Q & A with Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow, Paul Joseph López Oro
TLP: Tell us about your work and how your work contributes to contemporary Afro-Latinx studies.
PJLO: My research and teaching is at the intersections of Black Studies, Latin American, Caribbean, & Latinx Studies,and Gender & Sexuality Studies with a particularl focus on queer feminist activism among U.S. Black Central Americans. My work is situated in contemporary AfroLatinx Studies as Black feminist and queer analysis remains absent in most AfroLatinx Studies scholarship. Also, Black Central Americans remain peripheral to most mainstream AfroLatinx Studies projects and I hope this work can expand our knowledge productions on Black Latinidades and queerness.
TLP: What ideas do you have to enrich the NYU community?
I’m very much looking forward to building community in and out of NYU’s spaces to bridge Black Central American communities in New York City, from the Bronx, Eastern Brooklyn, and Upper Manhattan to have voices and stories we don’t get to hear all the time. I also aspire to have long-standing Garifuna communities in NYC have a space like NYU’s Latinx Project as a collaborative community-building where their stories, histories, and political activism can be archived and showcased as part of a long and rich history of Latinx peoples in this city.
TLP: Miriam was a friend and mentor to you. What does it mean to be named this year’s Miriam Jiménez Roman Fellow?
PJLO: Miri was a dear friend, mentor, and chosen family for many years. I miss her dearly, especially her sharp intellect, wisdom, and relentless sense of humor. It is such an honor to continue her scholarly activist legacy as this year’s MJR Fellow, especially as her encouragement and feedback always pushed my work on Garifuna New Yorkers forward. She was always particularly committed to more scholarship on AfroLatinx folks in the United States: a commitment that I seek to continue here and beyond. I miss her dearly and so grateful to be in a fellowship named after her, and to proceed after my dear friend-hermana-colleague Dr. Omaris Z. Zamora, whose scholarship and activism inspires me and keeps me moving forward. I’m delighted to be in such brilliant company.
Professor Paul Joseph López Oro teaches courses on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black feminisms/queer theory. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness in the Americas: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, a transdisciplinary study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City. Indigenous Blackness offers new ways to approach questions on the multiple ways in which Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent queerly negotiate, perform, contradict and articulate their Black, Indigenous and Central American Caribbean subjectivities.