Faculty & Staff
Gilda L. Ochoa, Chair of IDCLS 2024-2025
Professor of Chicana/o~Latina/o Studies at Pomona College
Pearson Hall 208 | Contact Professor for Office Hours
gilda.ochoa@pomona.edu
(909) 607-2604
Ochoa has been involved with and written on local struggles from bilingual education, sanctuary, ethnic and gender studies to the movement for greater representation in the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District. Her last book, Academic Profiling: Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Achievement Gap, was recognized by the Asian American Studies Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problem for its focus on eradicating racism and named as one of 35 books that all educators of African American and Latino students must read. Ochoa’s earlier books include Becoming Neighbors in a Mexican American Community, Learning from Latino Teachers, and Latino Los Angeles. Ochoa strives for interactive and transformative learning spaces, and she regularly collaborates with teachers. She has received several teaching awards, and in 2016, she was the Susan Currier Visiting Professor for Teaching Excellence at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.
Rita Cano Alcalá
Professor of Chicana/o~Latina/o Studies at Scripps College
Balch 205 | Contact Professor for Office Hours
rita.alcala@scrippscollege.edu
(909) 607-3543
Rita Cano Alcalá is a literary critic (PhD Comparative Literature) and language instructor (Spanish, Portuguese). in the interdisciplinary field of Chicanx Latinx Studies, Alcalá’s research centers the literary, cultural, and scholarly production of Chicanas, Latinas, and Latinoamericanas. Principal among her interests is the transference of patriarchal ideology and power across millennia and continents through the perpetuation of the virgin-whore dichotomy. Much of Alcalá’s work has focused on the iconic figures of La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, in their paradoxical representation of female power and agency. Her latest research is a transnational project on The Flapper, or La Pelona, of the early decades of the 20th century.
Guadalupe A. Bacio, Program Coordinator of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies, Pomona College (Fall 2024)
Associate Professor of Psychology and Chicana/o~Latina/o Studies at Pomona College
Lincoln Hall 2103 | Contact Professor for Office Hours
gbacio@pomona.edu
(909) 607-1024
Dr. Bacio directs the Cultural contExts, adolesceNt healTh behavioRs, & develOpment (CENTRO) Research Lab at Pomona College. The overarching goal of her program of research is to understand and address disparities in patterns and consequences of alcohol and drug use encountered by Latinx adolescents of different immigrant generations. Dr. Bacio’s research focuses on understanding the mechanisms that explain the immigrant paradox in the etiology and development of alcohol and drug use among Latinx youth of first-, second-, and third- immigrant generation.
Evelyn Boria-Rivera
Lecturer in Chicanx/Latinx Studies at Scripps College and Pitzer College
Miller 106 | Contact Professor for Office Hours
eboriari@scrippscollege.edu
eboriari@pitzer.edu
Evelyn Boria-Rivera specializes in Latinx Studies, Women’s Studies, and US American Literature. After earning an MFA from Emerson College, she went on to work at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She then earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame. Her interest in Latinx studies led her to teach in the Latino Studies Program at New York University and to spend a year as a research fellow at the Chicana/Latina Research Center at UC Davis. She went on to become a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at UCLA teaching in the departments of English, Gender Studies, and Chicano/a Studies. She has also taught Writing at the University of Southern California. Her work is on the intersection of Latina Literature, maternity and reproductive politics in the hispanophone Caribbean, and the politics of the Cold War.
Martha Gonzalez
Associate Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps College
Miller 206 and Lincoln 1101 |Contact Professor for Office Hours
mgonzale@scrippscollege.edu
(909) 607-3548
http://marthagonzalez.net
Martha Gonzalez is a Chicana artivista (artist/activist) musician, feminist music theorist and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps/Claremont College. Born and raised in Boyle Heights she is a Fulbright (2007-2008), Ford (2012-2013), Woodrow Wilson (2016-2017) and United States Artist (2020) Fellow.
Gonzalez’s research interests lie at the intersection of Chicana feminist theory, Chican@ music, transnational music dialogues, Performance Studies and feminist development theory. Her academic interests have been fueled by her own musicianship as a singer/songwriter and percussionist for Grammy Award (2013) winning band Quetzal. Quetzal has made considerable impact in the Los Angeles Chicano music scene. The relevance of Quetzal’s music and lyrics have been noted in a range of publications, from dissertations to scholarly books. Their latest recording “Puentes Sonoros” (Sonic Bridges) was released on Smithsonian Folkways in the fall of 2020. In addition, in the summer of 2017 Gonzalez’s tarima (stomp box) and zapateado dance shoes were acquired by the National Museum of American History.
Oscar Márquez
Visiting Assistant Professor at Pomona College
Edmunds 111 | Contact Professor for Office Hours
oscar.marquez@pomona.edu
Professor Márquez is an interdisciplinary historian who specializes in transnational and relational approaches to race, ethnicity, and land/property in the Southwestern US and Latin America. His teaching and research interests include critical Latinx Indigeneities, indigenous borderlands histories, geographies of race & capitalism, settler colonialism, blanquietud & anti-blackness, and relational approaches to Latinidad in the US. In the classroom, Prof Márquez is an anti-racist instructor, actively working to identify and challenge Latin American racisms, how these become interwoven with and layered upon American forms of racism, and how this ultimately impacts Indigenous & Afro-Latinos within the Latinx community.
Magally Miranda
Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Hahn 105 | Contact Professor for Office Hours or by appointment at https://calendly.com/magalintzin.
magally_miranda@pitzer.edu
Magally ‘Maga’ Miranda is a PhD candidate in Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. She attended Pasadena City College and earned a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz with a double major in Feminist Studies and Community Studies where she graduated magna cum laude in 2015. As an undergraduate, Maga’s thesis explored ways Latina immigrant domestic workers organized in worker centers to combat their vulnerability and precarity.
Her current project is a study of Latina immigrant care/workers as they navigate changes in the media and technology landscape i.e. how workers use Facebook groups to find job opportunities and empowerment one another, and how they maneuver around the so-called digital divide. Her methods emphasize the co-production of knowledge with rank-and-file workers.
Suyapa Portillo Villeda
Professor of Chicana/o~Latina/o Transnational Studies at Pitzer College
Scott Hall 221 |Contact Professor for Office Hours
suyapa_portillo@pitzer.edu
(909) 607-9415
https://www.suyapaportillo.com
Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. She is author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (UT Press, 2021). Her research and teaching priorities include Central American history, migration to the U.S., gender and labor in Central America, LGBTTI Latina/o populations and queer (im)migration in the Americas. Her work focuses on the intersections between labor, gender, ethnicity, race and other marginalized identities in workers’ lives in Central America and in the U.S.
Tomás F. Summers Sandoval Jr. , Program Coordinator of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies, Pomona College (Spring 2025)
Associate Professor, History and Chicana/o~Latina/o Studies, Pomona College
Mason Hall 122 | On Sabbatical Fall 2024
tfss@pomona.edu
(909) 607-2916
http://summerssandoval.com
Tomás Summers Sandoval is a historian of Chicane and Latine populations in the United States, with an emphasis on identity and community formation. A past president of the Oral History Association (OHA), he teaches classes on Latine histories, movements for change, oral history, and carcerality in the United States. He is the author of Latinos at the Golden Gate: Creating Community and Identity in San Francisco (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and is currently at work on a book titled On the Edge of Things: The Vietnam War in Latinx America, based on oral histories with Chicano/Latino Vietnam veterans and their families. An oral historian with commitments to the public-facing humanities, he has written, designed, and curated two public exhibits—”Vietnam Veteranos: Mexican America and the Legacy of Vietnam” (2017) and “Sounds of Pomona: Coming of Age in the Golden Era of Music, 1955-1975” (2023). And, based on his oral histories related to Latines and the U.S. war in Vietnam, he wrote and produced Ring of Red: A Barrio Story (2018), a stage play funded by The Whiting Foundation.
Arely Zimmerman
Assistant Professor of Chicana/o~Latina/o Studies at Pomona College
Lincoln Hall 1104 |Contact Professor for Office Hours
arely.zimmerman@pomona.edu
(909) 607-1877
Prior to joining Pomona College, Professor Zimmerman was a faculty fellow in the department of social and cultural analysis at NYU and a Mellon Fellow in Social Movements at the University of Southern California. She is a co-author of By Any Media Necessary: the New Youth Activism (New York University Press, 2018) which examines the political significance of social media in youth organizing and civic participation. She is currently at work on a book about the political activism of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States.
STAFF
Janet Hernandez
Academic Coordinator of IDCLS and the Pomona College CLS Program
Lincoln Hall 1103
janet.hernandez@pomona.edu
(909) 607-3221
Janet (she/her) received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from Cornell College in Iowa in 2015. She previously worked for four years at a local non-profit youth development foundation and brings to IDCLS her passion for working with the Latinx community and artistic creativity.