Iliana Alcántar

Assistant Professor of Spanish, Hispanic Languages and Literatures

Queens College/City Univeresity of New York

Iliana Alcántar received her Ph.D. from the department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA in September 2006 with her dissertation entitled, “In Pursuit of the Mexican Chimera: New Notions of Identity in Contemporary Literature and Performance.” Her interests include, among others, contemporary Latin American cinema, performance and postcolonial theory, as well as postmodern studies. At the moment, she is focusing on current Mexican writers that have been grouped by themselves—not necessarily in a willingly effort—readers, or critics in literary collectives or generations and the relevance and implications of such associations. Iliana also examines how these contemporary authors continue or break with a literary tradition that originated with the novelists of the Latin American Boom.

Stephen Allen

Ph.D. Student, Department of History

Rutgers University

Stephen Allen is a PhD student in Latin American History at Rutgers University. His research centers around boxing and its relationship with Mexican masculinity and national identity in the twentieth century.

David A. Badillo

Associate Professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies

Lehman College/City University of New York

David A. Badillo, an alumnus of the University California, Berkeley, and the CUNY Graduate Center's History Ph.D. Program, is Associate Professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College. He focuses his research and teaching on Mexican migration to the U.S., as well as on the urbanization of Mexican Americans and other Latinos.  He has published books--Latinos and the New Immigrant Church (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and Latinos in Michigan (Michigan State University Press, 2003)--as well as journal articles and books chapters.  His current research interests include Mexican migrants in New York City and Mexican-American Civil Rights in the twentieth century, and he is currently writing a socio-legal history of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF).

Roberto Barnard Baca

PhD Student, Music Composition 

The Graduate Center/City University of New York

Roberto Barnard Baca is a composer of chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music.  He is interested in concert music, ethnomusicology, radio broadcasting and cinema. A Mexican-American dual national, he was born in Morelia, growing up both there and in Seattle, Wash. He is currently wrapping up a doctorate in music composition at CUNY Graduate Center, with the dissertation String Quartets of Silvestre Revueltas and the score Jugalbandi  for orchestra. His works have been performed in Mexico, Canada, France, UK, and Belgium. Recent conference presentations include Sistema y transformación at the "II Coloquio Internacional de Análisis de Arte" at the Universidad de Guadalajara, México; La música como instrumento de acercamiento al hombre y a su época at the Facultad de Historia there. In April of 2009 he will present Modernismo y la música mexicana posrevolucionaria as part of the “III Jornada de Historia del Occidente de México” ;  in June of 2009 Semblanza del primer cuarteto de Revueltas as part of a Colloquium, and at the University of Veracruz. Lic. in Music Comp. from the Conservatorio de Las Rosas, Morelia; M.M. Universidad Veracruzana at Xalapa; ABD CUNY Graduate Center. Member: Cuerpo Académico de Arte, Comunicación y Cultura. CUAAD: Centro Universitario de Arte, Arquitectura y Diseño. Universidad de Guadalajara, MX; Technical Assistant for RILM and active as a Radio Amateur in both México and the USA (FMRE and ARRL).

Elaine Carey

Associate Professor of History

St. John's University

Elaine Carey is an Associate Professor at St. John's University in Queens, New York. Her research and teaching interests include Latin American social movements, international human rights, globalization, history of narcotics, and gender studies.  Elaine has received numerous grants, including Fulbright-García Robles fellowships 1996-97 and 2007-2008 and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is the author of Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (2005).  From 1998-2002, she taught Latin American and women’s history at the University of Detroit Mercy.  While at UDM, Elaine co-founded the <http://libarts.udmercy.edu/clasa/>  James Guadalupe Carney Latin American Solidarity Archive (CLASA), an activist and teaching archive on Latin American solidarity and human rights movements. Continuing this work,  she serves as an expert witness for gender-based violence asylum claims from Mexico and Central America. Currently, she is working on a book-length project entitled “Selling is more of a Habit: Women and Drug Trafficking in North America, 1900-1970.”

Alexandra Delano

Post-Doctoral Fellow, The New School

Alexandra Delano is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow at the New School. Her research interests are mainly Mexico-U.S. migration policies, international migration, immigrant integration and Mexico-U.S. relations. She is Mexican (from Mexico City) and did her B.A. in International Relations at El Colegio de Mexico. She recently completed her Ph.D. in International Relations at Oxford University. The title of her dissertation was "Sending States' Emigration Policies in a Bilateral Context: Mexico's Transition from Limited to Active Engagement (1982-2006)". 

Her recent publications include, "The Politics and Business of Immigrant Integration", Americas Quarterly, Summer 2008; "Del Congreso a los suburbios: Iniciativas locales para el control de la migración en Estados Unidos", Revista Migración y Desarrollo, Spring 2008;  "The Mexican Government and Organised Mexican Immigrants in The United States: A Historical Analysis of Political Transnationalism (1848-2005)", co-authored with Gustavo Cano (Columbia University), Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 33, no. 5, July 2007, pp. 695-725); "De la 'no intervención' a la institucionalización: La evolución de las relaciones Estado-diáspora en el caso mexicano", in Carlos González Gutiérrez (coord.), Relaciones Estado-Diáspora: perspectivas de América Latina y el Caribe. México DF: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2006.

Froylán Enciso

Ph.D. Student, Department of History

State University of New York, Stony Brook

Froylán Enciso was born in the tropical entrepôt, Mazatlán, Sinaloa, in 1981. He studied international relations at El Colegio de México (1998-2002), and is a student in the Ph.D. in history program at SUNY-Stony Brook.

His research interests focus on the position of Mexico in the 20th century discourse of the cosmopolitan writers and the contested drug-commodities markets. With regard to the first theme, he has been studying the diplomatic services of Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes for the Mexican government as the material condition of possibility in their self-invention as cosmopolitan writers that reconfigured the textual representations of Mexico in an internationalist and multicultural fashion. In his studies about drug trades, he has explored different inter and multidisciplinary approaches, but the one that convince him the most now is its study as contested psychoactive-commodities in its global circumstances.   

He has published more than 25 academic works and more than 80 journalistic articles. His most recent publications include Andar frontera. El servicio diplomático de Octavio Paz en Francia 1946-1951 (México, Bueno Aires, Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2008) and "Drogas, narcotráfico y políticas en México: protocolo de hipocresía (1969-2000)", in Una historia contemporánea de México. Las políticas, edited by Ilán Bizberg y Lorenzo Meyer (México: Océano/El Colegio de México, forthcoming 2009).

J. Brian Freeman

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History

The Graduate Center/City University of New York

J. Brian Freeman is a PhD Candidate in Latin America History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York where he is completing his dissertation on the political and cultural response to technology in post-Revolutionary Mexico. He taught Latin American history at Lehman College from 2007 to 2010. From fall 2010 to spring 2011 he will be a visiting researcher at the Colegio de México. His recent publications include: “Driving Pan-Americanism: Imagining a Gulf of Mexico Highway,” Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies 3:4 (Fall 2009/Spring 2010): 56-68; “El automóvil y el turismo Norteamericano en México, 1900-1940,” in Historia de México desde la óptica de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (forthcoming); and “‘La carrera de la muerte’: Death, Driving, and Rituals of Modernization in 1950s Mexico,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture (forthcoming).

Alyshia Gálvez

Assistant professor of Latin American Studies

Lehman College/City University of New York

Alyshia Gálvez is assistant professor of Latin American Studies at Lehman College/City University of New York. She is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, NYU 2004) whose work focuses on the efforts by Mexican immigrants in New York City to achieve the rights of citizenship.

Her book Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights among Mexican Immigrants is forthcoming in late 2009 on New York University Press. Other recent publications include Traveling Virgins/Virgenes Viajeras, a special issue of the journal e-misférica which she co-guest-edited; a volume she edited, Performing Religion in the Americas: Media, Politics and Devotion in the 21st Century (Berg/Seagull 2007); and articles in Social Text, International Migration, e-misférica and Revista Enfoques (Chile).  She is currently working on a book manuscript about the experiences of Mexican immigrant women in New York City’s public hospital system during pregnancy and childbirth.

Francisco X. Gaytán

Ph.D. Candidate in Psychological Development

New York University

Francisco X. Gaytán is completing his PhD in applied psychology at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Frank's dissertation research, supported by the Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, focuses on social capital and the cultural, academic, and psychological adaptation of the growing Mexican immigrant student population in New York City. In addition to his previous work in the social services in Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area, Frank has worked as an afterschool educator, tutor, mentor, and high school teacher in Latino communities in Boston and New York. He has a master's degree in social work from the University of California at Berkeley and a master's degree in education from Harvard University. He currently works as the coordinator of the Advocacy Coalition on the Status of Black and Latino Males at NYU's Metropolitan Center for Urban Education.

Stephanie Golob

Associate Professor of Political Science,

Baruch College/City University of New York

Stephanie Golob teaches courses in both International Relations (The United States in an Age of Globalization) and Comparative Politics (Politics of the Third World, Latin American and Caribbean Political Systems).  Similarly, her major research interest - sovereignty under globalization, with a specialization in the Western Hemisphere - occupies the intersection of these two subfields.  Prof. Golob has two ongoing research projects, the first on regional integration in the NAFTA Triad (Canada-U.S.-Mexico), and the second on the globalization of 'rule of law' ideas and their impact on legal and judicial culture in post-authoritarian Chile and Spain. Her work on NAFTA has appeared in World Politics and Canadian-American Public Policy, and her work on the Pinochet Case has appeared in Democratization, receiving the journal's Frank Cass Award for 2002.  The recipient of a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, Prof. Golob has lived and worked in Mexico City, as a visiting scholar at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), and in Ottawa, as a visiting researcher at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University.  At CUNY, Prof. Golob has been awarded a Whiting Teaching Award in the Humanities (2002-03), as well as a Mellon Resident Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center (2006-07).

Pablo Helguera
Museum of Modern Art, NY

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist working with installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance. Considering the relationship between history, cultural production and language, Helguera fictionalizes the real, generating commentary and discussion about our surrounding cultural reality and relationship to time. His work often adopts the format of the lecture, museum display strategies, musical performances and written fiction.
 
Helguera worked for fifteen years in a variety of contemporary art museums, most recently as head of public programs at the Education department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1998-2005), where he organized close to 500 public events and worked in the development of nearly 30 exhibitions. Since 2007, he is Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship.

He is the author of five books: Endingness (2005), an essay on the art of memory; The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary Art Style (2005; Spanish edition; 2007, English edition), a social etiquette manual for the art world; The Witches of Tepoztlán (and other Unpublished Operas), (2007), the novel The Boy Inside the Letter (2008), and Artoons (2009). Books of upcoming publication include Theatrum Anatomicum ( and other performance lectures)  and The Rhetoric of Contemporary Art.

His work as an educator intersected his interest as an artist, making his work often reflects on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. This intersection is best exemplified in his current project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest”, a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between.
 
Pablo Helguera performed individually at the Museum of Modern Art/Gramercy Theater, in 2003, where he showed his work “Parallel Lives”.  His first  musical composition, “Endingness” was performed in New York by the Mexican-American Orchestra.  Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as the Royal College of Art, London; 8th Havana Biennal, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Brooklyn Museum; IFA Galerie, Bonn; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center. His work has been reviewed in Tema Celeste, Art in America, Artforum, NY Arts Magazine, ArtNews, amongst others.  In 2005 he was the recipient of a 2005 Creative Capital Grant.

Carol Huang

Assistant Professor, Department of Education Leadership and Special Education,

City College/ City University of New York

Carol Huang’s Research interests include Chinese intellectual migration to the United States 1905-1960, Asian American educational history, Multiculturalism, Mexican migrant workers, and Social Justice.

Recent Publication and project:

Carol Huang & Maria Silva. 2006 “It Takes More Than Two Villages to Bring Migrant Teens to School: From Chiapas to the Rural Midwest” in Invisible Children, edited by Sue Books, Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chapter 4, pp. 64-82.

Documentary

Title: Chiapas - Illinois: an Elusive Dream
Directors: Carol Huang & Maria Silva

55 Minutes

This documentary explores the impact of US trade and immigration policy on Mexican immigrants searching for a niche in the US underground job market by tracing six years (2001–2007) in the lives of a group of Chiapas villagers who had found their way in the 1990s to an economically distressed Midwest rural town. The group's experiences of crossing, job search, adaptation and community building under post-9/11 policies of tougher sanctions and criminalization are closely examined. Their testimony reveals how economic pressures on their lives as subsistence farmers in southern Mexico, after the enactment of NAFTA, forced them to seek industrial jobs near the US border and ultimately to take the risky and expensive move of crossing. Without prio r migration knowledge and connection, their struggle to survive in the US shows not only the harsh reality of their migration as undocumented workers, but also their ingenuity in developing strategies to cope with the hostile environment, build alliances with other ethnic groups and reestablish their community in the Midwest.

Catherine J. Lavender

Associate Professor, Department of History

Coordinator of the American Studies Program and the MA in History Program,

The College of Staten Island/City University of New York

Catherine J. Lavender works on the Southwestern Borderlands, especially on interactions between Native peoples, Mexicans, Americans of Spanish descent, and Anglos. She has published mostly on ethnographic narratives and the history of Southwestern anthropology.

Her current project focuses on the controversy following the murder in 1931 of a female Columbia University graduate student doing field work on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona (officially, at least) by one of her male Apache informants.  More broadly, however, her current project deals with the question of Apache identity in the Depression borderlands.  The connections to Mexico are several in her research, but most immediately, she is researching Apache maintenance of tribal and family connections across the Mexico-US border (the White Mountain Apache frequently traversed it, with varying motives and outcomes), including interactions with state and federal governments in the U.S. and Mexico.

A side interest that has emerged in the progress of her current research is the culture of pulp publishing in Mexico; she would be very interested in talking with anyone who has knowledge about pulp publishing, especially before World War II, and most especially, a publication called, "Detectivos y banditos."

Recent publications by Lavender include, Scientists and Storytellers: Feminist Anthropologists and the Construction of the American Southwest (Albuquerque:  University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Catherine J. Lavender and Nancy J. Parezo, "Ruth Murray Underhill: Ethnohistorian and Ethnographer for the Native Peoples," in Their Own Frontier:  Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West, Shirley A. Leckie and Nancy J. Parezo, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008); "Ruth Fulton Benedict:  Culture, Pattern, and Personality in the Twentieth Century," in Twentieth-Century American Cultural Theorists, Paul Hansom, ed. (Columbia, South Carolina:  Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2001); Catherine J. Lavender and Lillian Schlissel, eds., The Western Women's Reader (New York:  HarperCollins, 2000).

Marguerite Lukes

Resource Specialist

NYS Spanish BETAC

Marguerite Lukes is a Resource Specialist with the NYS Spanish BETAC. Ms. Lukes holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics from Cologne University, Germany, and a Master of Arts degree in Language, Literacy and Learning from California State University, Long Beach. She has taught and directed programs in English as a Second Language, basic literacy in Spanish, adult basic education and family literacy, and has designed, implemented and evaluated professional development programs for K-12 and adult education teachers and administrators. She has also developed and taught graduate courses in bilingual/multicultural education for pre- and in-service teachers and developed and distributed on-line learning courses for adult and family educators. Ms. Lukes has published articles on family literacy, instructional technology, language policy and media literacy in TESOL Quarterly, Teaching for Change, Literacy Update, and Rethinking Schools.

Since 2004 I have coordinated a network of more than 20 local programs that provide basic education in Spanish to adults as part of a binational collaborative with the Mexican Ministry of Public Education (SEP) called Plazas Comunitarias. New York Plazas Comunitarias Network is a partnership among community-based organizations, volunteer groups, schools and NYU Metro Center‘s Spanish BETAC, to offer technology enhanced classes in English-as-a-Second Language (ESL), basic literacy in Spanish, GED (Spanish and English), computer training and workforce development to a growing Hispanic/Latino  immigrant community characterized by limited formal education.  The initial impetus for this partnership was a bi-national collaboration with Mexico’s National Institute for Adult Education (INEA) and the Mexican Consulate in New York. With instructional materials provided free-of-charge by INEA, SBETAC hosts a web portal accessible twenty-four hours a day. The Network connects community-based educational sites in NYC neighborhoods with high concentrations of Hispanic/Latino immigrants with a web-based on-demand system of educational services, where participants can access classes and resources as needed. Participants attend computer-enhanced face-to-face classes, and have opportunities to volunteer as tutors after strengthening their basic skills. The Network spans NYC with instruction and services to thousands of adults each year. Providers deliver quality, technologically-enhanced, culturally-responsive services to the Hispanic/Latino community. Services include: counseling, job placement, domestic-violence prevention, social services referrals, family literacy, parent education, and health education in Spanish and English. Network coordinators, teachers, and volunteers receive monthly professional development training free-of-charge provided by the NYS SBETAC, and receive on-going support on program implementation.  

Viviane Mahieux

Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Latino Studies

Fordham University.

Viviane Mahieux is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Latino Studies at Fordham University. She teaches and writes on modern and contemporary Latin American Literature, with a particular focus on Mexico. Her interests include the Latin American and European avant-gardes, the city and urban theory, the genre of the chronicle in the 19th and 20th centuries, journalism and media theory. Her book manuscript Accessible Intellectuals: Urban Chroniclers and Literary Modernity in Latin America,  is currently being completed. She has recently co-edited, with professor Adela Pineda from Boston University, a special issue for the Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana entitled “Cultura letrada y revolución mexicana”, and has also finished editing a collection of the chronicles of Cube Bonifant, a prominent Mexican woman journalist of the 1920’s. She is beginning research on the particular relationship between print journalism and the avant-garde in Mexico. 

Viviane received her B.A. in History and Comparative Literature at U. C. Berkeley and completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University. She previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Tours in France, and the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Sur in Mexico.

Isabel Martinez

Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology of Education, Department of Human Development

Teacher’s College, Columbia University

Isabel Martinez is a doctoral candidate at Teacher’s College, Columbia University in the program of Sociology of Education in the Human Development department.  Long involved with issues of educational attainment in Mexican and Mexican immigrant communities, her research currently examines the labor and educational experiences of unaccompanied, recently arrived Mexican immigrant youth in New York City and pre-immigration Mexican youth in southern Mexico.  Using transnational theory, social and cultural reproduction theory and life course theory, this study aims to broaden the discussion of immigrant youth beyond traditional discussions of school-going youth to include those who remain outside of the United States educational system. 

Her professional experience is rooted in community practices and research, as she has developed educational programs for Mexican immigrant and Mexican American youth and families in Texas, Colorado and New York City, and has studied issues of social mobility and Latino families in New York City. She is currently a 2008-2009 Spencer Dissertation Fellow and 2008-2009 Society for the Study of Social Problems Race/Ethnicity scholar.

John Ochoa

Associate Professor, Department of Sanish, Italian and Portuguese and
Department of Comparative Literature, Penn State University

Field of specialization: Mexican literature and intellectual history, Comparative Literature. PhD Yale, 1999. Before coming to Penn State (http://sip.la.psu.edu/people/faculty/ochoa.shtm), John Ochoa was Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Riverside. He was awarded a Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in 2001-02.  His first book, The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity (University of Texas Press 2005) studies the relationship between awareness of failure and national culture. It examines the work of several "monuments" of the Mexican canon, including Bernal Díaz del Castillo, J. J. Fernández de Lizardi, Alexander von Humboldt, José Vasconcelos, and Carlos Fuentes; it argues that the acknowledgement of failure, both historical and aesthetic, can actually be constructive and ultimately lead to both self-knowledge and self-definition.

Besides Mexican intellectual and cultural history, his other teaching and research interests include post-colonial theory, colonial Latin American literature, Chicano performance art, and, of all things, culinary history. He has published book chapters and articles on Edward Said’s debt to Foucault, on the novels of Agustín Yáñez and the end of time, and on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and food. He edited an anthology of work by the Mexican/Chicano poet and performance artist Guillermo Gómez Peña, Bitácora del cruce (Fondo de Cultura, 2006), and has published several studies of his work. 

His current research, comparative in nature, explores American exceptionalism. It will pair readings from the United States and Latin America in order to consider claims for the uniqueness of the American condition.

Gabriela Pérez Báez

Ph.D. Candidate, University at Buffalo

Visiting Research Scholar, Linguistics, The Graduate Center/City University of New York

Jenik Radon

Adj. Asst. Professor, School of International and Public Affairs

Columbia University

Jenik Radon is Adj. Asst. Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He is a visiting professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research in Mumbai, India, where he has taught the class "Dynamics of Corruption.” He has been named Distinguished University Professor at Monterrey Tech, Queretaro, in Mexico, where he gives special university wide lectures with the focus on expanding the concept of national branding and the points of excellence of Mexican culture, politics, and history.   He also does research on the subject of national branding and Mexico. Radon participated in the constitutional peace process in Nepal and was a drafter of the interim peace constitution. He is a member of the UN Global Compact Academic Initiative taskforce which seeks to have business schools worldwide incorporate the Compact's 10 principles on human rights into their curriculum and teaching.

In the early '80s, Radon founded Radon and Ishizumi, an international law firm representing international corporations and foreign public entities.  In 1980, Radon co-founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee that supported refugees displaced during the Afghan-Soviet war and freedom for Afghanistan. Advisor during Estonia's independence struggle, Radon co-authored the country's foreign investment, mortgage/pledge, privatization and corporate laws and was an architect of Estonia's privatization.  Radon was Georgia's key foreign advisor and negotiator of the multi-billion dollar oil and gas pipelines from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Turkey (the BTC).  In 2000, he was awarded Georgia's highest civilian award, the Order of Honor.

Radon has lectured in over 30 nations, including recently in Mexico, China, Germany, Laos,  and Nepal; and he has written numerous articles, including “Conflicts of Interest: the Unaddressed and the Unspoken Challenge,” International Social Science Journal (UNESCO); “Staatsfonds vor den Toren” (Sovereign Wealth Funds Before the [Trojan] Gates), Wirtschaft (Economy) section, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ);  “Getting Human Rights Right,” Stanford Social Innovation Journal (December, 2007); "How To Negotiate Your Oil Agreement," in Escaping the Resource Curse, ed. Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University Press, June 2007);  The New Mantra: Bribers Beware! " The Journal for Transnational Management (Vol. 11, No. 4, 2006); " 'Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, See No Evil' Spells Complicity," (UN) Compact Quarterly (Volume 2005, Issue 2), published by the (United Nations) Global Compact. Radon obtained his B.A. from Columbia University, a M.C.P. from the University of California, Berkeley and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Stephen Ruszczyk

Ph.D. Student, Department of Sociology

The Graduate Center/City University of New York

Stephen Ruszczyk is a CUNY Grad Center Sociology doctoral student.  He is currently writing an ethnography on Mexican high school students in Bushwick, Brooklyn.  The study looks at how factors outside of school impact on their school performance and post-high school prospects.

Luis San Vicente Portes

Assistant Professor, Department of International Business

Montclair State University

Luis San Vicente Portes is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Business at Montclair State University. He joined MSU in the fall of 2005 after the completion of his doctoral degree at Georgetown University. He earned his bachelor's degree at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), holds diplomas in Business Development and Administration from ITAM, and on the Economics of the European Union granted by the London School of Economics. Dr. San Vicente Portes has worked for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC., and for the Ministry of Finance and Petroleos Mexicanos in Mexico.

Dr. San Vicente Portes’ research focuses on macroeconomics and international economics. Using computational techniques he takes a theoretical approach in the study of business cycles, international trade and inequality. In particular, his research analyzes the macroeconomic effects of greater economic integration on business cycles and the distribution of income and wealth. His work has been published in journals such as the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, the Global Economy Journal, the B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, the European Journal of Management, among other academic outlets.

Araceli Tinajero

Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature

The Graduate Center and City College/City University of New York

Before joining the Foreign Languages Department at The City College of New York and the Graduate Center, Professor Tinajero taught Japanese language at the University of Wales in Great Britain and Spanish and Latin American Literature at Middlebury College and Yale University. She is the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano (Purdue UP, 2004), El lector de tabaquería: Historia de una tradición cubana (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2007), El lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader (University of Texas Press, forthcoming), and the editor of  Cultura y letras cubanas en el siglo XXI (Madrid: Iberoamericana [October] 2009). Her latest articles and book chapters have been published in The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005),  Cuba: un siglo de literatura (1902-2002) [Madrid: Colibrí, 2004],  Review:  Literature and Arts of the Americas (2006), Revista Iberoamericana (2006), Alternative Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), Diplomacia y orientalismo. Fuentes modernistas (México: UNAM, 2007), and Studi ispanici (2008). She is writing a book on 20th Century Mexican intellectuals

Oswaldo Zavala

Assistant Professor, Modern Languages

College of Staten Island/City University of New York

Oswaldo Zavala (Ciudad Juárez, 1975) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American literature at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York (CUNY), specializing in contemporary Mexican narrative. He obtained a dual doctorate in Hispanic literature from the University of Texas at Austin and in comparative literature from the University of Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle. Before becoming a professor, he worked as a reporter and columnist for various newspapers and magazines in Mexico and the US, including the political weekly Proceso. He is currently writing a book on the works of Chilean author Roberto Bolaño and co-editing, with José Ramón Ruisánchez of the Universidad Iberoamericana, Materias dispuestas: Juan Villoro ante la crítica, to be published this year.

Eric Zolov

Associate Professor of History

Franklin and Marshall College

Eric Zolov’s scholarship focuses on three principal areas: popular culture, Mexico, and U.S.-Latin American relations.  His first book was Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (1999) and uses the lens of the rock counterculture in Mexico during the 1950s-70s to examine broader questions of national identity and middle-class values during an era of dramatic change.  Since then, he has co-edited three other books.  The first is Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (2000),  a reference collection of key documents on the U.S.-Latin American relationship.  The second is Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Popular Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (2000), a co-edited volume of essays that explores various facets of Mexican politics and culture in the post-revolutionary period.  A third co-edited project is Rockin' Las Américas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America (2004); it is the first interdisciplinary collection to explore the diversity of rock music cultures throughout the Americas.   Zolov’s current research examines the impact of the Cuban revolution on Mexican politics and U.S.-Mexican relations during the 1960s. 

Recent publications by Zolov include, "Between Bohemianism and a Revolutionary Rebirth: Che Guevara in Mexico" in Paulo Drinot, ed., Che's America: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America (Duke University Press, 2009; in press); "Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a New Left in Latin America," A Contracorriente: A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America 5:2 (Winter 2008); "¡Cuba sí, yanquis no!: The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano in Morelia, Michoacán, 1961," in Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In From the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with Cold War Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); "The Graphic Satire of Mexico's Jorge Carreño and the Politics of Presidentialism During the 1960s," Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina 17:1 (2006); and "Showcasing the 'Mexico of Tomorrow': Mexico and the 1968 Olympics," The Americas 61:2 (October 2004).