Label Me Latina/o 2025 Special Issue Volume 15: Healing Wounds on the Borderlands
Filed under: Special Issue: Healing Wounds on the Borderlands
Healing Wounds: Justice, Creativity, and Joy in the Borderlands and Beyond
By Gionni Ponce and Lee Bebout
Lee Bebout is a professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches and researches in the areas of race, social justice, and political culture. His articles have appeared in Aztlán, MELUS, Latino Studies, and other scholarly journals. He is the author of three books Mythohistorical Interventions: The Chicano Movement and Its Legacies (Minnesota, 2011), Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White (NYU, 2016), and Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice (NYU, 2025). He has also co-edited (with Philathia Bolton and Cassander Smith) Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom (Northwestern UP), a volume on the challenges of and strategies for teaching about race. He is currently exploring the possibilities and limits of applied humanities through a new research project and by curating the Subversive Sticker Project at SubStick.org.
Gionni Ponce is a prose writer living in Tempe, Arizona. She is a proud alumna of Macondo, Tin House, and VONA. She has been awarded fellowships to the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers Workshop, and the Fine Arts Work Center. In 2018, she was named a Writer in South Asia Fellow by Indiana University. In 2024, she was selected as a Poesiæuropa Fellow, traveling to Italy to present on Octavia Butler’s influence on women of color writing sci-fi. She’s organized workshops for young writers, assistant-directed national writing workshops, and continues to host readings, workshops, and collaborative projects as an arts administrator. Wherever she goes, she aims to create storytelling space for traditionally marginalized stories as a writer, artist, cultural curator, and creative writing instructor. Her work is published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Kenyon Review Online, South Carolina Review, and The Seventh Wave. She is currently working on a short story collection centered on bilingualism and multi-generational conflict in Mexican-American families. You can learn more on X: @gpisme.
Un Cuento del Camino: A Literacy Journey
By: Mónica Baldonado-Ruiz
Mónica Baldonado Ruiz is an assistant professor of literacy at San Diego State University who believes that the power of stories connects us to others around us. She has used her own voice as an advocate for students and to celebrate the communities of those students. Her research interests include literacy education, culturally sustaining pedagogy, equitable practices of teaching writing, and LatCrit theory of education, specifically testimonio. As a first-generation college graduate, she is dedicated to cultivating liberatory literacy education for historically marginalized student populations. She welcomes your thoughts and questions and can be reached at mbaldonado@sdsu.edu.
Visiting Abuela’s Sister and Her Five Daughters and Waves of Dolor: A Deconstructed Sestina
By Adriana Estill
Adriana Estill grew up in California and Guadalajara; she eventually landed in Minnesota, where she teaches Latinx studies and literature at Carleton College. She has recent poems in Heimat Review and Kakalak 2023; she’s only just begun to dream of being a poet.
Humor (and Borderlands of Joy) in Chicana Poetry in Spanish
By: Isabel Díaz Sánchez
Isabel Díaz Sánchez is an associate professor at the Department of English at the University of Alicante/ Profesora Titular de Universidad. She holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of Alicante. She was awarded a teaching scholarship at Arizona State University where she taught in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. There she completed her graduate studies for her second PhD in Spanish taking the comprehensive exams with honors. Her research interests lie in Chicanx poetry and Latinx Literature, with special emphasis on memory and trauma studies.
the staling of pomegranate seeds
By Berenice Limeta Jimenez
Berenice Limeta Jimenezis an English major at UCLA and will be applying for graduate schools in the fall. She enjoys reading contemporary poetry that deals with current issues of war and immigration. Her favorite writers are Toni Morrison and Joan Didion, as they both have impacted her writing style in different ways. Above all, she enjoys going on nature walks with her dog Peluda.
Bordering Latinidad: Black Joy and Queer Refusals in the Poetics of Alán Peláez López
By Joshua R. Deckman
Joshua R. Deckman is assistant professor of Spanish and Latine/x Studies and director of La Casa Cultural Latina at Stetson University. He has written on racial and affective politics, Afro-diasporic religious practices, and anti-imperial/decolonial epistemologies in contemporary Caribbean and Latinx literary and cultural productions. He is the author of Feminist Spiritualities: Conjuring Racial Politics in the Afro-Caribbean and Its Diaspora (SUNY Press, 2023) and is currently working on a second monograph, entitled Militant Softness: A Queer Politics of Resistance and Anti-Imperialism in US Afro-Latinx Literatures.
