2025 Faculty, Lecturers, & Presenters

Adriana Domínguez (she/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at UT-El Paso and focuses on excluded and underrepresented groups in the performing arts. She received her B.A. in Theatre Arts with a minor in secondary education from the University of Texas at El Paso, M.A. in Performing Arts Administration from New York University, and Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from New Mexico State University.  

Adriana has published with Chicana/Latina Studies, Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, Camino Real, Theatre Topics, ETUDES, presented at national conferences, and received grant funding for projects from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Recent projects include: Heroes & Saints, Zoot Suit, And Then Came Tango, Real Women Have Curves, Luna, El Toro y La Nina, Lengua, and Cenicienta which received the Directors’ Choice Award at the Region VI Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in 2022. Adriana’s adaptation, A Christmas Carol en La Frontera with co-author Jay Stratton, was accepted for publication by Eldridge Musicals and Plays. Adriana serves as chair for the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) and Scholarship committees for the Department of Theatre and Dance at UTEP, was appointed a Provost’s Faculty Fellow for 2022-2023, and was named Educator of the Year for Higher Education by the Texas Educational Theatre Association in 2020. Adriana is honored to live in El Paso, a vibrant community that knows no borders.

C. J. Alvarez is an associate professor in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is an environmental historian and writes about deserts, the built environment, and the U.S.–Mexico border.  

His current book project, Another Kind of Clay: An Environmental History of the Chihuahuan Desert, is about the largest and least-known expanse of dryland in North America. He begins the story at the end of the last ice age, and drawing on a combination of archaeological records, radiocarbon-based paleoenvironmental reconstructions, oral history, and documentary archives he piece together a multi-millennial story of a place we now know as the “Chihuahuan Desert.” This work has been supported by visiting fellowships at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. 

C.J.’s first book, Border Land, Border Water: A History of Construction on the U.S.–Mexico Divide (University of Texas Press, 2019) is a history of the built world of the U.S.–Mexico borderline. Based on dozens of rare and never-before-seen historic maps, photographs, and blueprints, as well as archival documents and oral histories, he explains how and why the history of survey markers, surveillance infrastructure, and fencing is connected to the history of river engineering, damming, and other hydraulic projects. This book won awards from the Vernacular Architecture Forum as well as the Society of Architectural Historians for its contribution to our understanding of the built environment of the border.

Before C. J. received his doctorate in history from the University of Chicago, he studied art history at Harvard College and Stanford University. Though he left the discipline of art history, he explains that his commitment to visual analysis remains as well as his interest in creative expression. C. J. was born and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He lives in Austin, Texas.  

Mexican American author, filmmaker, and youth literacy activist e.E. Charlton-Trujillo is the recipient of the prestigious Michael L. Printz Award 2024 for The Collectors: Stories, an anthology edited by A. S. King. 

Charlton-Trujillo has written several award-winning books for teens and children, most notably the Fat Angie series, an ALA Stonewall Award Winner, and Prizefighter en Mi Casa (2007), a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor Winner. Their Lupe Lopez: Rock Star series, co-authored with The New York Times Bestseller Pat Zietlow Miller, illustrated by award-winning illustrator Joe Cepeda, has received a number of accolades such as the International Latino Book Award, Junior Library Guild Gold and Bank Street Best Spanish Book. A Girl Can Build Anything also written with Zietlow Miller, illustrated by Keisha Morris, was a National Science Teacher Association Winner. 

e.E. is the Executive Director of the youth literacy nonprofit Never Counted Out that supports access to books and creative mentorship. e.E. is also a proud member of the Las Musas collective. 

Denise Elia Chávez is a Fronteriza writer, bookseller, and activist for Sentient Life. She is the owner, with her husband, Franco/Ukrainian/American photographer Daniel Zolinsky, of Casa Camino Real Bookstore in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It is located in the historic Mesquite District and on the Camino Real. Denise is the author of The King and Queen of Comezón(2014),A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food and Culture (2006), Loving Pedro Infante (2002), Face of an Angel (1995), and The Last of the Menu Girls (1986, 2004). Her most recent novel is titled Street of Too Many Stories (2024).

Denise has a B.A. in Theatre and English from New Mexico State University (1971), an M.F.A.in Theatre from Trinity University (1974), an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico (1984), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of New Mexico (2004). 

Denise has received various awards, including the the New Mexico Governor’s Award, The American Book Award, the Premio Aztlán Literary Prize, and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, among others. 

Denise is the Director and Co/Founder of Libros Para El Viaje/Books for the Journey , an ongoing book gathering and distribution initiative that delivers books to Refugee, Migrant, and Asylum-seekers children and families on the U.S./México border, schools, libraries, unhoused apartments, Senior Centers, El Caldito Soup Kitchen, and other places in need of books. Her long-term project, Museo de La Gente/Museum of the People, is the formation of a community archival resource center, library, bookstore, and living archive of the Borderlands region based in her hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. 

Yolanda Chávez Leyva is a Chicana/ fronteriza historian and writer who was born and raised on the border. She is of Rarámuri descent and honors her grandmother Canuta Ruacho. She is the Director of the Institute of Oral History and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at El Paso. She is also the lead historian for the first-ever Bracero Museum (funded by the Mellon Foundation) slated to open in Socorro, Texas in 2024. She has spent her life listening to and now documenting the lives of people who live on la frontera.

Professor Leyva specializes in border history, public history, and Chicana history. She is co-founder of Museo Urbano, a museum of the streets that highlights fronterizo/a history by taking it where people are—from museums to the actual streets of El Paso. She came to academia after a decade of social work in the Black and Brown communities of east Austin, Texas, with a desire to make academia and especially history relevant and useful to people.

In 2014, the government of Brazil invited Dr. Leyva to conduct community dialogue training with new and emerging historical sites from Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  She is also completing a manuscript on interpreting Latinx history in museums and historic sites, based on oral histories conducted with museum and historic sites professionals. Dr. Leyva has curated, and co-curated, many museums exhibits with her students.

Dr. Leyva has published numerous articles on Chicana, lesbian and border history. In addition, she has published poetry in Ixhua, La Voz de Esperanza, and Cantos al Sexto Sol.​ ​She blogs at http://www.fiercefronteriza.com. Her street photography may be found at https://www.fiercefronteriza.com/callegrafias-fronterizas.html

Born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico and raised in Eagle Pass, Texas, Guadalupe García McCall is the award-winning author of several young adult novels, short stories for adults, and children’s poems. She received the Prestigious Pura Belpre Award, a Westchester Young Adult Fiction Award, the Tomás Rivera Mexican-American Children’s Book Award, and was a finalist for the William C. Morris Award and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, among many other accolades. Her books includ Under the Mesquite (2011), Summer of Mariposas (2012), and Shame the Stars (2016). Guadalupe’s most recent books are Secret of the Moon Conch (2023) and Hearts of Fire and Snow (2024), both coauthored with David Bowles

Fluent in both English and Spanish, Guadalupe is a compelling speaker who has visited many middle schools, high schools, universities, festivals, conferences, and organizations all over the country. Her proudest distinction came when her alma mater, Sul Ross State University, selected to feature her image and biography on their Living the Dream II – Cultural Pride on Campus mural outside of the Gallego Center.

As an educator, Guadalupe taught K–12 in San Antonio, Texas, for decades before she moved to the Pacific Northwest to teach undergraduate courses in literature, women’s studies, and creative writing at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Currently, she is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the low residency MFA Creative Writing program at Antioch University in Los Angeles, California, where she teaches graduate courses.  

As an educator, author, poet, and speaker, Guadalupe is an advocate for literacy, diverse books, and Own Voices. She is now a full-time author/part-time educator and lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband Jim.  

Ignacio Martínez is an associate professor of history specializing in the history of Colonial Latin America. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of New Mexico and his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. His research and scholarly interests include the Hispanic World, the intellectual history of Latin America, and the Spanish Borderlands.

His first book, The Intimate Frontier: Friendship Civil Society in Northern New Spain (2019) examines the role of friendship in the social and intellectual construction of frontier society. He argues that the ideals, rhetoric, logic, and emotions of friendship played an important role in the multilayered lives of frontier Indians, Spaniards, and mixed-raced people. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, Ignacio uses friendship as a lens through which to more clearly view the nuanced struggle for power and influence along the northern reaches of imperial power. His second book project is tentatively titled The Hispanic World: From Creole Patriotism to Chicano Nationalism. 

As a scholar and intellectual, Ignacio is fundamentally devoted to thinking deeply and conscientiously about the world. Also, he is profoundly committed to helping and mentoring students. When Ignacio finds time to unwind, he enjoys hitting the gym, drinking with friends, playing Switch with his daughters (mostly Mortal Kombat, Legend of Zelda, and Mario Kart), and working on his yard. He lives in El Paso, Texas. 

Alessandra Narváez Varela is a poet and teacher born and raised in Ciudad Juárez, México. Her first book, Thirty Talks Weird Love (2021) is a young-adult novel in verse. The audiobook, narrated by the author, was released by Listening Library. 

Alessandra has published her poetry in Poets.org, Huizache, Acentos Review, Duende, The Normal School, and TAYO. She was featured in “Seeking a Voice, Via a Bilingual M.F.A., in Writing and in Life,” an article in The New York Times, Education Life section, where she spoke of her experience as a bilingual poet who writes mostly in English, instead of Spanish, her native tongue. Her, a chapbook, was published by the University of Houston, the Department of Hispanic Studies. 

Alessandra holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso, where she is a lecturer. 

Zeke Peña is a professional doodler and an aspiring time traveler. He is Xicano, born in the Chihuahuan desert, and grew up in a place called Sun City. His debut author/illustrator picture book, Sundust , will hit shelves in Summer 2025. More of Zeke’s work can be found on the pages of Miles Morales Suspended: A Spider-Man Novel (2024), a New York Times bestselling book. He has also received several awards for his book illustrations in My Papi Has a Motorcycle, (2019), Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide (2018), and Gabi, a Girl in Pieces (2014).

Currently, Zeke currently lives in northwest Arkansas where works in a tiny studio that is an old closet.