cynthiavazquezphd
Xicana. Feminist. Borderlands & Community-Based Scholar.
Carmona, Sandra, "Divine Snake Maijaawe," Installation, Aug 28, 2021, Ocotillo, CA.
Cynthia Vazquez, Ph.D.
Former UCLA Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow
As the first member of my family to earn a doctoral degree. My scholarship emerges from the in-between spaces, where I explore the intersections of Indigenous sovereignties, transborder communities, education, and memory. This work is grounded in building meaningful, reciprocal relationships within and beyond my communities, recognizing that knowledge is created through collaboration, care, and lived experience.
I am a Xicana educator, independent scholar, historian, critical ethnographer, and storyteller. Daughter of immigrant parents, born in Los Angeles and raised in Las Vegas, I spent a decade in San Diego, and now I am back home where I teach in my community--East Las Vegas, Nevada. My life work embraces the active engagement in fostering and maintaining connections within my community, artists, and the border tribal community who worked with for more than a decade on language reclamation. My philosophy is grounded in land based pedagogies, liberatory practices, and resistance.
I am the author of two forthcoming peer-reviewed book chapters: “TransMission Hauntings and Ama de Llaves Apparitions in Contemporary California Schooling,” in Critical Mission Studies Handbook (University of California Press), and “Border Transcolonialities: Illegalities, Crossing(s), and Racializations of the Kumeyaay in California and Baja California,” in Critical Latinx Indigeneities: An Anthology (Duke University Press). My scholarship examines Indigenous sovereignties and futurities along the U.S./Mexico border while interrogating transcolonialities, Indigenous dispossessions, and educational systems through a transborder Indigenous lens.
As a former Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA where I was affiliated with the American Indian Studies Center 2022-2024, I was able to further my research and document the traditional game of Peon with the Kumeyaay in San Diego and Tijuana region. I earned my Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies in 2022 from the UC San Diego, with a graduate specialization in Critical Gender Studies.
