Latina/o Studies is pleased to announce Professor Paloma Martines-Cruz, Marie Lerma, Victoria Barbosa Olivo, Gabrielle Elders, and Lucero Galan as the recipient of Latina/o Studies Awards.

Award for Outstanding Service – Latina/o Studies

Professor Paloma Martinez-Cruz has been a core member of the Latina/o Studies community since her arrival at OSU in 2013. Beyond her scholarly accomplishments in the areas of performance, popular culture, and borderlands and indigenous studies, Paloma has brought an unequalled richness and dynamism to the Latina/o Studies group and has strengthened our engagement with the community. Most saliently, Paloma has repeatedly and expertly led the popular Día de los Muertos events at OSU, providing a pause for celebration, remembrance, and community during the Fall semester. A two-time member of the Latina/o Studies Advisory Council, she has invested in and supported the pedagogical and intellectual project of Latina/o Studies and helped cement its place in the OSU campus.

Award for Best Graduate Research Paper – Latina/o Studies

Marie Lerma's paper "Tenable and inhabitable: The non-relationship relationship between Latinx women,non-binary people and mainstream environmentalism" theorizes mainstream environmentalism's inhospitality and uninhabitability to Latinx women and non-binary people through the idea of the non-relationship relationship. Marie concludes that mainstream environmentalism fails to challenge capitalism outside of a shallow critique and disregard Latinx communities' oppositional environmentalism and their struggle for another world. 

Victoria Barbosa Olivo’s paper “Investigating Success: A Historical Analysis of The University of Texas at El Paso” investigates the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) as an exemplary Hispanic Serving Institution due to its classification as an R1 institution. In contrast to predominant treatments of Latinx, low-income, and first-generation college students within a deficit lens, Victoria argues that UTEP’s success story is partly explained by its location and history of El Paso, Texas and its particular institutional history, where an initial specialization in mining came to be paired by a broader liberal arts education.

Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research Paper – Latina/o Studies

Gabrielle Elders’s paper “The Journey towards Defining Latinidad” offers a critical reading of Michelle Serros’s How to be a Chicana Role Model, focusing on the place that non-Spanish fluent US Latinos occupy within Latinidad.

Lucero Galan’s paper “The Failures of the American Justice System are not Issues of the Past,” reflects on how Baldwin’s If Beale Street could Talk and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House put forward a structural critique of the Justice System, noting how racialized populations are targeted by this regime.

Congratulations!