Rockefeller Fellows

2004-2005

Muneer Ahmad, J.D.

Muneer Ahmad is an assistant professor of Law at the Washington College of Law at American University. He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1993, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1996. He has written several articles on the role that race and legal regimes play in the construction of immigrant identities after September 11th, and has been an invited speaker on the subject of immigrant rights at Harvard University, UCLA, New England School of Law, and Loyola Marymount University, among others. Professor Ahmad has also presented his work at conferences sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of State, American Studies Association, The Rockefeller Foundation, The California Endowment, The Wellness Foundation, National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. Prior to joining the faculty at American University, he served as the Staff Attorney and Skadden Fellow at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles, CA.

His project for the Rockefeller, entitled "Informal Economies, Informal Citizens: The Law's Construction of Women Workers in the Globalized Garment Industry," looks at the way the law has been used to facilitate the exploitation of women in the informal economy. During his year-long residency at CSULA, Professor Ahmad will undertake a comparative study of female garment workers in Los Angeles, California and Ahmedabad, India. His interdisciplinary research project is centered on three critical inquiries: how does the law operate, both domestically and transnationally, to construct conditions of exploitation for women in the garment industries of Los Angeles and Ahmedabad, 2) how does the economic marginality that these women experience affect their political, social, and cultural citizenship, and, 3) how might women, who are geographically distant but economically linked, begin to support one another in their claims for social justice? This project will combine legal research and in-depth interviews with garment workers in both research sites, and will culminate in a manuscript regarding law, informality, gender, and citizenship.

Research Assistant - Stephanie Abraham

Founding editor of LOUDmouth, Cal State L.A.'s feminist magazine. Stephanie is currently pursuing an interdisciplinary M.A. in Cultural Studies with an emphasis on race and representation, focusing specifically on the gendered representations of Arabs in Hollywood film and television.

Research Assistant - Josh Saxe

Josh Saxe is 23 and a graduate student in History at Cal State LA. He has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life and has been involved with activism around issues of workers' rights, peace, women's rights and anti-racism. His focus is labor history and he plans to do a thesis on some aspect of the history of the American working class. Josh can be contacted by email at: joshsaxe@yahoo.com

Bryant Keith Alexander

Bryant K. Alexander is an associate professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. and M.S. degrees from the University of Southerwestern Louisiana -- now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette -- and his Ph.D. from Southern Illinois Univeristy at Carbondale. As a teacher, performer, scholar, Dr. Alexander's publications and performances deal with the social construction of identity and the performance of culture, with particular interest in the classroom as a "cultural site." His articles have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals, including Communication Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, Text and Performance Quarterly,and others. He has a major chapter contribution in the forthcoming 3rd edition of The Handbook of Qualitative Research, and is the Performance and Pedagogy section editor of the forthcoming Handbook of Performance Studies. His co-edited book, Performance Theories in Education: Power, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity, is due out in Fall 2004 from Lawrence Erlbaum Press.

Alexander's project is entitled "Gendered Labor: An Ethnography of Black Women Hair Care Professionals and the Domesticity of Public Service (in L.A. Based Hair Care Salons)." This project extends his ongoing interest in the social, political, and sometimes domesticating cultural context of Black barbershops and salons. Alexander argues that these are sites and services that are at once constructed as businesses, but are also seen as banal cultural activity, disavowed as insignificant expressions of vanity and the domesticated act of processing Black hair. The Black salon serves as a specified context in which Alexander explores the larger tradition of disavowing the economic value of Black women's domestic labor and how this dismissal undermines the reality that the domestic is political and the political is both gendered and racialized. This study also implicates the social, sexual, and political construction of Black women's labor across historical and class boundaries, from the fields to the boardroom, bleeding the borders of the private and public spheres. The project combines in-depth interviews with Black women hair-care profesionals, analyses of their narratives, and historical research. It will culminate in a formal manuscript detailing the cultural construction of Black women's labor.

Research Assistant - Thomas Fitzgerald

Enrique Ochoa

Enrique Ochoa is an associate professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles. He has written several articles on the Mexican welfare state, food policy, radical pedagogy, and community activism in the contemporary U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Dr. Ochoa is also the author of Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food Since 1910 (SR Books, 2000). He is also the editor of several volumes, including Mexico in the 1990s: Economic Crisis, Social Polarization, and Class Struggle, a special double issue of Latin American Perspetives (May and July), and Agricultura y estado en México: Antecedentes e implicaciones de las reformas salinistas (UAM, Azcapotzalco, 1994).

His project is entitled “Food, Work, and Gender: Transnationalism and the Tortilla Industry in Los Angeles." Through oral history interviews with a wide range of people -- including workers and managers of various local firms (past and present), women who produced tortillas in the household, and consumers -- Ochoa will explore the various facets of tortilla history and culture while tracing the rise and transformation of the tortilla industry in Los Angeles and its impact on work, culture, identity, and gender.

Research Assistant - Lucila Chavez

Research Assistant - Natalie Mazas

Patrick Hebert

Patrick "Pato" Hebert is a prolific community-based educator, graphic designer, and photographer whose work documents and is actively engaged in the Latino queer communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. He received his B.A from Stanford University and his M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. He has taught creative writing and drawing at L.A. Central Juvenile Hall, and led the Los Angeles County's Commission on Human Relations sponsored project "No Haters Here" with students at four L.A. high schools. In addition to working with youth, Hebert has served as an Art Director for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and has taught photography, theory, and writing at Scripps College and the University of California, Irvine. He has also worked with the National Taskforce on AIDS Prevention and Policy, Proyecto ContraSIDA por Vida, LLEGO, and the Delhi Center. Mr. Hebert is also the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Creative Work Fund, and has shown at galleries throughout California. Hebert's most recent work includes "HIVisionaries/VIHsionarios," a public art project designed to counter homophobia in the San Fernando Valley.

His project for the Rockefeller is entitled "Work It Out: Shaping Latino communitydiscourse in representations of HIV, risk and resilience." It involves informative HIV research and graphic design work with Latino communities throughout Central Los Angeles. "Work It Out" is a public art project shaped by three interrelated labor dynamics: 1) the challenges facing sex workers and their clients, 2) the unpaid work of local community organizing, and, 3) shifts in the international AIDS industry. He asks: how do these labor practices impact a complex series of Latino communities that are bilingual, transnational, multigendered, polysexual, and affected by HIV, and how do people nurture well-being amidst a virus that is linked to our most fundamental needs? The project aims to reconceptualize HIV so that we can understand it not just as a contagious viral illness, but as a social disease crafted and spread by meta--dynamics such as poverty, anti-immigrant legislation, housing shortages, and the inclination of governments, health agencies, and churches to control sexuality. During his half-year residency, Mr. Hebert will direct a community education project that directly engages a diverse group of Latinos, from transgender sex workers to gay immigrant men, in the creation of billboards they can use to frame and claim their streets.

2003-2004

Ester E. Hernandez

Ester E. Hernandez received her Ph.D. in Social Science in 2002 from UC Irvine. She teaches in the Department of Chicano Studies at CSU Los Angeles.

She received the UC Presidents Dissertation Fellowship in 1999. While in residence at the Center for Genders and Sexualities, she will continue a project that she has been developing on the Salvadoran diaspora. Her work examines changing gender relations, family structures, identities and sense of belonging among Salvadoran immigrants in Metropolitan Los Angeles. The project is tentatively titled "Young Salvadorans: Memory, Cultural Production and the Remaking of Family and Nation" focusing on the efforts that community organizations are making to connect the second generation Salvadorans to their family and community histories. She will consider how activists and young Salvadorans (e.g. artists, students, etc.) approach transnational linkages and transnational histories through the intersections of place, space and cultural memory. Cultural production is cross cultural, drawing from diverse influences including Chicano art forms. It is built on coalition politics and progressive gender politics.

Research Assistant - Judith Rodrìguez.

Completing a Master's program in Mexican-American Studies, with a focus on Day Laborers in Southern California.

Re Assistant - Paula Garcia.

Jeanne Theoharis

Jeanne Theoharis is an assistant professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She received her A.B. in Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and her Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan. She has written several articles on the politics of race in America on subjects ranging from teaching race in American history, to welfare reform and the racial politics of globalization, to the civil rights movement in Boston. In addition, she has co-authored These Yet To Be United States: Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in America Since 1945 with Athan Theoharis (Harcourt-Wadsworth, 2002) and co-edited Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South with Komozi Woodard (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).

Her project for the Rockefeller entitled "Families of Resemblance: Urban Black Teenagers and the Politics of Representation" looks at the ways a group of black high school students in Los Angeles write about themselves, their communities, and their history in the context of studying black history. This is part of a larger comparative project begun in Boston with a group of black high school students there who completed weekly journal writings as part of an African American history class. Speaking to a sense of possibility for themselves and their communities, these students in Boston understood themselves embedded by choice, responsibility, and structure within families of resemblance, defined in part by kinship and community and in part by the structures of race and class that shaped their place in the city and in the nation. Their writings complicated notions of race and family; American-born and immigrant, they claimed blackness as a source of power and a transnational identity that encompassed not only their history but also who they were becoming. These young people stressed family and community, often before themselves as individuals, and figured themselves through these categories.

The Boston/ Los Angeles comparison will investigate the ways that the spatial organization of race and the particular histories and politics of race in L.A. and Boston affect the ways these young black people understand themselves and frame the social landscape of the city. It also seeks to contrast the ways young people write about themselves with the ways scholars, journalists, and policy experts have written about them. This project has immediate and long-term goals: to provide community-based, socially relevant learning and to put the ways young people write about race, citizenship, and the nation into public dialogue.

Graduate Assistant - Alfio Saitta.

Completing a Master's program in History with an emphasis on Latin America.

Graduate Assistant - Sam Vong.

Mark Wild

Mark Wild received his doctorate from University of California San Diego and now teaches in the history department at California State University Los Angeles. His first book, Rumored Congregation: Confronting the Multiethnic Neighborhoods of Early Twentieth Century Los Angeles, will be published by the University of California Press next year. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Western Historical Quarterly, the Southern California Quarterly, and the forthcoming collection Immigrant Life in the U.S.: Multidisciplinary Perspectives.

Wild's current project, tentatively titled "Cities of God and Mind: Spiritual and Educational Responses to the Urban Crisis," explores churches and schools that addressed the social conflicts of the 1960s-1980s by reformulating parameters for identity formation and community membership. Focusing primarily on Los Angeles and San Francisco, it connects the spatial transformations of industrialization/de-industrialization, ethno-racial demography, and sexual practices to individuals and organizations that forged new spiritual and pedagogical epistemologies for understanding urban environments. These efforts challenged discourses that condemned cities as bankrupt, irrational, or "queer," labels that had fueled business divestment, middle-class flight, and the backlash against government spending.

In particular the study seeks to complicate previous interpretations of the period that emphasize growing divisions along gender, ethnic, racial, and class lines. Such trends masked alternative movements, often operating outside government policy, which sought to celebrate diversity without sacrificing universal claims to social justice.

Graduate Assistant - Maurice Cook.

Completing a Master's program in History with an emphasis on modern U.S. history. His current research focuses on Civil Rights organizations in America.

Harry Gamboa
http://www.harrygamboajr.com

Since 1972, Harry Gamboa Jr. has been actively creating works in various media (photography, performance, video, fotonovelas, fiction, and installation) that document and interpret the contemporary urban Chicano experience. He was a co-founder of Asco, 1972-1987, the East L.A. conceptual-performance art group that invented the No Movie concept and created numerous absurdist intermedia performance works. Gamboa has produced more than thirty video works including: L.A. Familia (1993); Loner With A Gun (1994); Baby Kake (1984); Imperfecto (1983). He has also written and produced numerous conceptual dramas including: Maze of Concrete-Concert of Haze (2001), California State University, Northridge; Spatial Dialogues (2001), The J. Paul Getty Center; N/either Here N/or T/here (1999), University of Wisconsin-Madison; Reedooss (1998), UC Berkeley, and Jetter's Jinx (1985), L.A.T.C. He is the author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., ed. Chon A. Noriega. (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Gamboa's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2001); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2000); Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY (1999); Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. (1997); Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (1996); 1995 Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994); Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (1994); LAX/CSU Los Angeles (1994); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1979); and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (1978).

While in residence Gamboa will develop and complete a video L.A. Familia 2, a work that examines the urban Chicano familia experience. He will also produce several new photographic and text works that examine family dynamics of contemporary Los Angeles.

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