Dolores Inés Casillas is Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media, the representation of accented Spanish and English languages within popular culture, as well as the integration of Ethnic Studies within K-12 schools.  She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016), and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UC Santa Barbara) of Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018). Her current manuscript explores the politics of language learning and language play as heard through different media technologies.

Esther Díaz Martín is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her forthcoming manuscript, Latina Radiophonic Feminism(s): Voice and Gender Politics into the Digital Age, theorizes a methodology for Chicana feminist listening that attends to the affect and political work of Latina voices in US-Spanish language commercial radio at the turn of the 20th century and Latina podcasting. Her scholarship, centering on Latinx popular culture, digital media, and popular feminism, is published in Chicana/Latina Studies, Diálogo, and Spanish and Portuguese Review and Voices from the Ancestors: Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices.

Sara Veronica Hinojos is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on representation of Chicanxs and Latinxs within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial, visual, and sonic function of “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US. She has published in Aztlán: Journal of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Latino Studies, and in the compilation, Thinking With An Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice from UC Press.

Eliana Buenrostro is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She received her M.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. Her M.A. paper entitled “Destined to Fuck Up: Los Illegals, Chicano Punk and the Immigration Politics and Art of 1980s Los Angeles” uses oral history to recount the activist cultural production of the Chicano punk band Los Illegals, during a period of mass deportations in the United States. Her ongoing research examines the criminalization, immigration, and deportation of Chicanes and Latines through the lens of music and other forms of cultural production. She is a recipient of the Cota Robles Fellowship and the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship. As a member of the Latinx Sound Culture Studies Working Group through the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Initiative, she moderated a talk on “Chicana Punk Epistemologies” with scholars who are redefining the field of punk studies.

José Manuel Flores is a Ph.D. candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition Program at The University of Texas at El Paso. He holds a Master’s in Art and Design from Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez with a CONACYT scholarship. José specializes in sound design and audio production for animation, film, and video games, and his research focuses on Sound Studies, soundscapes, and Cultural and Latino Studies. He developed the “Border Soundscapes Project,” a digital repository preserving intangible cultural heritage in the Paso del Norte Region. His work is published in academic journals and books, including a piece in Sounding Out! alongside Dr. Inés Casillas and a piece in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, which received the Best Webtext Award at the 2022 Computers and Writing Conference. José is part of the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship and moderated a webinar with Mexican author Valeria Luiselli.

Cloe Gentile Reyes, PhD (she/ella) is a Miami-born Taino Boricua scholar, poet, and performer. She is a Faculty Fellow at NYU and earned her PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Cloe’s writing explores how Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. She is currently writing her first book, Sounding Sucia: Decolonial Embodiments in Reggaetón. The book is based on her dissertation entitled “Reggaetón as Resistance: Negotiating Racialized Femininity through Rap, Miniskirts, and Perreo.” She has published essays with Sounding Out! and Intervenxions. Her poetry and short stories have been featured in the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit, and she often collaborates with sound artists and musicians. 

Kristian E. Vasquez (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned his B.A. in Chicana and Chicano studies and American Indian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His academic research is at the intersections of decoloniality, affect, sound, performance, media, cultural labor/production, and materiality. His dissertation considers the “artist’s workshop,” cultural texts, and public events (e.g., readings, exhibitions, and music) to theorize the sign system, soundscape, haptics, imaginal, and spiritual dimension of the Xicana/o/x artistic producer’s (writer, musician, and visual artist) embodied process of artmaking and production. His writing has been published in Grietas: A Journal of Zapatista Thought and Horizons, Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal, Ethnic Studies Review, and S/O: Sounding Out!. As part of the inaugural cohort of the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship (2022-23), he was a graduate fellow of the Latinx Sound Culture Studies Working Group.

Alex Mireles is a doctoral student in the Department of Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. Her work explores questions of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and capitalism through aesthetic movements in fashion, beauty, and digital visual cultures. Her master’s thesis “Paisa Aesthetics: Streetwear Fashion and Latinx Aesthetic Labor” conceptualizes paisa as analytic to theorize the un/organized creative labor of Latinx and Chicanx fashion designers, identity formation, and belonging. “Paisa Aesthetics” received the 2022 Charlotte Stough Memorial Prize for innovative scholarship in Feminist Studies and was the UCSB entrant to the Western Association of Graduate Schools/Proquest Distinguished Master’s Thesis Competition 2022. She is currently meditating on the materiality of queer Chicanx content creation through an analysis of paisa aesthetic practices online, how they queer the heteronormativity and market logics of the algorithm and thumbing as brown queer embodied labor. She is co-founder of the Queer Arts Collective at UCSB which seeks to carve out a space on campus for queer and theory informed art practice through performance art, visual art, zine making, and creative writing. 

Rebeca Rivas is a Ph.D. student in the history department at the University of Texas at El Paso. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science from the University of Texas at El Paso. Her Master’s thesis “ Public Trust in Latin American Courts”, seeks to assess trust in Latin American judiciaries and find factors affecting public trust in high courts. Her current research is centered on the interaction between sport and community building. Her work explores sports, culture, community, and identity, focusing on Lucha libre in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.