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Latinx @ UMich

Latinx @ UMich

By Latinx @ UMich

This Latinx Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15, 2022), University of Michigan junior Luisa Sánchez speaks to Latino researchers and graduate students about their experiences in academia, how they forged a path to their current fields, and how they navigated different challenges and opportunities at U-M. Sánchez, a Latina/o Studies and Political Science student, created the podcast to connect with, celebrate, and inspire the Latino community at U-M.,
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Puro escándalo, featuring William Calvo-Quirós

Latinx @ UMichSep 23, 2022

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The evolution of Latino Media, featuring Yeidy Rivero

The evolution of Latino Media, featuring Yeidy Rivero

Yeidy Rivero is a professor in the U-M departments of Film, Television, and Media and American Culture. In this episode, she discusses how Latino media has evolved since the 1960s and how she turned her love for theater and teaching into a fruitful and successful career.

Sep 23, 202235:47
Puro escándalo, featuring William Calvo-Quirós

Puro escándalo, featuring William Calvo-Quirós

William Calvos-Quirós is a an assistant professor and core faculty member in the Program for  Latina/o Studies in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts at U-M. He holds a joint appointment in the LSA Department of American Culture and by courtesy in the Stamps School of Art and Design. His research and teaching is all about connections and intersections between the multidisciplinary fields of design, aesthetics and space with Latina/o Chicana/o Studies. In this episode, he tells us about his research on lowriders, jotería and his upcoming book about saints and monsters, and how it all connects to the Latinx experience in the US.

Puro escándalo

William Calvo-Quirós knows that when someone looks at his work, it might look a little psychofrenic: From studying murals to chupacabras to low-riders and saints, all is fair game for the professor of Latino/a studies.

"From the outside, it looks that way but for me it makes total sense in that we're unifying the Latino life experience in the United States. And a community has many expressions of their lives," Calvo-Quiroz said. "We're talking about cultural studies and therefore the cultural manifestations of that community."

Born in Costa Rica, Calvo-Quirós' family immigrated in the late 1980's to Reno, Nevada. His professional career includes his undergraduate degree in industrial design, his first doctoral degree from the Department of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University (ASU) for his ethnographic work on lowriders aesthetics and a second doctoral degree from University of California at Santa Barbara focusing on Chicana and Chicano Studies and “Monsters of Late Capitalism Along the U.S. -- Mexico Border:  Legends, Epistemologies and the Politics of Imagination.”

In this podcast, he discusses the importance of finding safe spaces, how lowriders, camp culture and barriología are all connected and discusses his new book "Undocumented Saints, The Politics of Migrating Devotions."

He also shares his personal journey as a gay man in Costa Rica, a would be priest turned scholar and how the communities he belongs to have helped him in this journey.

"I grew up in a nation where for a long time I thought that I would never get old because I would die from AIDS or I would get beat up," he said. "So when my mom made the decision -as a single mother- to migrate to the United States without documentation, risk her own health and everything, she created a space for me to exist."

"When my mom decided to embrace me and love me beyond what she understood, she made a revolutionary act. She said I chose love over what the church says, over what the state says. And that moment transformed my family and everything."

Puro escándalo

Calvo-Quirós says it was while studying the lowriders aesthetic that he was able to make a connection between Latinos and 'camp', the aesthetic movement that seeks to exaggerate differences to command attention.

For lowriders, that might be a bold pink car, adorned with flowers and symbols commanding the police to look, since they knew they were looking anyways.


"Camp is fantastic because it's disruptive… is this kind of excessive, extravagante, loud aesthetic. Camp is political because it's a creative rupture of the norms of what people should wear, or how they should talk. So in that sense, for many communities of color, camp allows them to carve a space where they say, I exist in my own differences.

"I am a scandal because we are saying that we don't need to be defined by this system, that we can imagine a world where Latinos can fully flourish as a community. So that's a scandal, because the system cannot imagine that."

"So that's why I say: people, embrace your escándalo. Just be escandalosos. Be proud of who you are."

Sep 23, 202242:11
Musically speaking, featuring Marjoris Regus

Musically speaking, featuring Marjoris Regus

Marjoris Regus recently completed her PhD at U-M and is returning to New Jersey to teach music. She shares her experience as an Afro-Latina, her personal journey defining her identity, and the challenges she’s faced within and outside the Latino community.

Sep 23, 202248:48