JSW Radio celebrates four important activist-scholars for Hispanic Heritage Month
September 2023
JSW Radio honors Hispanic Heritage month with a curated offering of four popular episodes featuring Hispanic activist-scholars. Each of them, in related but distinct ways, strives to place social justice at the forefront of their scholarship, community engagement, and teaching. We hope you enjoy these offerings!
♥ Morning Coffee with Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith – (January 2020)
Dr. Rubio-Goldsmith is the co-director of the Binational Migration Institute in the University of Arizona’s Department of Mexican-American Studies. A professor of History at Pima College for three decades, she has participated since the late sixties on a diversity of human rights initiatives in Tucson and the greater Southwest, and has led numerous community-based research projects focused on the effects of US immigration and border enforcement policies. Dr. Rubio, reviews with JSW Radio six decades of research, community activism, and the very history of Mexico and the US. Raquel shares her rich anecdotes from her academic and militant experiences, and her invaluable insights on the present of migrations flows across the Southwest.
♥ A Conversation with Emma Pérez – (May 2019)
Professor Emma Perez is a research social scientist in the Southwest Center and professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Pérez has published fiction, essays, and the history monograph, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999). Pérez’s first novel, Gulf Dreams, was published in 1996 and is considered one of the first Chicanx queer/lesbian novels in print. Her second novel, Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory (2009) won the Christopher Isherwood Writing Grant (2009) as well as the National Association for Chicana/Chicano Studies Regional Book Award for fiction (2011). Previously published essays and poems appear in a collection titled, Queering the Border (2023), and a dystopic novella, Testimony of a Shifter), detailing the lives of sex-shifting rebels resisting a corrupt global world order, is forthcoming in 2023.
♥ Natalia Mendoza-Rockwell: Conversaciones en el desierto, a political ethnography of drug and human smuggling on the US-Mexico Border – (September 2020)
Jeff Banister talks with Dr. Natalia Mendoza-Rockwell about her work documenting the effects of drugs and human smuggling in the communities across the US-Mexico borderlands. A Sonoran native from the town of Altar, Dr. Mendoza-Rockwell is a professor of anthropology at Fordham University, and one of the few scholars analyzing the politics and social geography of smuggling from an ethnographic perspective. Natalia is also a gifted writer with a powerful prose, recently recognized by the prestigious José Revueltas literary prize.
♥ Maribel Álvarez: Public Folklorist, Scholar, and Advocate for Regional Traditions and Arts – (October 2021)
Dr. Maribel Álvarez is the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore in the University of Arizona Southwest Center, Associate Dean of Community Engagement in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and an Associate Research Professor in the School of Anthropology. She founded the Southwest Folklife Alliance, a non-profit organization that supports folklife throughout the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico and directs one of the largest folklife festivals in the United States, Tucson Meet Yourself. As a public folklorist and a professor, Dr. Álvarez straddles a line between the life of a scholar and that of a community leader and advocate for regional folk traditions. In 2018, she was honored by the American Folklore Society with the highly prestigious Américo Paredes Prize.
