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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Jessica Taft, Director |
Kim Vachon |
Nancy Hernandez-Rocha Events & Program Assistant Class of 2024 |
LINK 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 |
Saskias Casanova |
Kent Eaton |
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| Sylvanna M. Falcón Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies |
Kirsten Silva Gruesz Professor of Literature |
John Jota Leaños Professor of Film and Digital Media |
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Fernando Leiva |
Carlos Martinez Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies |
Aims McGuinness |
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| Steve McKay Associate Professor of Sociology |
Sara Niedzweiki Associate Professor of Politics |
Justin Perez Assistant Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies |
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| Juan Manuel Pedroza Assistant Professor of Sociology |
Patricia de Santana Pinho Professor of Latin American & Latino Studies |
Roberto de Roock Assistant Professor of Education |
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| Jennifer Maytorena Taylor Associate Professor of Film & Digital Media |
Zac Zimmer Associate Professor of Literature |
Staff and Advisory Board Bios
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.
As an educator, researcher and former clinical therapist, Dr. Kim Vachon has a long history of commitment and dedication to social justice in education and creating liberatory environments for youth. In Spring of 2023, she completed her doctorate in Education with a designated emphasis in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz after successfully defending her dissertation entitled “Barriers to developing antiracist teachers:The role of policy, pedagogy, and practice.” Her research interests include examining how education policy provides affordances and constraints for what teacher candidates learn about race and racism in teacher education programs and how teacher candidates engage with antiracist teaching frameworks both in and beyond their teacher preparation experiences. In her free time, Kim enjoys taking long walks by the ocean with her family, hiking and camping, making music, and laughing with dear friends.
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.”
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.
Saskias Casanova is a critical sociocultural psychologist. She uses interdisciplinary, intersectional, and contextual approaches to examine how Black, Latine, Indigenous, and immigrant-origin students’ cultural strengths and experiences with structural marginalization influence their educational trajectories. As director of the Migration, Identity, and Education Lab, she co-produces knowledge with students and community partners to inform practice. Saskias recently received a Spencer Foundation Small Grant, a Hispanic Serving Institution Department of Education Grant, and a UCSC Campus+Community Faculty Fellowship. Her work appears in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Adolescent Research, and Educational Researcher.
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 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. Her second book is titled Contesting Tiers of Citizenship: Human Rights Counterpublics in Peru (forthcoming, University of Illinois Press). 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, which is housed at the Huerta Center and served as Huerta Center director from 2018-2023.
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.
Fernando Leiva is a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at UCSC. His current research follows two main lines. First, emerging strategies multinational extractivist corporations currently deploy to overcome community resistance, with a focus mostly on Chile’s Atacama region. He is working on a book, tentatively titled, Embedding Extractivism: Political Technologies and Community Resistance in Chile, under contract with Routledge’s Critical Development Studies series. His second line of research involves the study of economic elites in the Americas and the political economy of Latin American capitalism. He is the founder and co-coordinator of the Extractivism & Society Research Cluster. He is also the author of The Left Hand of Capital: Neoliberalism and the Left in Chile (SUNY Press, 2021) and Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Carlos Martinez, MPH, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies and core faculty member of the Global and Community Health program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Trained in public health and medical anthropology, Carlos researches the health consequences and sociocultural implications of the deportation regime, asylum deterrence policies, punitive drug policies, and migrant captivity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Aims McGuinness is the author of Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Cornell U. Press, 2008), which retells the history of an iconic event in California history as an event in the history of Panama. He is co-editor of New Routes for Diaspora Studies (Indiana U. Press, 2012) and Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on the British West Indies, South Africa, British Colonial Africa, Cuba, and Brazil (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). He curated a bilingual (Spanish/English) exhibition about the history of Panama at the Smithsonian Institution’s Ripley Center in 2009-2010. The exhibition was a collaboration between the Smithsonian Latino Center, the Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
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.
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).
A former middle school teacher and youth organizer, Roberto de Roock researches and teaches about how typical approaches to literacy and technology contribute to unjust practices in educational settings along with ways of using them for social justice. In particular, he explores and seeks to transform the uptake of digital media in diverse classroom and community ecologies, taking into account the politics of technology and its place within broader material realities of racial capitalism, schooling, and neoliberal education reform. He is committed to pursuing abolitionist social transformation, especially through liberatory approaches to pedagogy and technologies (such as video games and AI).
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.
