Antiracism Learning Studio, and she is on the advisory committee for the Aquí en Chicago project at the Chicago History Museum. Under the 2022 Racial Equity and Community Partnership Grant, García collaborates with Mudlark Theater to build bi-lingual Latinx theatrical frameworks, curriculum, and performances.

Emily Maguire

Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese

Phone number: 847-491-2340
Office location: 3-125 Crowe
e-maguire@northwestern.edu
Emily Maguire research focuses on literature of the Hispanophone Caribbean and its diasporas. Her book Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography (University Press of Florida, 2011) explores the ways in which Cuban writers in the first half of the twentieth century drew on both ethnography and literature in their re-valorization of Afro-Cuban culture as a source of Cubanness. Her publications include essays in Small Axe, Revista Iberoamericana, Estudios, Ciberletras, and The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Literature. She is currently at work on a second book project on Caribbean science fiction.

John D. Márquez

Associate Professor, Black Studies & Latina and Latino Studies (On Leave 2025-26 Academic Year)

Phone number: 847-467-0503
j-marquez@northwestern.edu

John D. Márquez is an interdisciplinary scholar. He received B.A. in History, Sociology, and Philosophy from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP); an M.A. in Borderlands History from UTEP; and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Race/Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego.

Mérida M. Rúa

Professor (On Leave)

Office location: Crowe Hall, Room 1-148
mrua@northwestern.edu

Frances Aparicio

Emeritus Professor, Latina and Latino Studies
Professor of Spanish & Portuguese

frances-aparicio@northwestern.edu

Frances Aparicio's research interests include Latina and Latino literary and cultural studies, the cultural politics of U.S. Latino/a languages, Latino/a popular music and dance, literary and cultural translation, cultural hybridity, transnationalism, Latinidad, and intralatino subjects. She is author of Listening to Salsa (1998) and has edited numerous anthologies, including Tropicalizations (1997), Musical Migrations (2003), Hibridismos culturales (2006), and The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2012).