Gabriela Spears-Rico
Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico is a cultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of Chicanx Latinx Studies with a joint appointment in American Indian Studies. A P’urhepecha/Matlatzinca scholar and poet, Spears-Rico’s BA is from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the U.C. MEXUS Fieldwork Grant, the Arnold Mitchem Fellowship by Marquette University, and a Visiting Scholar appointment with the Center for Anthropological Studies at El Colegio de Michoacan. Her work examines manifestations of consumption and cultural appropriation in touristic transactions between mestizos and indigenous people in Mexico. Her primary investment is in unraveling how the trauma of rape from the Spanish Conquest informs the mestiza/o desire to tour and inhabit indigenous communities. She is currently working on Mestiza/o Melancholia and the Legacy of Rape and Conquest in Michoacán, a book that explores how gendered violence has framed the racialization of indigenous people and the manufacturing of mestizaje in Mexico. Spears-Rico's scholarly work has been published in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy, and in Latinx Talk. She has two forthcoming chapters, “Decolonial Maternalista Motherwork as Pedagogy,” in the Chicana Motherwork anthology and “In the Time of War and Hashtags: Rehumanizing Indigeneity in the Digital Landscape” in Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Social Networks and Indigenous Identities in Latin America, both to be released in 2019 by the University of Arizona Press. Dr. Spears-Rico is also a working artist and poet. The daughter of migrant farmworkers, her poetry reflects the working class and hybrid aesthetics of having grown up in migrant labor camps along the American West Coast. Her poetry has been published in numerous anthologies including Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas (University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest and Hope (Benu Press, 2012). In the Twin Cities, her work has been exhibited at Intermedia Arts, the Ordway Theater, and the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. Her work is prominently featured in the documentary film "Let: An Act of Reverse Incorporation" and in Molly McGlennen's book Creative Alliances: the Transnational Design of Indigenous Women's Poetry.