Affiliation Years
2021-2022
Department:
Modern Thought and Literature
Dissertation Title
Narratives of Displacement: The Spatialization of Power in Chicanx/Latinx Cultural Production

Cynthia García is a PhD candidate in the Modern Thought and Literature Program with minors in History and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research and teaching agenda engages with the fields of Chicanx/Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Urban Studies. García’s scholarly and curatorial work appears in Mapping the U.S. Latino Experience, a featured digital media experience for the inaugural exhibition ¡Presente! A Latino History of the United States, located in the Molina Family Latino Gallery at The Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Her dissertation documents how Chicanx/Latinx communities in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago respond to the violence of geographical displacement and the racial homogenization of their communities through storytelling, public art, and activism. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, García performs close-readings of literary and historical texts, employs the tools of visual analysis, and interprets trends in demographic data. At stake in her work is an understanding of the affordable housing crisis as an extension of the legacy of racialized dispossession and the preservation of a non-white underclass, as well as, how people of color resist their positioning within this unjust racial order.

At Stanford, her social justice work has centered around community-based knowledge practices and the retention of underrepresented students. In 2016, she co-founded the Decolonial Collaborative Research Group which challenges the material, ontological, and epistemic violence of coloniality by reorienting the premises of cultural and literary scholarship towards the practice of transformational knowledge production. Throughout her graduate career, she has served as a mentor for the EDGE Program, the First-Generation Low-Income Partnership, and El Centro Chicano y Latino. As a CCSRE Pedagogy and Race Teaching Fellow, Garcia will co-develop a lecture and workshop series that supports teaching on race and social justice.