Karla Larrañaga
Karla Larrañaga is a first generation Chicana from Inglewood, California. Karla received her BA in Chicana/o Studies and Women & Gender Studies from Loyola Marymount University in 2017. She received her Master’s in English with an emphasis in Cultural Studies from Kansas State University in 2019. Karla’s research focuses on an analysis of digital performances of piety dedicated to La Virgen de Guadalupe. Emphasizing the importance of digital spaces as sacred helps to make veneration more accessible for all. These spaces become digital altars that defy borders and boundaries associated with able-bodiedness and citizenship.
Kristian Vasquez
Kristian E. Vasquez (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a land-grabbing university that occupies ancestral Chumash territories. He was born and raised to Mexican-American parents on ancestral Tongva territories in South Gate, California—an unincorporated city of southeast Los Angeles—with family roots in Durango, Michoacán, and Zacatecas, México.
He is a proud community college student from Los Angeles Southwest College, owing his successful matriculation experience to the Puente Project and the Extended Opportunity Programs. He is the first person in his family to obtain a four-year degree, receiving his B.A. in Chicana and Chicano Studies and American Indian Studies from UC Los Angeles in 2019 as a transfer student and a Ronald E. McNair scholar. He received his M.A. in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara in 2021.
His dissertation, “Coloniality of the Wor(l)d: Aesthetics, Heresy, and the Decolonial Spirit of Xicanacimiento in California,” investigates the aesthetic theory and strategy of Xicana/o/x “aesthetic-conjurers” (cultural producers and artist workers) in California forged by the 1990s Indigenous resurgence conjuncture. The doctoral project explores how affect, aesthetics, and ideology operate within the fissures between flesh and world, culture and politics, body and text, revealing how the “coloniality of the wor(l)d” becomes diffuse in not only the lifeworld of ordinary experience but the bio-semiological construction of meaning in general. This concept, the coloniality of the wor(l)d, theorizes how mythoi (word) become captured expressive forms within quotidian life (world) under modernity/coloniality. This research has been supported by the UC Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Louis H. Towbes Fellowship, the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship, and the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship.