Staff & Executive Committee
Huerta Center Leadership | Graduate Researchers and Undergraduate Interns | Executive Committee
Huerta Center Team (Click on the photo to read bio)
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Sylvanna M. Falcón, Director |
Darío León |
Nancy Hernandez-Rocha Events & Program Assistant Class of 2024 |
Graduate Student Researchers (Click on photo to read bio)
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Karina Ruiz |
Roxanna Villalobos PhD Candidate Sociology (Winter '23, Spring '23) |
Click here to learn about former graduate student researchers and undergraduate interns
Executive Committee (Click on the photo to read bio)
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| Mark Amengual Associate Professor Languages & Applied Linguistics |
Gabriela Arredondo Associate Professor Latin American & Latino Studies |
Lily Pearl Balloffet |
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| Michael Chemers Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts |
Kent Eaton Professor of Politics |
Jennifer A. González Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture |
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| Kirsten Silva Gruesz Professor of Literature |
John Jota Leaños Professor of Film and Digital Media |
Steve McKay Associate Professor Sociology |
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| Sara Niedzweiki Associate Professor Politics |
Justin Perez Assistant Professor Latin Amer. & Latino Studies |
Jessica Taft Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies |
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| Matt O'Hara Professor of History Provost of Stevenson College |
Juan Manuel Pedroza Assistant Professor Sociology |
Patricia de Santana Pinho Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies |
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| Jennifer Maytorena Taylor Associate Professor Film & Digital Media |
Zac Zimmer Associate Professor Literature |
Staff and Advisory Board Bios
Professor Falcón's research and teaching interests are in the areas of human rights, transitional justice in Peru, transnational feminism, and racism/anti-racism. Her book, Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations (University of Washington Press, 2016) won the 2016 National Women's Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is the founder and director of UC Santa Cruz's Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas.
Darío manages daily operations of the Huerta Center, such as guest speaker relations, and faculty and student awards. He grew up in Chico, CA to farm working parents who immigrated from the state of Guanajuato, México. Darío is an alum of UC Santa Cruz. His work in strengthening communities spans over 16 years of experience engaging with diverse neighborhoods and cities in different aspects throughout the state of California. Darío is also the Community and Research Coordinator for the Institute for Social Transformation.
Nancy Hernandez Rocha is the Huerta Center's Program and Events assistant. She is a third year UC Santa Cruz student majoring in Community Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies combined with Sociology. Nancy grew up in Sonoma County, CA to immigrant parents from Michoacán, México. In high school she began to be interested in activism and that is when she began doing some community organizing for the Latine community. She is also the Academic Co-Chair of Hermanos de UCSC, an organization on campus that focuses on the retention and graduation of Latine students in higher education.”
Karina Ruiz is a doctoral candidate and holds an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies. She is a scholar of childhood, families, citizenship, and labor. Her dissertation examines the role of children in mixed-status family labor dynamics, specifically doing care work. Her work is sponsored by the Research Center for the Americas, the Blum Center for Poverty, and the Institute for Social Transformation. She previously worked on We Belong, a community-engaged research project focused on immigrant justice in Santa Cruz County.
Roxanna Villalobos is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her BA in Psychology and Feminist Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2012, and her MA in Gender & Cultural Studies from Simmons University in Boston, MA in 2015. She identifies as a Latina with roots in El Salvador and California’s Central Valley. Roxanna grew up in Parlier, CA, a small rural town in the heart of California that is home to a predominantly Latinx community of immigrant farmworkers. Drawing inspiration from her own background, Roxanna’s research explores the gender and racial subjectivities of working-class Latina girls living and working in rural, farm-working communities in California’s Central Valley.
Professor Amengual's research and teaching interests focus primarily on bilingualism, experimental phonetics, and psycholinguistics. His research on linguistic and cognitive aspects of bilingualism has been published in international venues, such as Journal of Phonetics, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Phonetica, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, International Journal of Bilingualism, Applied Psycholinguistics, and Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. He is the director of the Spanish Studies major and the UC Santa Cruz’s Bilingualism Research Lab in the Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics.
Professor Arredondo (RCA/CLRC Director, 2008–13) received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago and is the author of Mexican Chicago: Race, Identity, and Nation (University of Illinois Press, 2008) and co-editor of Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2003). Her research and teaching interests range from migration histories and critical race formations in the Americas, to comparative Latino histories and Chicana feminisms. Over 2015-16, she oversaw the oral history component of Nuestras Historias: RCA/CLRC Archive Project.
Lily Pearl Balloffet is a scholar of migration, mobility, and inter-American relations in historical context. She is the author of Argentina in the Global Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2020), a transregional history told through the lens of alliances, solidarities, and exchanges that emerged from past migration booms in the Global South. Her next book project bridges environmental, medical, and labor histories of moving people and animals in the Caribbean Basin.
Michael is a scholar of dramatic literature and dramaturgy, whose research on othering and empathy in performance culture has included collaborations with some of the leaders of Chicanx dramatic arts and scholarship, including Luis Valdez, Kinan Valdez, and Jorge Huerta, including Theatre of the Sphere: The Vibrant Being (Routlege 2021), and 4x45: Luis Valdez (Routledge 2021) Other books include Staging Stigma (Palgrave MacMillan 2008), Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010/2nd ed. 2022), and Systemic Dramaturgy: A Handbook for the Digital Age (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020).
Professor Eaton’s research focuses on a variety of political issues in Latin America, including political parties, economic development, decentralization, and the rise of subnational governments. Over the last twenty-five years he has lived and worked extensively in Latin America, including most recently in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru. His research on the 2016 Colombian peace accords was recently published in the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development and his newest book is entitled Territory and Ideology in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Professor González's research focuses on modern and contemporary art in the United States with a focus on Latinx, feminist, and digital art. Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT, 2008) explores how contemporary artists refigure and critique historical representations of colonialism and racism, especially in the context of museums and public spaces. Her second book, Pepón Osorio (Minnesota, 2013) explores the radical social practice of this acclaimed Puerto Rican artist. She is also editor in chief of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke, 2019).
Professor Gruesz’s book Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: Language, Race, and American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2022), tells the story of the first Spanish-language imprint in the English colonies and its surprising links to Indigenous and Black Spanish speakers. Her book Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton University Press, 2002), documented the creative work of Spanish-language periodicals in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. Her other published work has explored language ideologies, bilingual code-switching, and the material conditions that influence Latinx authorship--often drawing on archival finds such as the first U.S. Latinx novel, serialized in New Orleans in 1848.
John Jota Leaños is a Mestizo (Xicano/Italian-American/Chumash) interdisciplinary artist and animator concerned with the embattled terrains of history and memory as they relate to nation, power and decolonization. A Guggenheim Fellow of Film and Media, Creative Capital Artist and United States Artist Fellow, Leaños’s practice includes a range of media arts, documentary animation, video, public art, installation and performance. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, PBS.org, the Whitney Biennial, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Cannes Film Festival; and other international venues.
Professor McKay is the author of Satanic Mills or Silicon Islands? The Politics of High Tech Production in the Philippines (2006); and the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (2021) and New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012). His community-initiated student-engaged research (CISER) projects conducted across Santa Cruz County focused on low-wage labor (Working for Dignity), affordable rental housing (No Place Like Home), immigrant and mixed-status families (We Belong), and the legacies of early Filipino farm workers (Watsonville is in the Heart).
Professor Niedzwiecki studies the politics of social policy, subnational governments, and immigration in Latin America. Her newest book, Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press) studies the implementation of health policies and conditional cash transfers in Brazil and Argentina. She is currently working on a new book on social policy and immigration in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil.
Justin Perez, assistant professor of Latin American and Latino Studies, is an anthropologist with interests in gender and sexuality, health inequality, migration, and rights. His research program is grounded in long-term ethnographic collaboration with gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru. His current book manuscript is a story of their encounters with global HIV prevention initiatives over the 2010s. Recent publications include “Scandalous Denouncement: Discrimination, Difference, and Queer Scandal in Urban Amazonian Peru” in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies and “Peche Problems: Transactional Sex, Moral Imaginaries, and the ‘End of AIDS’ in Postconflict Peru” in American Ethnologist.
An interdisciplinary youth studies scholar, Dr. Taft’s work focuses on the political lives of children and youth across the Americas, with an emphasis on youth activists and youth social movements. She is the author of Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU 2011), an ethnography of teenage girl activists in five cities in North and South America and The Kids are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru's Movement of Working Children (NYU 2019) about intergenerational relationships and age-based power in the Peruvian movement of working children.
Matt O'Hara is a historian of colonial and nineteenth-century Latin America with a focus on Mexico. His publications include the books A Flock Divided: Race, Religion and Politics in Mexico (Duke University Press, 2010); The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico (Yale University Press, 2018); and Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009) (co-edited with Andrew Fisher). His current research is on the history of an Amazonian dart poison that transformed twentieth-century anesthesia. It examines connections and conflicts involving Indigenous plant specialists, U.S. botanists, and international pharmaceutical companies.
Professor Pedroza studies the changing landscape of immigration in the United States. Over the past decade, he has examined the vast inequalities of immigrants' access to justice, the social safety net, and poverty. His research examines how and where deportation and enforcement initiatives exacerbate these inequalities and leave imprints in our local communities. His research has been published in Policy Studies Journal, Annual Review of Public Health, International Migration Review, Race & Social Problems, and The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies.
Patricia de Santana Pinho is the author of Mapping Diaspora: African American Roots Tourism in Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) and Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Duke University Press, 2010). She is currently working on a project that examines the whiteness and the rise of the far-right in Brazil, and another one that investigates the "Science Without Borders" program in Brazil that funded the academic mobility of over 93,000 college students between 2012 and 2016. Pinho is a member of the Executive Committee of BRASA (Brazilian Studies Association).
Professor Taylor makes colorful, character-based films about real people with extraordinary stories, often with Spanish-language content. Her work has shown at venues like the Sundance, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Locarno Film Festivals, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, New York Museum of Modern Art, PBS, Sundance Channel, Al Jazeera, and NHK-Japan. Her new feature documentary For the Love of Rutland is premiering in film festivals. Her most recent short film Redneck Muslim is streaming worldwide on TheAtlantic.com.
Zac Zimmer is an Associate Professor of Literature and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. His research explores questions of literature, aesthetics, politics, and technology in Latin America; previous publications have appeared in Latin American Research Review, Chasqui, Modern Language Notes, Technology & Culture, and the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. Professor Zimmer is also a faculty affiliate with Legal Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies.
