Sylvia Mendoza

Sylvia Mendoza, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexualities Studies in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas-San Antonio (UTSA COEHD)

Co-PI Sylvia Mendoza Aviña, Ph.D. (she/her/ella)  brings to this consortium her research experience within Chicana/x feminisms, particularly Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of the borderlands, as well as women of color feminisms and research methodologies. An assistant professor in the Mexican American Studies program at UTSA in the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Studies, her research interests reflect her deep personal and professional commitment to centering the histories of communities that have historically been erased or grossly misrepresented within the larger narrative of Texas history through the use of Chicanx/Latinx feminist research methodologies, Chicanx Cultural Studies, women of color feminisms, and critical Latinx feminist digital humanities approaches. Like other Chicana/x and Latina/x feminist scholars, Mendoza is in the process of bridging women of color feminisms/research methodologies with critical Latinx public digital humanities, as the merging of the two offer ethical research practices rooted in community care and reciprocity and make academic research accessible to larger communities outside of higher education. These approaches frame the current two ongoing community-based oral history projects she is working on: 1) The West Side Sound Oral History Project, which documents the history of the musical genre West Side Sound through historical memory and experiential knowledge, and 2) the MAS Muxeres Oral History Project which documents and preserves the movidas of the women running and sustaining Mexican American Studies programs in San Antonio, Texas. Her research interests also examine the unique subjectivities of Chicanx/Latinx youth, as well as their forms of resistance. She has developed and taught courses tied to these research interests, including Black and Brown Youth Resistance, Introduction to Chicana/x Feminisms, and Women of Color Feminisms.

As such, Mendoza’s contributions to the consortium will be to identify and coordinate workshops that provide training on women of color feminisms and transborder digital humanities to the larger community as a way to create more community based digital humanities projects that focus on the borderlands. As someone whose work is highly translatable to other geographic areas, Mendoza will also be a valuable model to demonstrate the ways in which lessons from the US-Mexico border can be translated to other borderlands across the globe.