Advisors

Megan J. Elias

Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York. She is the lead faculty mentor for Bridging Historias through Latino History and Culture: An NEH Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Project (funded 2013). She is also the author of Stir it Up: Home Economics in American Culture.

Maria Cristina Garcia

Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. Her research focuses on refugees, exiles and transnationals in the Americas. She is the author of Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994 and Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada.

Gary Gerstle

Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Professorial Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. His recent research includes immigration, race, and nationality in the twentieth century. He is the author of several books including American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century; Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy; and Working-Class Americanism.

Kristine Navarro McElhaney

Public History program coordinator at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She has lead several oral history projects that focus on Hispanic Entrepreneurship, Immigration and was a lead researcher for the NEH-funded project, The Bracero History Archive that collected the life stories of almost 800 Mexican migrants brought to the U.S. as guest workers between 1942 and 1964. She currently sits on the governing board for the National Council on Public History and the Oral History Association.

Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and the Media and Idea Lab; and founding curator of the Latino Arts and Activism archive at Columbia University. Her films include Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican (Whitney Biennial, 1995) as well as the recent Small City, Big Change (2014), and War in Guam, forthcoming on PBS in 2015. Among her books and publications are Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture (CHOICE Award, 2004) and the recently published report "The Latino Media Gap" (2014), the most comprehensive examination to date of the persistent marginalization of Latinos in English-language mainstream media.

David Montejano

Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books of historical and political sociology including Quixote's Soldiers: A Local History of the Chicano Movement, 1966-1981; and Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986.

Stephen Pitti

Professor of History and American Studies and the Director of the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program at Yale University. His research focuses on the history and culture of Latinos in the twentieth century. He is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California and American Latinos and the Making of the United States: A Theme Study, a publication of the National Park System Advisory Board (NPSAB) for the National Park Service (NPS).

Vicki Ruiz

Distinguished Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in gender and ethnic identity. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the author and editor of several books including From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America; and Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. Ruiz currently serves as President of the American Historical Association.

Marta Tienda

Maurice P. During Professor in Demographic Studies, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Director, Program in Latino Studies at Princeton University. She publishes widely on educational outcomes and immigration patterns between Latin America and the United States. She currently serves on the White House Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.

Holly Alonso

Executive Director, Peralta Hacienda Historical Park in Oakland, California. At Peralta Hacienda, her effort is to create a setting for many cultures to connect to time, place and each other—now underway in the planning and construction of the Historic Core of the site under an NEH Challenge Grant as an arts and cultural gathering place, as well as a local and regional center to understand the transformations of the land itself through Native, Spanish, Mexican and U.S. arrivals, invasions and settlement.

Andrea Blackman

Division Manager for the Special Collections Division of the Nashville Public Library. She has coordinated the library's nationally recognized Civil Rights Room and Collection since 2003 and is a frequent speaker on multicultural education, library services and oral history methodologies. She has led several oral history initiatives in Nashville including Civil Rights, Veterans History, Nashville Business Leaders, 2010 Flood Digital Project, and StoryCorps @ your library.

Monica Chapa Domercq

Principal Librarian for Adult Services at the Oceanside Public Library. She administers a series of library programs for adults, the Spanish-speaking, and anyone in the community interested in culture and literature. She is active in REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Services to Latinos and the Spanish-speaking and has served on the ALA's Public and Cultural Programs Committee.