2026 Co-Directors
John D. (Jody) Blanco
Professor of Comparative Studies in Philippine and Latin American literature and culture of the colonial period, UC San Diego
John D. (Jody) Blanco is a Professor of Comparative Studies in Philippine and Latin American literature and culture of the colonial period. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (UC Press, 2009); and Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom (Amsterdam UP, 2023). He has also translated Julio Ramos’s book Divergent Modernities of Latin America into English (Duke UP, 2001). Jody currently serves as the co-director of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas; and as the senior editor of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies.
Marisa Belausteguigoitia
Professor at School of Pedagogy in the Humanities at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Marisa Belausteguigoitia is an award-winning scholar and Professor at the school of Pedagogy in the Humanities at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, and was Chair of the Gender Studies Center at UNAM (2004-2014 and 2021-2025). She publishes amply in Spanish on gender in critical pedagogies, artistic and juridical practices, focusing on women in prison. In English she co-edited the book Critical Terms in Latin American Thought, and coordinated the Spanish translation and publication of two classics in Chicana feminism: Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval; and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
Founders
Elliott Young
Professor of History, Lewis and Clark College, Portland
Elliott Young is Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, as well as co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC) and the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 1100 asylum cases.
Pamela Voekel
Associate Professor of History, Dartmouth College
Professor Pamela Voekel has won awards for her scholarship, her undergraduate and graduate teaching, and her efforts in collaboration with underserved students targeted by anti-migrant policies. Her second book, For God and Liberty: Catholicism and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1780-1861 (Oxford University Press, 2022) draws on more than forty archives in six languages and ten countries to demonstrate that a religious conflict underlay the Liberal-Conservative political battles of Latin America's nineteenth century. She is the co-founder and five-time conference director of the Tepoztlán Institute, and a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, now in its second decade of providing rigorous college-level courses for the undocumented students banned from Georgia's top research universities.