Welcome to the Latinx Outdoor Recreation Symposium

Visting Scholar Presenter Bios 

Olivia Aguilar is a first-generation college student who completed her B.S. and M.S. in Horticulture Science at Texas A&M University where she studied children’s gardens and their effect on youth environmental attitudes. After teaching in public schools, she went on to receive her PhD in Natural Resources at Cornell University, studying theories of learning in environmental education. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of community, race, and transformative learning in environmental education. Specifically, she examines how and why environmental and science learning communities are exclusive and how they can be more inclusive and empowering of groups often marginalized. Her teaching is interdisciplinary by nature, often examining both the science and human dimensions of environmental issues, particularly issues around food equity. She has published in Environmental Education Research and in the Journal of Environmental Education as well as Food, Culture and Society. She has book chapters in Across the Spectrum: Resources for Environmental Educators and in Urban Environmental Education Review and has written op-eds for Truthout on issues of race and the environment. 

Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. is an interdisciplinary scholar, of Cuban and Mexican descent, a queer Chicano raised in North Hollywood, California. He earned his Ph.D. in Chicana and Chicano Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara and an MA and BA in Spanish from California State University, Northridge. An Associate Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Fullerton, his scholarly and creative work has been published in Latino Studies, TSQ, Journal of Lesbian Studies, Aztlán, Sounding Out!, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Performance Matters, Label Me Latina/o and other journals and books. He is one of the co-editors of Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Spaces (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) and the curator of the 2023 exhibition “Finding Sequins in the Rubble: Archives of Jotería Memories in Los Angeles” at the Museum of Social Justice in downtown LA. A founding member of the Association for Joteria Arts, Activism, and Scholarship, he also serves on the Advisory Board for The TransLatina Coalition. Dr. Alvarez’s advocacy includes his work as an expert witness for asylum cases for gay and trans immigrants from Mexico.

Brenda Beza (she/her/ella)  resides in Riverside, California, ancestral lands of the Tongva, Payokawichum, Cahuilla and Kizh peoples. She is a podcaster, educator and administrator in higher education. Her love for storytelling and history led her to earn a B.A. and M.A. in American Studies from California State University, Fullerton and an M.S. in Educational Counseling from the University of La Verne. Brenda is trained in oral history and cultural documentation at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian Institute’s Latino Center. As a daughter of Central American immigrants, Brenda was raised to value community and service to others. At 6-years-old, Brenda’s mother exposed her to curanderas (healers who use plant-based folk remedies) in Tijuana, Baja California. These experiences sparked her curiosity in healing practices rooted in the Natural world. Nature has been, and continues to be, central to her spiritual sustainability practice. She views her podcast, Your Healing Nature, as a continuation of oral traditions practiced by her ancestors. In the spirit of service to community, Brenda leads the Inland Empire chapter of Latino Outdoors, an organization that centers cultura y comunidad as part of the outdoor narrative ensuring Latine history, heritage and leadership are valued and represented. On weekends, Brenda can be found leading hikes or campouts for Latino Outdoors, doing water drops for Border Kindness or in the ocean paddle boarding as she co-creates stories alongside Mother Earth. She is a finisher of the 52 Hike Challenge Adventure Series and recipient of the American Hiking Society’s National Trails Day Microgrant.

Sara Fingal (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. At CSUF, Dr. Fingal teaches courses on Nature and American Cultures, California Cultures, research and methods, and the West. Her research interests include North American environmental history, borderlands, access to waterscapes and green spaces, and the history of Latinx environmentalisms. Dr. Fingal has published the peer-reviewed entry for “Latinx Environmentalism” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History and an article titled, “Your House es Mi Casa: American Homebuyers in the Baja California Borderlands, 1964-1989” in Western Historical Quarterly. Her book manuscript and current research is centered on American beach culture and conflicts over coastal access in California and Baja California, Mexico during mid to late twentieth century. Sara greatly enjoys time outdoors, particularly walks and picnics with her family and friends.

Manuel (Manny) Galaviz-Ceballos is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CSU, Fullerton. His experience as a construction worker (a drywaller) and his undocumented youth in Southern California motivated his research into the people and cultures of the United States-Mexican Borderlands. He volunteers with the #LibroMobile Arts Cooperative and Book Store in Santa Ana, California. He is also the host of the LM Voices Scholar Holler Podcast, a series focused on first-generation graduate students and faculty experiences.  

Moe Gámez (they/them/elle) is a graduate student in the English doctoral program at the University of Oregon. They intend to focus their research on 20th and 21st century American literature of the working classes, specifically through the works of Chicanx and Latinx writers exploring the intersections of labor, ecological crisis, and care. They hope to do this research amidst exploring such topics as: care labor, environmental justice, abolition, mutual aid, and queer theory. They are also a poetry & fiction editor at The Hopper, an environmental literary arts magazine. 

Teresa Irene Gonzales is native of Mexican Chicago. Teresa Irene Gonzales is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. She received her doctorate and master’s degrees from the University of California Berkeley in Sociology, and her bachelor’s degree from Smith College in Latin American & Latina/o Studies with a focus on literature and history. Her work is situated at the intersections of feminist, urban, and organizational theories with a focus on race and structural racism. Given her interests, she focuses on three major areas: a) marginalized communities’ access to public goods through an interrogation of trust relationships, social cohesion, and civic engagement, b) the use of racial and class-based narratives to inform local public decisions, and c) the playful reimagination of public place that centers Black and Brown individuals in the public sphere. Gonzales has over ten years of experience analyzing community responses to racial and income marginalization in the United States, with several publications, including her recent book Building a Better Chicago: Race and Community Resistance to Urban Redevelopment (NYU Press 2021), and several award-winning articles. These include, “Ratchet-Rasquache Activism: Aesthetic & Discursive Frames within Chicago-based Women of Color Activism” and “The Stories We Tell: Colorblind Racism, Classblindness, and Narrative Framing in the Rural Midwest.” Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and the Ford Foundation. Gonzales firmly believes in the capacity of sociology to redress social injustices and inequalities. You can learn more about Gonzales’ work at https://teresagonzales.com/.

Gabriela Enriqueta Nuñez is the Director of the Latinx Lab for Storytelling and Social Justice and Associate Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at CSUF. Dr. Nuñez’s research interests include Latinx environmentalisms and BIPOC experiences in sports and recreation, contemporary Latinx literary traditions, and, most recently, Latinx fashion and style. As a first-generation university student and educator, Dr. Nuñez's service work focuses on demystifying academic structures for students and junior faculty. Dr. Nuñez’s work appears in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Latino Studies Journal, Altermundos: Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture, edited by Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson and B.V. Olguín (UCLA UP, 2017), and Latinx Environmentalisms, edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray (Temple UP, 2019). As a veterana of long-distance triathlon racing Gabriela loves participating in endurance sports and is currently training for the New York City Marathon, 2023. Gabriela finds the most peace spending time with her smiling and funny kid.

Lillian Wynne Platten is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Loyola University Chicago. Her master’s thesis examines how active shooter drills in educational institutions impact student sense-making and socialization through peer culture and cultural reproduction. She is currently a Graduate Research Assistant at Loyola University Chicago working with Dr. Teresa Gonzales. Lillian’s current and previous research interests and experience center on social determinants of health and socialization across the life course, mental health, education, organizational theory, and social policy.

Bernardo Vargas is a Ph.D. student of Philosophy and a teaching fellow for the Philosophy and Religion department at the University of North Texas. He is also Crossing Latinidades Mellon Humanities Fellow in the Climate and Environmental Justice Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Working Group with faculty from the various members of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities, which aims to reveal how Latina/o/x communities confront environmental injustices and adapt to extreme climate events.  His primary philosophical interests are in questions of oppression and liberation, with particular emphasis on race and racism as they relate to Mexican-Americans and Latinxs in the US. Bernardo's interdisciplinary approach draws from Africana, Indigenous, Decolonial, and Latinx thinkers, as well as history, sociology, and legal studies. In matters of environmental justice, he is concerned with the ongoing history of environmental racism toward BIPOC and their resistance to such discrimination through decolonial approaches to environmentalism. His general research areas are the critical philosophy of race, environmental justice, critical race theory, social and political philosophy, Mexican-American philosophy, Latinx philosophy, and decoloniality. Bernardo is originally from Ciudad de México, México, and immigrated to Houston, TX, at eight. This transition into the US at an early age created a positionality of being in-between worlds as a Mexican national, Latinx, an immigrant, and yet identifying with the social and political thought of Chicanos in the US, particularly after living in the social and political context of South Texas for twelve years. He aims to use this in-betweenness to further philosophical inquiry into issues of these liminal groups living within the context of the US. 

David J. Vázquez is Associate Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies and Literature at American University in Washington, DC. He is co-editor of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Temple, 2019) and the author of Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity (Minnesota, 2011). He has published journal articles in Symbolism, Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, CENTRO, and Latino Studies. He has also contributed to the Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature and Erasing Public Memory: Race, Aesthetics, and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas. In addition to his current affiliations, he is a former director of the Center for Latina/o and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon and a past fellow at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University and at the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon. He is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled “Decolonial Environmentalisms: Race, Genre, and Latinx Culture.”

Sarah D. Wald (she/her) is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and English at the University of Oregon. Wald is co-editor of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Temple, 2019), which was awarded Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection. She is also the author of The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl (U of Washington Press, 2016). She is lead on the digital humanities project Racial Ecologies of Mt. Hood National Forest. Wald has published journal articles in Diálogo, Food Culture, and Society, and Western American Literature and contributed to multiple edited collections including the Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment (2022), Asian American Literature in Transition (2021), Cambridge Companion to Food and Literature (2020), Asian American Literature and the Environment (2015), and Service Learning and Literary Studies in English (2014). Wald has served elected positions with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the American Studies Association’s Environmental Justice Caucus and currently serves on the board of American Literature. Wald is currently working on a monograph titled “Environmental Justice Storytelling in the Outdoor Diversity Movement.”

Priscilla Solis Ybarra is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas. Her book Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment (University of Arizona, 2016) was chosen for the 2017 Thomas J. Lyon Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies. She is co-editor of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial (Temple University Press, 2019), which was awarded the 2022 Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Collection. She has been elected to serve terms on the Executive Council of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, on the Executive Committee of the Western Literature Association, and on the Board of Directors for Orion Magazine. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. For 2021-2022, she was the Clements Senior Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies. Her best days involve time with her family and friends, cooking, good words, birds, waterways, wandering, and dogs.