Former Dissertation Research Scholars

Lissett Bastidas

lbastidas@berkeley.edu

Lissett Bastidas is a Peruvian-American scholar of Native American history and Indigeneity in the Americas. She earned a B.A. from UCLA with a double major in International Development Studies and Middle Eastern & North African Studies. Bastidas’s foci there were comparative colonialism, political violence, and critical studies of underdevelopment in Latin America and the Middle East. Informed by this work, she pursued and earned an M.A. in Folklore at the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology. Lissett’s M.A. research focused on the problematic relationship of the concept of folklore with Indigenous communities and the political contexts where it historically arose in the U.S. and Latin America. Some influential thinkers in her intellectual trajectory have been Frantz Fanon, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Audra Simpson, and Reinhart Koselleck. At the Latinx Research Center, she serves as a member of the Decolonial Knowledges & Pluri-university research team.

Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez

ip2301@columbia.edu

Ivón graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2015 with degrees in history and philosophy. She is currently a U.S. History Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, where she is at work on a sociolegal history of child migrants in the twentieth century. Her research historicizes the child-centered consequences of draconian border enforcement and identifies the multiple forms of rights violations migrant Latinx children have had to confront at the U.S. international border and inside the nation. She traces the legal regimes and law enforcement practices that denied border-crossing Latinx children rights and public assistance between 1938 and the 1990s, resulting in labor exploitation on farms, educational deprivation, and incarceration. Her doctoral research has received generous support from the Harry S. Truman Foundation, American Historical Association, Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and American Society for Legal History, among others. Outside of the academy, she has conducted research on child and family migration for the federal government and non-profits in the U.S. and Mexico. Ivón joined us at the LRC in 2018-19 and 2019-20.

Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz

juanmaldape@berkeley.edu

Juan Manuel was an active presence at the LRC 2018-19 and 2019-20. He is a working-class, formerly-undocumented immigrant from Mexico. He is concerned about choreographic processes, contemporary dance, latinidad, undocumented bodies, and sweat citizenships. He filed his dissertation, “Choreotopias, State Violence, and the Near Past” in May of 2020. A dancer, choreographer, and scholar, his dissertation examined the role of contemporary dance theories and practices in the configuration and reconfiguration of national Mexican publics since the 1960s. This interdisciplinary, transnational project used choreographic theories to consider feelings of serial colonialism, state violence, and belonging that impact Mexican choreographers and performance artists producing work in Mexico City and San Francisco. He is the co-director of the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers, in San Francisco, California and has been a resident choreographer for arts venues such as the Alfredo Zalce Contemporary Art Museum (Morelia, MX), Zenon Dance Company (Minneapolis, US), STATION-Service for Contemporary Dance (Belgrade, Serbia), and Sugar Space Arts Center (Salt Lake, US). He holds a joint-MA in International Performance Research from the University of Warwick (UK) and the University of Arts in Belgrade (Serbia). Juan Manuel is currently a Visiting Lecturer and Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow 2020-22 at Cornell University’s Department of Performance and Media Arts and the Society for the Humanities.