5th Annual Ramona Arreguín de Rosales Lecture: Somewhere We Are Human

Reyna Grande is a bestselling author known for her powerful explorations of immigration, family separation, and the cost of the American Dream. Born in Mexico, her early childhood experience of crossing the border to be reunited with her father in California profoundly shapes her writing. The first in her family to attend university, Grande earned a BA in Creative Writing from UC, Santa Cruz, and an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Across a Hundred Mountains, Dancing with Butterflies, and A Ballad of Love and Glory, as well as the memoirs The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home. Her work has garnered significant recognition and awards, such as the American Book Award and a Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature. Through her compelling storytelling, Grande illuminates the often-ignore struggles of immigrant families and centers the experiences of undocumented youth.

Sonia Guiñansaca is an international award-winning queer migrant indigenous Kichwa-Kañari poet, cultural strategist and social justice activist. Sonia has over 17 years of movement and cultural organizing experience that began when they were among the first waves of young people to publicly come out as undocumented. They emerged as a national leader in the migrant artistic and political communities where they coordinated and participated in groundbreaking civil disobedience actions. Guiñansaca helped build some of the largest undocumented organizations in the U.S, including co-founding some of the first artistic projects by and for undocumented writers. As a writer and performer, Sonia creates narrative poems and essays on migration, queerness, and nostalgia, often collaborating with filmmakers and visual artists. They have been awarded residencies and fellowships from Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and the British Council. Guiñansaca has performed at the Met, the NYC Public Theater, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, Lincoln Center, toured campuses across the country, and has been featured on Interview Magazine, Ms.Magazine, Teen Vogue, Diva Magazine UK, CNN, NBC, and PBS to name a few. Their writing appears in many anthologies like Daughter of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women (2023). They co-edited the highly anticipated anthology Somewhere We Are Human: Authentic Voices On Migration, Survival, and New Beginnings (2022). They self-published their debut poetry book Nostalgia & Borders (2016), and in 2023 it was translated to Kichwa & Spanish by Severo Editorial under Nostalgia Y Fronteras.

Dr. Blanca Caldas Chumbes is a transnational Latina scholar of Quechua descent and an Associate Professor in Multilingual and Elementary Education programs at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She holds a faculty affiliate status at the Chicano and Latino Studies Department and the Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her research interests focus on working-class bilingual education, bilingual teacher education (pre & in service teachers), minoritized language practices, language ideologies/identities, and critical pedagogies. She is the co-editor of the book Critical Ethnography: Bi/Multilingualism, Race(ism) and Education (Multilingual Matters) and her work has been published multilingually.

Dr. Gabriela Spears-Rico is a P’urhepecha and Pirinda cultural anthropologist, poet, and Critical Indigenous Studies scholar who completed her B.A. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from Stanford University (Honors) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in the same field at U.C. Berkeley.  She serves as an Assistant Professor of Chicano Latino Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her scholarship and creative work have been published in Feminist Anthropology, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Chicana Latina Studies and in the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, among other venues. Her public scholarship has been featured on Native America Calling, Indigeneity Rising, Latinx Talk and Texas Public Radio. As a board member of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Spears-Rico’s leadership was instrumental in drafting Minnesota Bill SF 2442 Genocide Education mandate. Spears-Rico is a Mellon Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and an NDN Collective Radical Imagination Grant artist. At this institution, she was awarded a McKnight Land Grant Professorship and a residency with the Institute for Advanced Study. Her mentoring work was recognized with the Honoring Indigenous Women Award by the American Indian Student Cultural Center (2022) and the inaugural Excellence in Graduate Student Career Support Award by the College of Liberal Arts (2025). Her first book Mestizo Melancholia and Colonialism in Michoacán is in contract with the University of Arizona Press.