, Arturo J. Aldama and Frederick Luis Aldama, eds, (The University of Arizona Press, 2020), was recently awarded runner up for best non-fiction by Empowering Latino Futures “." The awards ceremony will be held virtually on October 16 and 17, 2021. Congratulations Arturo and Frederick!

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Call for Proposals
Submissions due: Oct. 1, 2021
Editors: Arturo J. Aldama and Jessica Ordaz

Violence, Migration, and Detention during Trump’s Reign of Terror and Beyond

Although rooted in a long history and lineage of state violence and immigration enforcement, the Trump administration (2016-2020) enacted countless examples of white supremacy, anti-migrant violence, vigilante shootings and assaults, family separation, child abductions, caging of children, border policing, the increased incarceration of Latinx migrants, the sexual and reproductive abuse of migrants, and rhetoric and policies that framed them as criminals, gangsters, and rapists. 

This book seeks interdisciplinary scholarship and artistic responses that consider the impacts of Trump’s immigration and detention policies and the whole scale criminalization of BIPoC migrants indigenous to Abya Yala (The Americas and the Caribbean). We seek work by established leaders and by rising stars from various areas and disciplines including Chicana/o/x, Latina/o/x Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Latin American Studies, American Studies, Immigration Studies, History, Critical Refugee Studies, Critical Indigeneity’s, Cultural Studies, and Theater, Performance, Fashion, Visual and Communication Studies. We are also interested in work by and about artists who create counter-narratives in visual, performative, and sonic, or multi-modal registers that push back on the demonization of migrants and create other registers of trauma, pain, sadness, hope, solidarity, and abolition.

The volume will also consider work that addresses nativism, vigilante violence, and the cruelty of border and detention policies before Trump’s reign of terror as well as futurist visions. We are especially interested in considering work that speaks to and challenges white supremacy, toxic masculinities, transphobia, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, empire, global militarism, neoliberalism, transnational histories, indigenous migrations, and queer of color critique.

Some topics to be addressed may include:

• Family separation, unaccompanied minors, and the zero-tolerance policy
• Migrant children, trauma, and state violence
• Migrant detention centers and refugee camps
• Immigration enforcement and toxic rape culture
• Colonialities of power and border patrol violence
• ICE and predatory masculinities, cruelty, internalized racism
• Medical and sterilization abuse in migrant detention
• The operations of the detention and deportation regime and technologies of power
• Migrant incarceration and the carceral state
• Abolish ICE, prison abolition, migrant resistance, and transborder solidarities 
• Migrant deportability and illegality
• Migrant death and necropolitics
• Biometrics, surveillance, and border security
• Border militarization and migrant crossings
• ICE raids
• Migrant smuggling
• The business of migration and Homeland Security
• Deportation, drugs, and gangs
• Trump’s border wall

Please submit either a  3-page proposal, a 15–25-page paper draft,  and/or original creative work,  and CV to arturo.aldama@colorado.edu and jessica.ordaz@colorado.edu.

Respectfully,

Arturo J. Aldama 
Chair and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, �鶹ӰԺ 

Jessica Ordaz
Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, �鶹ӰԺ 

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Welcome all faculty, staff, students, and community members to the new 2019-2020 academic year. We are very fortunate to have three exceptionally talented and gifted scholars and leaders join the Department of Ethnic Studies (DES). Dr. Jennifer Ho was hired from an extremely competitive national pool to serve as the Director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts (CHA). We are honored that Dr. Ho has chosen to have her tenure home in DES. Dr. Natalie Avalos was also selected from a highly competitive pool to serve as the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Scholar in Religious Studies, and we were fortunate to be able to offer her a tenure track position in DES as she finishes her second year of the postdoctoral residency. Dr. Nishant Upadhyay brings their tremendous acumen and impressive range of accolades to DES. We are delighted to have recruited Dr. Upahdyay through an international search of incredibly talented scholars led by Dr. Seema Sohi. Finally, Awon Atuire joins our department as a full-time teaching faculty. Awon will offer classes in Africana studies and will help build a class on community engagement and leadership that will offer internship credit for our students.

Both Dr. Upadhyay and Dr. Avalos are teaching doctoral seminars this Fall for DES and are already creating a huge buzz among students. I’m also excited to share that through Dr. Ho’s leadership, the CHA is hosting and organizing an inaugural event titled, #Me Too and the Supreme Court: One Year of After Christine Blasey Ford, on Wednesday, September 25th from 12:00 to 1:00pm in Ketchum #371.  

In addition, Joanne Corson joined our department over the summer. Joanne brings an impressive range of professional experience and skill sets to help with the administrative leadership of DES, and to work with our amazing doctoral students and inspiring undergraduates, among other tasks.

I would also like to recognize our faculty that have recently achieved significant accomplishments. We are extremely pleased to congratulate Dr. Clint Carroll for his successful promotion to Associate Professor with tenure, and to Dr. Angelica Lawson for her successful passing of comprehensive review—an important milestone towards tenure. 

Serving in new administrative leadership roles are Dr. Carroll as Associate Chair of Graduate Studies and Dr. Sepúlveda as Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies. Many thanks to Dr. Sohi and Dr. Belknap, whose former dedication to these roles has greatly contributed to the success of our students and department.

We are also pleased to announce that the Undergraduate Certificate in Critical Sports Studies was approved. We look forward to rolling out and building this impressive certificate in full force starting Spring 2020, which will bring together students from all discipline—even across colleges—who have a nascent passion for sports and will encourage them to develop an intersectional lens to understanding how issues of race, class, gender and sexuality impact the spectacle and business of sport. Finally, we are re-opening our Graduate Studies admissions cycle to attract talented doctoral students, and we are looking forward to recruiting a dynamic cohort who will begin studies in Fall 2020.

We in DES feel it is a crucial time to provide community, academic, and civic leadership to the CU �鶹ӰԺ community and beyond. We are deeply concerned and outraged by the ongoing acts of vigilante and state violence directed at people of color and the seeming ongoing sepulcherization of toxic masculinity and gender violence in the dominant body politic. Horrifying examples include: vigilante mass shootings in El Paso directed at Latinx people; the continued acts of state violence on Indigenous and Latinx children as they are separated from their families at the border; the ongoing acts of police brutality on communities of color; the senate-driven disavowal of the practices of sexual violence and toxic masculinity in their nomination and votes for a Supreme Court Judge; the ongoing femicides of Indigenous women on Turtle Island; and the continued rise of mass incarceration and its attendant industries. 

As always, we in DES take pride in providing a safe space for all students, faculty, and staff. Please keep any eye out for our upcoming events and activities this year that seek to cultivate community while sparking critical discussion on the complexities of our current time.

Warmly, respectfully, y paz.

Arturo J. Aldama
Chair

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As the newly elected Chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies, I hope to continue building on the visionary and pragmatic leadership of Dr. Rabaka and Dr. Maeda. I am deeply committed to continue building our Department of top tier scholars, teachers, students at both the undergraduate and doctoral levels, and community leaders. As a Department, we strive to provide the very best undergraduate training for our students to develop the necessary tools to gain admittance into top-tier graduate and professional programs and to become community leaders and bring their vision and knowledge of social justice to their professional lives. As the 4^th doctoral program in Comparative Ethnic Studies, and the only one outside of California, our doctoral students are doing amazing original research and bringing new ideas and epistemic frames as they move through their course-work, prepare for their comprehensive examinations, defend their prospectus, work on their dissertations, and prepare and become successful or the job market.

As a Department, we are deeply honored that the College of Arts and Sciences recognizes our exceptional interdisciplinary and intersectional rigor and commitment to practicing “inclusive excellence” by appointing two of our tenured faculty to assist the College under the invigorating leadership of Dean White. We are all deeply proud that Dr. Hillary Potter and Dr. Daryl Maeda will be serving as Associate Deans in the College of Arts and Sciences. We are confident that they will help make the College and the University an exceptional learning space for our students and to build and foster deep seated cultures and practices of inclusive excellence for all faculty, staff and students.

These are truly exciting and energizing times to serve as a faculty at CU �鶹ӰԺ as it embarks on our “academic futures”, exciting changes to the general education requirements for all students at CU �鶹ӰԺ, and invigorating leadership. I am both humbled and inspired to serve as a faculty and Chair.

Respectfully y paz,

Arturo J. Aldama, PHD

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Congratulations to Professor Aldama, winner of the Excellence in Service award from the �鶹ӰԺ Faculty Assembly!

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Saturday, March 10, 2018
8:30 AM - 4:00 PM

Eaton Humanities 1B50
1610 Pleasant Street
�鶹ӰԺ, Colorado 80302

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Moments in Mexican American History in the Southwest, an historical look into Mexican-American history from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) to the present, is on display at The Collective in Lafayette. The exhibit of 23 panels combining text and images, was prepared by CU professors Dr. Arturo Aldama and Marjorie McIntosh. They are part of a traveling exhibit in �鶹ӰԺ County. The exhibit explores issues such as racism and discrimination as well as activism and social justice.

In addition to the historical exhibit, the paintings of Jerry Rael are on display. Denver artist Jerry Rael was born near the Bosque de los Caballos in a small house located in Jaroso, Colorado, about six miles north of the New Mexico state line. His paintings explore and pay homage to his Mestizo heritage, and address such issues as immigration, Standing Rock, and race. The bright colors and the mixed emotions in Rael's subjects are represented with a quality that suggests ghosts intertwined in a world where one doesn't know which is real or which is fantasy. The Collective –Community Arts Center is a City of Lafayette facility managed by the Arts and Cultural Resources Department. The Collective Gallery is open Tuesdays and Wednesdays 10:00 am – 5:00 pm; Thursdays and Fridays 10:00 am – 7:00 pm and Saturdays 10:00 am – 5:00 pm; Sundays 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm. The Collective Gallery is closed on Mondays.

For more information visit .

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