About the Presenters: The Limits and Possibilities of Cross-border Latinidades & Indigeneities

Laura Pulido, Moderator

Laura Pulido is the Collins Chair and Professor of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and Geography at the University of Oregon and Centennial Professor in Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. She studies race, environmental justice, Chicanx Studies, and cultural memory. Prior to moving to Oregon she taught at the University of Southern California for over 20 years. She has published six books, including Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (University of Arizona, 1996); Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California, 2006); A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (with Laura Barraclough and Wendy Cheng) (University of California, 2012), and most recently she worked with Jordan Camp to posthumously complete Clyde Woods’s, Development Drowned and Reborn: The Blues and Bourbon Restoration in Post-Katrina New Orleans (University of Georgia, 2017). She has received numerous honors, including the Cullum Geographical Medal from the American Geographical Society, the Presidential Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers, as well as Ford and Guggenheim fellowships. Her current work on landscapes of historical commemoration, Monumental Denial: US Cultural Memory and White Innocence is forthcoming with the University of California Press.

Ramón Resendiz, Presenter

Ramón Resendiz is an incoming faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His research examines how historical institutions, visual culture, and documentary media shape perceptions of Latinx and Indigenous histories and citizenship in the United States. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Race & Ethnicity in Society and the IU Media School, where he is completing his forthcoming book, Archival Resistance: Memory, Documentary Media, and Refusals from the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands, along with an accompanying documentary film, Between Memory and Resistance: A documentary about the labor of Refusing to Forget (2026).

Yvette Saavedra, Presenter

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Presenter

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is a professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Department & the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. Her book, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Duke UP 2016), received the 2019 Casa de Las Americans Literary Prize in Latino Studies; the 2017 ASA John Hope Franklin Book Prize; and the 2017 NACCS Book Award. With thirty articles, in English and Spanish, on revolution, subaltern politics, indigenous peoples, racial formation, migration, narco-economies, and Latin American and Latinx cultural studies, her most recent include “Indians Have Always Been Modern: Roma, The Settler Colonial Paradigm & Latinx Temporality” (Aztlán, Fall 2020), which rethinks decolonialism from a Latin American perspective; and “The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees: The U.S. and Central America,” which explores the integral role gendered labor and violence play in the drug economy (Social Text, Fall 2019). She is the Chairwoman of the Coalición Mexicana, an immigrants’ rights organization, and an expert witness for Central American asylum cases with legal aid agencies internationally.

Gabriel Sanchez, Moderator

Gabriel Sanchez is an Indigenous Anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Oregon. He also serves as the Curator of Zooarchaeology for the Museum of Natural and Cultural History. He is honored to serve as a Research Associate for the Amah Mutsun Land Trust in their Historical Ecology, Archaeology, and Climate Change Program.

Daina Sanchez, Presenter

Lynn Stephen, Presenter

Lynn Stephen, Philip H. Knight Chair and Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of Anthropology, focuses her research on immigration and asylum, gendered violence, race, transborder communities, Latinx and Mesoamerican Indigenous Communities in Mexico, Guatemala and in diaspora in California and the Northwest.  Her current research explores access to justice for survivors of gendered violence, the impact of COVID-19 on farmworker health and well-being, and mapping Mesoamerican Indigenous languages and communities in diaspora in the U.S. She is the author of 15 academic books and many articles and chapters. Social justice and collaboration are at the center of her research and teaching. Empowering students and co-researchers and people she works with to put forward their own critical questions, answers, and telling their own stories is a top priority.  She has a strong commitment to research projects that produce findings accessible to the wider public and her work includes films, websites as well as scholarly publications. She serves as an expert on immigration, asylum and gendered asylum in the U.S.

Naomi Sussman, Presenter

Naomi Sussman is an interdisciplinary scholar who draws on Native Studies, community-engaged, and ethnohistorical methodologies to narrate the Indigenous histories of California and the Southwest. Her current book project, “Between the River and the Sea: Relational Sovereignty in California’s Native heartland, 1769-1931,” reimagines the California interior as a Native heartland by exploring how the Cahuilla, Kúpangaxwicham, Kumeyaay, and Payómkawichum used relationships to sustain their sovereignty over the longue durée. These four Nations’ relational politics reveal that Native people, not missionaries or miners, shaped the region’s destiny over the long nineteenth century. This inheritance of power and resistance animates contemporary Native resurgences in California and North America more broadly. She also seeks to translate histories of Indigenous power into formats that serve contemporary Native sovereignty work. She is currently collaborating with the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians to develop and implement archival trainings for Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and other Native cultural resource management professionals. While a researcher with the NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project, she also partnered with Indigenous historians and law students to craft an amicus brief that buttressed the Indian Child Welfare Act during the US Supreme Court case Brackeen v. Haaland.

Jason Younker, Moderator