Label Me Latina/o 2022 Special Issue Volume 12: (En)Visioning Central American Migration: Views from the Diaspora
Filed under: Special Issue: (En)visioning Central American Migration: Views from the Diaspora
Introduction: (En)Visioning Central American Migration: Views from the Diaspora
Ignacio Sarmiento and Mauricio Espinoza
Ignacio Sarmiento is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American History at the State University of New York at Fredonia. He holds a PhD in Spanish from Tulane University. His research focuses on postwar Central America and the Central American diaspora. He is currently working on a book entitled Specters of War. The Battle of Mourning in Postwar Central America. He is the co-editor of The Never-Ending Journey. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Central American Migrations (forthcoming). In 2017, he coedited (Re) Imaginar Centroamérica en el siglo XXI (Uruk Editores, Costa Rica). His scholarly work has been published in several academic journals, including The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos, Istmo. Revista Virtual de Estudios Centroamericanos, and Transmodernity, among others.
Mauricio Espinoza is a poet, translator, and researcher from Costa Rica. He is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He holds a PhD in Latin American Literatures and Cultures from The Ohio State University. His research and publications focus on Latin American/Latinx comics and film, Central American literature and cultural studies, and migration. He’s co-editor of New Central American Film: 21st Century Trends, Genres, and Themes (University of Florida Press, in process) and of The Never-Ending Journey. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Central American Migrations (forthcoming). Additionally, he has translated the work of several Central American and U.S-Central American poets, including Eunice Odio.
Essays
Patricia E. Reagan, Randolph-Macon College
Patricia Reagan is a Professor of Spanish at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. She is the author of two books, The Postmodern Storyteller and Deconstructing Paradise and multiple articles focused on modern Latin American literature, culture and film. Dr. Reagan’s current research project centers on the portrayal of children in films about undocumented Latino immigration to the United States. Dr. Reagan is passionate about teaching about social change, human rights, and resistance movements in media and culture, community-based learning and service-learning opportunities and internships, and professional applications of Spanish such as interpreting and translation. In addition to her work at Randolph-Macon, Dr. Reagan is also the Founder & CEO of Syncroz Language Solutions, an interpretation and translation company that strives to create a world with fair and equitable language access for all people no matter the language they speak.
Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied: Materiality, Citizenship and Salvadoran Identity
Tatiana Argüello, Texas Christian University
Andrew Ryder, Texas Christian University
Tatiana Argüello is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Hispanic studies at Texas Christian University. She specializes in literature and cultural studies of Central America and its diaspora, particularly modernist and avant-garde poetry, war and violence, Indigenous experience, and questions of ecology and the nonhuman. She has published her work in peer-reviewed journals such as Oxford Encyclopedia, Revista Iberoamericana, A Contracorriente, Transmodernity, among others. She co-edited a special issue on Posthumanism and the Non-human in Central American Literature and Culture for Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos. She is currently cowriting Consciousness beyond the Human: Mesoamerican Dialogues in Race, Gender, and Ecology, a book on reexamining notions of race and gender through ecological thought in the writings of literary and philosophical figures in the Mesoamerican region.
Andrew Ryder is a Visiting Lecturer at the John V. Roach Honors College at Texas Christian University. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at Emory University, and has taught around the world, including in the Palestinian Territories and in Budapest, Hungary. He has written multiple articles on contemporary politics, ethnic studies, literature, and Continental philosophy. Currently, he is co-authoring a book titled Consciousness beyond the Human: Mesoamerican Dialogues in Race, Gender, and Ecology.
Tania Pleitez Vela, Università degli Studi di Milano
Tania Pleitez Vela es Doctora en Filología Hispánica (Universitat de Barcelona) y profesora de cultura y literatura hispanoamericana en la Università degli Studi di Milano. Ha sido docente en la Universitat de Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra y Autònoma de Barcelona y profesora visitante o invitada en la Universidad de El Salvador, Universidad Iberoamericana (México), Università della Calabria (Italia) y Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Alemania). Autora de la biografía Alfonsina Storni. Mi casa es el mar (Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 2003) y la monografía Literatura. Análisis de situación de la expresión artística en El Salvador (San Salvador, Fundación AccesArte, 2012). Participó en la complicación de la tetralogía La vida escrita por las mujeres (Barcelona, Círculo de Lectores, 2003; Lumen, 2004). Coeditora de Teatro bajo mi piel. Poesía salvadoreña contemporánea (San Salvador, Editorial Kalina, 2014), Puntos de fuga. Prosa salvadoreña contemporánea (San Salvador, Editorial Kalina, 2017), Más allá del estrecho dudoso. Intercambios y miradas sobre Centroamérica (Granada, Valparaíso ediciones, 2018) y Redes excéntricas. Poéticas y circulación transatlántica (1985-2018) (Nueva York, Peter Lang, en prensa). Es integrante de la Red Europea de Investigaciones sobre Centroamérica (RedISCA), miembro correspondiente de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE) y cofundadora de la Red de Investigación de las Literaturas de Mujeres de América Central (RILMAC).
Poetry
Luis Diego Mora Morales, Universidad de Costa Rica
Diego Mora. Escritor, docente e investigador. Doctor en Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos por la Universidad de Cincinnati; Máster en Literatura Latinoamericana por la Universidad Estatal de Nuevo México y Licenciado en Psicología por la Universidad de Costa Rica. Ha ejercido la docencia en universidades estadounidenses y latinoamericanas; además ha publicado poesía, narrativa y ensayo en diversas editoriales y revistas tanto en formato físico como digital. Actualmente es profesor en la Universidad de Costa Rica.
Sonia Priscila Ticas, Linfield University
Sonia P. Ticas immigrated to the U.S. in 1980 at the onset of the Civil War in El Salvador. She holds a Ph. D. from the University of California Berkeley in Romance Languages and Literatures and is professor of Spanish language, culture and literature at Linfield University in Oregon. Her research and publications focus on Salvadoran women poets and the history of suffrage in the early part of the 20 th century. She is co-translator of Eunice Odio’s poetry into English published under Territory of Dawn. The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio (Bitter Oleander Press, 2016) and The Fire’s Journey (Vol. I-IV, Tavern Books, 2013-2019). Her current Project involves the writing of a memoir about her childhood in El Salvador in the preamble of war and her subsequent migration to Los Angeles.
Karina Alma, University of California Los Angeles
Karina Alma (formerly Oliva Alvarado) was born in El Salvador and grew up in Westlake and Pico Union in Los Angeles. She earned a B.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University. She is an assistant professor in the Chicana/o and Central American Studies department at UCLA where she has designed classes on race-gender diversities, expressive cultures, and textual productions in Central America and U.S. diasporas.
Zacamil | Brown
Zacamil|Brown (Diego Murcia) Writer, Trans-lator/creator, Geek, Photographer, Podcaster, & Chocolate Agnostic. Por casi 20 años he escrito para periódicos en Estados Unidos, México y El Salvador. Tengo una Maestría bilingüe en Bellas Artes de la Escritura Creativa y una licenciatura en periodismo. Mis cuentos, poemas y traducciones han sido publicados en revistas literarias especializadas de Colombia, México, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Estados Unidos y Francia. Mis textos periodísticos han sido publicados en Estados Unidos, México y El Salvador. Inicié en el mundo del podcasting en 2011. Ahora soy creador de contenidos, productor y editor de podcasts. Vivo en la frontera sur entre Chihuahua, México, y Texas, Estados Unidos.
