Research
My book project, based on my dissertation research, is the first study of Latinx graphic life stories. It addresses the gap in scholarship on graphic memoirs and comic biographies by and about Latinx people. I compare four graphic narratives, two biographical comics, Who is Ana Mendieta? (2011) by Christine Redfern and Caro Caron, and Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker (2015) by Julian Voloj and Claudia Ahlering; and two graphic memoirs, Spit and Passion (2012) by Cristy C. Road, and Darkroom: A Memoir (2012) by Lila Quintero Weaver. As Latinx cultural products, I explore how all four narratives deal with social movements that have taken place throughout the United States, spanning the 1960s-1990s. I contend that each comic is deeply situated in various social moments of U.S. history. My manuscript further explores how each of these graphic narratives uses the genre of life writing to reflect the cultural and societal flux of the time.
I participate in the shift in comics studies scholarship that engages in gender studies and critical race theory. The narrative capabilities of Latinx graphic memoirs and comic biographies reclaim a Latinx subjectivity in the United States that presents the multiplicity of Latinx stories. My project places Latinx identity and subjecthood formation within a cultural, literary, and visual context. I argue that a comparative examination of these graphic narratives reveals how they contest dominant histories that either erase U.S. Latinx communities from social movements or characterize them as passive participants of history. Reading these four books together reveals how they present a counter-narrative of Latinx experiences in the United States. The counter-narratives that they offer are significant because they show the variety of Latinx identities while also speaking to the specificity of each group’s struggle.
Competing in the 3-Minute Thesis. Photo from P3 Collaboratory, RU-N.
Essays in Edited Collections
"Pedagogical Strategies for Teaching the Comic Anthology Puerto Rico Strong in the Literature Classroom" in Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative Approaches, edited by Fernanda Díaz-Basteris & Maite Urcaregui (Rutgers University Press 2025).
The comics anthology combines vibrant and varied images and text into narratives that are an entryway for students to learn about and critique US and Puerto Rican official history. My pedagogical strategies show how students experience a Latinx comics anthology in a literature classroom to understand and interrogate the cultural and historical aspects of literary criticism. My task has been to help students engage with narrative, history, and memory in literature.
"Life Out Loud in the Closet: The Grotesque as Latinx Imagination in Cristy C. Road's Spit and Passion," in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies, edited by Fredrick Luis Aldama (Routledge 2020).
I argue that Road's graphic memoir uses the trope of the closet and the style of the grotesque to explore interwoven issues of sexuality and culture. The metaphor of the closet becomes the physical setting, drawn on the page in full detail. Spit and Passion takes the image of the closet and uses the comic medium to show readers how and why the closet was necessary for queer children and adolescents growing up in a hostile, homophobic culture.
Peer Reviewed Articles
"Mixtec Pictography and Immigrant Labor Resistance in the Comic Undocumented: A Worker's Fight," The New Americanist 2 (2023), 35–55.
Duncan Tonatiuh's A Worker's Fight is indicative of American political life that involves the struggle for better working conditions in order to better the situation for undocumented immigrants in the United States. It asks readers to move from the xenophobic and racist sentiment of "they're taking our jobs" to think about how undocumented labor is central to the labor movement and the economy.
"Putting the Black Ink Back into Print: Black Newark/Black New Ark,"
New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8 (2022), 34–49.
This essay makes the case for the 1968 community newspaper Black Newark as an archival site that provides an alternative account of the growth of the Black Power movement in the city of Newark. The issues written about in this radical publication are an abundant resource for historians and researchers of New Jersey culture and Black cultural production in the United States.
I have articles on queer diasporic comics and the comic biography Who is Ana Mendieta? forthcoming in media and comics studies journals.
Reviews
Review of Drawing on Religion: Reading and the Moral Imagination in Comics and Graphic Novels by Ken Koltun-Fromm, Religion & Literature 54, no. 3 (2022): 168-170.
"Cocuyos Never Say Die: Review of Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega," American Book Review 41, no. 6 (2020): 9-10.
"Michael A Chaney. Reading Lessons in Seeing: Mirrors, Masks, and Mazes in the Autobiographical Graphic Novel," Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 42, no. 1, article 12.
Other Research
I have also presented sections of my dissertation as various regional and national conferences.