Beyond Borders: Lightning Talks

Michelle is a second-year Sociology PhD student at UC Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis in Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS). She earned her B.A. in Sociology and Feminist Studies from UC Santa Barbara, and then completed an M.A. in Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University. Throughout her graduate studies, she has researched the gendered and sexual lives of working-class Latinas. Her future goal is to become faculty at a public institution where she can work closely with marginalized students. Michelle is a recipient of two Research Center for the Americas awards: a 2018-19 Research Cluster grant and The Lionel Cantú Memorial Award (co-administered with the Sociology and LALS Departments at UC Santa Cruz).

Gina is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz, majoring in Latin American and Latinx Studies. She is a member of a mixed-status family and is an activist committed to bringing justice to marginalized and underrepresented communities. Her experiences in and out of the university equips her with critical tools to recognize, conceptualize, and combat power systems that have personally affected her and her family as well as those in her community. In Fall 2018, she was a research assistant with the Research Centers of the Americas’ Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program. She assisted with documentary media research, focused on how documentary filmmakers depict migration and immigrants from Latin America to the United States. Gina’s life experiences have propelled her to reimagine ways of connecting to home and academic settings that deconstructs oppressive mechanisms and systems, by mobilizing the concept of love.

Juan is a documentary filmmaker, journalist and PhD student of Latin American and Latinx Studies at University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC). He is also the Graduate Student Researcher for the Research Center for the Americas at UCSC. His work focuses on environmentalism, social movements and globalization. He has directed two feature documentary films: Compañeros de lucha (2012) and Vieques: una batalla inconclusa (2016). His documentary filmography also includes the short-documentary film, La generación del estanbai (2016), which won “Best National Short Film” at Festival Internacional de Cine Fine Arts in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Dávila currently works as a correspondent for Democracy Now! His journalist work has also been featured in TeleSur, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, and the Indypendent. He holds a Bachelor in Arts of Communication from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico (2011) and a Master of Arts in Social Documentation from UCSC (2015).

Patricia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She is the author of several works on blackness, whiteness, racism, and forms of resistance to racism in Brazil. Her latest book, Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), examines the construction of black transnational solidarity within the geopolitical context of the black diaspora. She is also the author of Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press, 2010). Dr. Pinho is a native of Salvador, Bahia and has a PhD in Social Sciences from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP, Brazil. Patricia is on the Steering Committee of the Research Center for the Americas at UCSC.