María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is a professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Department & the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU. Her book, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Duke UP 2016), received the 2019 Casa de Las Americans Literary Prize in Latino Studies; the 2017 ASA John Hope Franklin Book Prize; and the 2017 NACCS Book Award. With thirty articles, in English and Spanish, on revolution, subaltern politics, indigenous peoples, racial formation, migration, narco-economies, and Latin American and Latinx cultural studies, her most recent include “Indians Have Always Been Modern: Roma, The Settler Colonial Paradigm & Latinx Temporality” (Aztlán, Fall 2020), which rethinks decolonialism from a Latin American perspective; and “The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees: The U.S. and Central America,” which explores the integral role gendered labor and violence play in the drug economy (Social Text, Fall 2019). She is the Chairwoman of the Coalición Mexicana, an immigrants’ rights organization, and an expert witness for Central American asylum cases with legal aid agencies internationally.
