Dr. Gretel Vera-Rosas

Professor Vera-Rosas studied photography and creative writing at El Camino Community College and has a B.A. in Literature with a focus on Modern Literary Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. Broadly speaking, her work uses a feminist and decolonial framework to examine the political and cultural representations of mothers who exist outside the boundaries of legality in the Américas. In addition to this, her most recent research explores the limits and opportunities offered by visual cultural production to think critically about the social worlds destroyed and produced by the drug wars and security and immigration policies in the hemisphere. She is currently working on a book manuscript that centers film, silk-screening, performance, and photography to analyze the visual economies of deportation, migration, and the war on drugs in Mexico. At CSUDH, she is a member of the Undocumented Student Ally Coalition (USAC) and is an active mentor and advocate of student-moms on campus.

Her poetry and academic work are published in The Acentos Review and The Chicana Motherwork Anthology, as well as in scholarly journals such as American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, e-misférica, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures and Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana.