Presenter Bios
Iris Acquarone
Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Her research examines political representation and electoral politics, with a focus on elite behavior and historically marginalized groups in Western democracies, particularly Latin America and the United States.
Alexandra Délano Alonso
Professor of Politics and Global Studies at The New School, a writer, and a scholar of migration, diaspora, sanctuary, and political memory. Her scholarship examines state–diaspora relations, transnational citizenship, and sanctuary and mutual aid as political practices. Across her work, she analyzes how migrants and their communities negotiate belonging, protection, and rights across borders.
Dr. Rebecca C. Bartel
Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at San Diego State University. A specialist in the anthropology of religion and political economy, her recent research focuses on "border religion," exploring the intersections of carceral systems, migrant detention, and how religious imaginaries provide the tools for resistance and endurance in the face of state violence.
Evan Berry
Associate Professor in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His research examines the relationship between religion and the public sphere in contemporary societies, with special attention to the way religious ideas and organizations are mobilized in response to climate change and other global environmental challenges.
Regina Branton
Marshall A. Rauch Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Arizona, a M.A. in political science from the University of Wyoming, and a B.A. in political science from the University of South Carolina. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity politics, marginalized groups, and contentious politics.
Tatyana Castillo-Ramos
Postdoctoral fellow at Reed College through the Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Liberal Arts Colleges. She received her PhD from Yale University in the Department of Religious Studies in December, 2025. Her work engages U.S. religious history, Latinx studies, and popular religion. Her dissertation, Monumental Friendship: Friendship, Militarization, and Religion at the San Diego-Tijuana border examines how militarization and friendship are co-implicated in the ritualization and sacralization of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Samantha Chapa
Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Hesburgh Program in Public Service at the University of Notre Dame and an incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Arlington for fall of 2026. Her current research projects examine the impacts of urban immigrant inclusion policies on the political participation and civic engagement of immigrant and minoritized communities.
Vanessa Fonseca Chavez
Associate Professor of English in the School of Applied Sciences and Arts and the Assistant Vice Provost of the Polytechnic campus at Arizona State University. Her current research focuses on the ways in which rural communities in the Arizona and New Mexico borderlands understand and communicate their sense of place and belonging.
Irasema Coronado
Director and professor of the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. She received her bachelor's degree in political science and a certificate of Latin American Studies from the University of South Florida. She has an M.A. in Latin American Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Arizona. Her area of specialization is comparative politics, her research focuses on human rights on the U.S.-Mexico Border and environmental issues in a binational setting.
Eileen Diaz McConnell
Sociologist, Southwest Borderlands Scholar, and President’s Professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. Her recent scholarship focuses on contemporary attitudes about future U.S. racial/ethnic diversification and how federal and state-level immigration policy and enforcement activities shapes the well-being of mixed-status Latinx communities, among other topics.
Melissa Guzman Garcia
Associate Professor in the Latina/o Studies Department at San Francisco State University where she teaches classes on Latiné immigration; Latino youth and juvenile justice; and Latino Studies more broadly. Her scholarship focuses on how Latino Evangelical communities help communities impacted by deportation and incarceration.
Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien
Professor of Political Science at San Diego State University. He is the author of two books on U.S. immigration policy (Handcuffs and Chain Link: Criminalizing the Undocumented in America and Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge), as well as articles on voting, immigration, and racial & ethnic politics. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics and has served as an expert witness in cases contesting the constitutionality of 8 U.S.C. § 1326, which criminalizes undocumented reentry.
Anita Huizar-Hernandez
Born and raised in Arizona, Anita Huizar-Hernández's teaching and research focus on the ways literature, film, and other forms of expressive culture have consolidated or challenged myths about Arizona, the West, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her first book, Forging Arizona (Rutgers, 2019), examines these themes through a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme in which a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to present his wife as the heiress to a spurious Spanish land grant with the intention of claiming ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories.
Kiku Huckle
Associate professor and departmental chair of Political Science at California Lutheran University. Her research addresses how culture, values, and identity intersect and ultimately affect political beliefs and patterns of engagement, with an emphasis on race, racial resentment, and religious affiliation. Her book project, “Reluctant Evolution: Latino Communities and the American Catholic Church” examines the institutional barriers to the full inclusion of Latinos within the American Catholic Church.
Candace Lukasik
Candace Lukasik is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. She is the author of Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of U.S. Empire (NYU Press, 2025; winner of the Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies) and co-editor of Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity: Theology, Politics, Ethics (Fordham University Press, 2025). Previously, she was a Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, an AAUW American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellow, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Francisco Lozada
Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. His leadership and scholarship focus on migration, borderlands hermeneutics, and biblical interpretation.
Rafael Martinez
Assistant Professor at Arizona State University (ASU) in Southwest Borderlands whose work focuses on immigrant rights, mixed-status families, and Latinx cultural and historical productions in the southwest borderlands. Dr. Martínez’s award winning book (2025 International Latino Book Award - Silver Medal - Best Academic Themed Book, College Level) with the University of Arizona Press, Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States, analyzes the rise of Undocumented Youth Social Movements in the U.S. and immigrant youth’s contributions to the broader Immigrant Rights Movements. Dr. Martínez is the Co-Director of the newly launched Latinx Oral History Lab at ASU.
Jose Muzquiz
Political scientist and former humanitarian worker whose scholarship is defined by polymathy and methodological breadth. His research sits at the intersection of Political Science and Cultural Studies, combining quantitative rigor with historical and theoretical inquiry. His doctoral dissertation interrogates the category of “Hispanic/Latino” in American Politics, exposing its internal diversity using statistics, and identity theory.
Alejandro Nava
Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona, a native Tucsonan, and a first-generation college graduate. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He has written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Commonweal Magazine, America, The American Scholar, and local media outlets in Arizona. He is the author of several books in the areas of religion, Latin American literature and music, and hip-hop. His most recent publication is “Street Scriptures: Between God and Hip-Hop,” UChicago, 2022.
Diana Orces
Director of Research at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), specializing in public opinion toward immigration. She is an adjunct professor at American University, where she teaches graduate-level research design and methods, and a research fellow at Centro Cultural Mexicano. Diana has held positions in academia and nonprofit organizations.
Francisco Pedraza
Francisco Pedraza examines political attitude formation and political behavior among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, and the consequences these portend for public policy.
JoAnna Reyes
Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at ASU and adjunct curator of Art of the Americas at the Phoenix Art Museum. A specialist in the visual and material culture of Viceregal Latin America and contemporary Chicana/o America, Reyes’ work explores identity formation, extraction economy, and borderland iconography. Dr. Reyes has held positions at the Getty, LACMA, and the Hispanic Society, and was Aztlán’s book review editor.
Stella Rouse
Director of the Hispanic Research Center and professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Her research examines how identities inform representation, political behavior and participation, focusing primarily on Latino and youth politics. She is the author or coauthor of three books: Latinos in the Legislative Process: Interests and Influence, The Politics of Millennials: Political Beliefs and Policy Preferences of America’s Most Diverse Generation, and Citizens of the World: Political Engagement and Policy Attitudes of Millennials across the Globe. She has published articles on Latino representation on congressional committees, the mobilizing effect of female candidates in midterm elections, how generational and/or ethnic identities influence attitudes about immigration, climate change and COVID-19, and the role of religion on the political attitudes of Latinos, African Americans, and whites.
Leah Sarat
Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University and author of the book Fire in the Canyon: Religion, Migration, and the Mexican Dream (NYU Press, 2013). Her work centers on the religious dimensions of migration, border crossing, and incarceration in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, with a current focus on the intersection of Christianity with immigrant detention in Arizona. She received her PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of Florida in 2010.
Günes Tezcür
Professor of Political Science and Director of the ASU School of Politics and Global Studies. A scholar of comparative politics, Tezcür explores the trajectories of political violence and politics of religion and ethnicity with a focus on Iranian, Kurdish, and Turkish human geography as well as the United States. He is the author or editor of five books and has published 38 scholarly articles and book chapters. His most recent book is Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies (Cornell University Press, 2024) that won multiple awards.
Cori Tucker-Price
Assistant Professor of Religion at UC Santa Barbara. Her research and teaching focus on nineteenth and twentieth century African American religious history, religion and the U.S. West, religion and media, digital humanities, and migration studies. She is currently completing her first book project, Righteous Citizens: A History of Race and Religion in Los Angeles, 1903-1953, which traces the historical and social forces that shaped African American religious life in southern California.
Edward Vargas
Edward Vargas' primary areas of interest are the effects of poverty and inequality on the quality of life, focusing specifically on health, immigration status and social policy, and how these factors contribute to the well-being of vulnerable families. In addition, poverty and inequality are strongly tied to race and ethnicity; thus, he is also interested in the methodological issues involved in the quantitative study of race and ethnicity. Edward is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University, Non Resident Fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings, and a Senior Analyst at BSP Research.
Daisy Vargas
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. She specializes in Catholicism in the Americas; race, ethnicity, and religion in the U.S.; and Latina/o/x religions. Her ethnographic and historical work includes on religion and material culture, religion in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, and religion and the law. Her current book project traces the history of Mexican religion, race, and the law from the nineteenth century into the contemporary moment, positioning current legal debates about Mexican religion within a larger history of anti-Mexican and anti-Catholic attitudes in the U.S.
Sujey Vega
Associate Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research traces the way Latina/os assert home and belonging in the U.S. Using ethnography, oral history and archival analysis, Professor Vega’s research includes race/ethnic studies, social networks, gendered experiences, and ethno-religious practices. She is the author of Latino Heartland: Of Borders and Belonging in the Midwest (2015) and more recently Mormon Barrio: Latino Belonging in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (2026).
Ana Vieytez
Third-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published on Salvadoran religious transnationalism. Her ongoing research focuses on changing religious practices and civic engagement within Central American religious communities in the U.S., with a focus on the role of the second-generation in fueling internal cultural change within their congregations.
Kenicia Wright
Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Her research examines factors that shape public policy preferences and outcomes in the U.S. She often applies intersectionality to explore the effects of multiple layers of marginalization, power, structures, and different forms of representation (bureaucratic and political). In her current research projects she centers the experiences and views of traditionally under-studied groups to improve understanding of promising pathways for improving health outcomes of marginalized groups and reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health and healthcare.