President Paule Cruz Takash is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Chicana & Chicano Studies in the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, New Minorities, New Majorities: Latinization and Erosion of Whiteness in Watsonville, California, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press as part of The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues Series.

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Secretary-Treasurer Norma Gonzalez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Utah. She is an applied anthropologist (Ph.D. Arizona) with a specialty interest in anthropology and education, and language use in Latino communities. Her publications include I Am My Language: Discourses of Women and Children in the Borderlands , and Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Schools. She is currently the Chair of the Anthropology and Education Committee of the AAA.

 

Program Co-Chair Carmen Ferradas is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Director of the Latin American, Caribbean and Latino/a Studies Program at Binghamton University. A social anthropologist interested in the critical analysis of the impact of development processes, Ferradas has studied popular responses to hydroelectric projects and resettlement policies in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, which she writes about in Power in the Southern Cone Borderlands: An Anthropology of Development Practice. She is currently studying environmental struggles in the tri-national frontier of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay and conducting research on the Argentine economic crisis. Other interests include ecology, consumption, urban anthropology, border studies, social impact assessment, social movements, communication and discourse analysis, globalization and localism.

 

Member at Large Mariela Nuñez-Janes specializes in race, ethnicity, and education. Her areas of interest also include Latinos and applied anthropology. She obtained her PhD at the University of New Mexico and is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas. In her dissertation, Dr. Nuñez-Janes explores ways in which the pedagogy of bilingual education informs the attitudes of Mexicano and Chicano students who attended an elementary school in New Mexico. As a Latina scholar, she envisions her intellectual interests as a form of advocacy. Mariela Nuñez-Janes joined the anthropology faculty at UNT in the fall of 2003. She is currently co-directing the Ethnic Studies Program and plans to continue her research on bilingual education in New Mexico and embark on similar projects in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. Significant publications include "Bilingual Education and Identity Debates in New Mexico: Constructing and Contesting Nationalism and Ethnicity," published in the Journal of the Southwest, 2002.

 

Web Editor Ruben G. Mendoza is a founding faculty member and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and Director of the Institute for Archaeological Science, Technology, and Visualization, California State University, Monterey Bay. He is past President of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists, and recently ended his term on the AAA Committee for Human Rights. He currently serves as a charter member of the California Missions Foundation Board of Directors, and was recently selected to serve on the AAA Executive Program Committee for the 2006 meetings. His research and teaching interests encompass anthropological archaeology, ethnohistory, cultural resources management, American Indian science and technology, Mesoamerican and African civilizations, Chicano culture history, photography and multimedia, and wireless archaeology. Recent publications include “An Archaeological Approach to Teaching U.S. Cultural Diversity” (Blackwell, 2001), “Lords of the Medicine Bag: Medical Science and Traditional Practice in Ancient Peru and South America” (Kluwer, 2003), and “Sacrament of the Sun: Eschatological Architecture and Solar Geometry in a California Mission ” (California Mission Studies Association Boletín 22(1), Spring 2005). He is co-editor and author (with Dr. Richard Chacon) of the forthcoming, and tentatively titled, Problems in Paradise: Conflict and Ritual Violence in Native America (Two Volumes, University of Arizona Press, 2006-07), and a forthcoming paper titled "The Divine Gourd Tree: Tzompantli Skull Racks, Decapitation Rituals, and Human Trophies in Ancient Mesoamerica" (In Human Trophies in the Americas, Springer, 2006-07).

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Awards Committee Chair Vilma Santiago-Irizarry is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Latino Studies at Cornell University. Her fieldwork centers on arts education, mental health, and medical issues, which she documents in Medicalizing Ethnicity: The Construction of Latino Identity in a Psychiatric Setting. She has also studied substance abuse prevention programs in schools, penal institutions, and community-based organizations of New York City. Other interests include language, ethnicity and identity, law, and institutional culture, both in the US and in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Santiago-Irizarry practiced public interest law for eleven years in Puerto Rico, including both criminal trial practice and civil rights litigation, and danced professionally for much of that time.

 

Section News Co-Editor Diego Vigil is a professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. His expertise is in urban society, psychology, socialization and education, and ethnohistory of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. His books include From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican American Culture , and Barrio Gangs: Street.

 

Student Representative Ramona Lee Perez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University. A Ford Foundation Fellow, she recently completed fieldwork in New Mexico and Chihuahua where she studied how food practices mediate notions of body, gender and social belonging. Her interests include culinary anthropology and sensorial ethnography, Mexico/US Borderlands, gender and kinship, feminist research methods and critical pedagogy. She has served on the boards of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, the Graduate Students of Color Network at NYU, and the Civil Institute for Women of Color.