Against Death: Black Latina Rebellion in Diasporic Community

A LatinX Month Keynote Presentation by Lorgia Garcia Peña

Dr. Lorgia García Peña is a first-generation Black Latina scholar from Trenton, New Jersey. Through transnational, multidisciplinary lens, grounded on humanistic approaches to history and literature, García Peña studies Blackness, colonialism, migration and diaspora, with a special focus on Black Latinidad. Her work emphasizes social justice, women of color feminism and Afro-Latinx episteme. She has a strong commitment to undocumented communities and first-generation students of color. 

Dr. Lorgia García Peña is a 2021 Freedom Scholar, a 2018 Martin Luther King, Jr. fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the recipient of the 2017 Disobedience Award, Ford Foundations Postdoctoral Fellowship (2016), The Johns Hopkins University African Disapora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010), the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship (2010), and the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship (2006). García Peña received her PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University. Currently, she serves as the Mellon Associate Professor in the Department of Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts University. 

About the keynote presentation: 
"Based on seven years of qualitative research in Italy, New York, and the Dominican Republic working with Black Dominican women-led organizations, this presentation engages the intersections of politics, violence, class, race, and migration as they impact Dominicanas' everyday lives. My research centers on the activist and political work of migrant Dominicanas in Italy from the early 1980s to the present in dialogue with the history of Black women's activism in the transitional years of the post-Trujillo dictatorship in Santo Domingo (1963-1980), particularly through involvement in La UASD and contemporary Dominicanyork cultural productions. The revolutionary anticolonial work of brave Dominicanas from the 1960s to the 80s has not been studied within the context of Black politics and Black freedom. This omission is due in part to the fact that, until the late 1990s, the language of liberation among Dominicanas was articulated through class and anti-dictatorship struggles rather than through blackness. Yet, not only did these women understand themselves as Black and part of the African diaspora, as Milagros Ricourt argues, but, as many of the women who shared their stories with me explained, they looked to Black freedom fighters in the United States and elsewhere to shape their political frameworks and aesthetic choices. My intervention translates their struggles to the larger context of global blackness." 

This is an in-person event, open only to students, staff, and faculty in the Wellesley College testing protocol.