Latin American and Latino Studies

A warm welcome to our new Assistant Professor Soledad Alvarez Velasco.

Soledad Álvarez Velasco is a social anthropologist and human geographer whose research analyses the interrelationship between mobility, control and spatial transformations across the Americas. She investigates the intersection between undocumented global south-north and global south-south transit migration, border regimes, the formation of migratory corridors across the Americas and the migrant struggle across these transnational spaces. She combines a multi-scale and historical analysis with multi-sited ethnography and a digital ethnography based on a migrant-centred perspective to reconstruct migrants’ spatial and temporal trajectories. In her research, she foregrounds the Andean Region as a key space for understating the dynamics at stake in the transits of Latin American, Caribbean, African and Asian migrants to reach the U.S., or other southern cone and Caribbean destinations. Her work also analyzes the impact of the externalization of the U.S. border regime across the migratory corridors of the Americas, the movement of unaccompanied and undocumented migrant children, as well as the dynamics of transnational migrant smuggling networks operating across those transnational spaces.

Warm welcome to our new Business/Administrative Associate Ivan Raya.

Ivan Raya was born and raised on the far southeast side of Chicago and is the son of Mexican immigrants. He is a first-generation college student graduating from UIC with a Bachelor of Science in Integrated Health Studies and double major in Psychology in 2020. He then sought to continue his education by pursuing a master’s degree. In 2022, he graduated from UIC with a Master of Education in Urban Higher Education. Graduating with a masters has been an accomplishment of a lifetime that his family values dearly. All of this because he is the first in his family to graduate from high school, earn a bachelor’s and now a master’s degree. And now, he is striving to obtain a doctoral degree in higher education administration. During his free time, he enjoys reading, biking, and cooking. He loves to meal prep for the week with new recipes while keeping his Mexican cuisine in mind.

A warm welcome to our new Assistant Professor Barbara Sostaita.

Barbara Sostaita is a scholar of religion and global migration. She grew up undocumented in the south, the daughter of a minister who taught her how religion informs and shapes migrant-led organizing. Profesor Sostaita holds a PhD in Religious Studies with a Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, she is completing a manuscript titled Sanctuary Everywhere, an ethnographic study of care practices in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. This book and her other projects consider how people on the move–including migrants, artists, and organizers–engage with the sacred to cross and transgress borders. At UIC, she teaches courses on Latinx religions, transnational migration, and undocumented social movements.

The Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative ignites cross-institutional and cross-regional comparative research, training of doctoral students, and new scholarship in emerging areas of inquiry about Latinos. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the initiative serves as the anchor of the consortium of R1 Hispanic Serving Institutions at the University of Illinois at Chicago. LALS faculty Maria de los Angeles Torres and Amalia Pallares are co-principal investigators on the grant.