Nadia Villafuerte

What excites you most about joining our School of Arts and Humanities community?

“I am thrilled to be part of the School of Arts and Humanities because it is a community. ‘Community’ involves not just students, researchers, teachers, colleagues and staff but also all the people and ecosystems connected to the university or affected by it.”

“Since the first day I visited the Department of Literature, I felt the freedom and openness to show my work as an artist and scholar, which are at the core of my teaching practice. I feel confident about exploring alternative modes of teaching and learning. I believe that our work as artists and researchers does not just occur in the institutional space locked behind a tuition paywall but also turns any communal space into a site of learning and exchange. I hope to make this interchange into a practice where we might bring our experiences to encounter creativity, critical thinking and social consciousness.”

Why did you choose your field? Why should students consider studying the arts and humanities?

“I dedicate myself to literature because I come from a family where orality and music are vividly present in our everyday lives. People in southern Mexico, where I was born and grew up, tell stories constantly to keep kinship alive: storytelling continuously creates a bond. But these narratives also foster collective memory.”

“This understanding has been a guiding light in my life as I've realized the profound importance of literature and other expressive practices (such as music) in preserving or critically questioning our heritage. If music and literature were part of my earlier foundation, studying at the university level allowed me to understand the many ways in which my heritage as a mestiza from southern Mexico is usually overlooked and erased from institutional education but also why it was essential to me to make my roots my primary resource of knowledge.”

“My students know how passionate I am about arts and humanities because my experience as a woman from a historically dispossessed land taught me that arts and humanities are not just ways to understand but also to challenge, multiply, expand, dislocate and ultimately dismantle the world we inhabit.”   

What research or project are you working on currently?

“I am working on my book ‘The Forgotten Southern Mexican Passage: a History of Violence, Expulsion, Memory and Resistance,’ where I analyze an array of contemporary Mexican cultural productions (fiction, poetry, documentaries, films, photography and performance) that offer insights into a historical landscape where violence, expulsion but also the memory of its inhabits (migrants, refugees and locals) make visible the overlooked Mexico-Guatemala region.”

“Additionally, I am writing an essay that will be part of my second research project. Here, I explore an ephemeral archive documenting the lives of Haitian women who work as braiders in Tapachula, a southern Mexican city on the border with Guatemala and the first stop for many refugees and asylum seekers toward the U.S. Engaging with the literature on time as matter and approach, I analyze ‘irregular temporalities’ produced by the bureaucratic immigration apparatus to deter mobility, as well as the term ‘chronodissidence’ (Miguel A. López) to highlight how the migrant body confronts these invisible walls through ancestral practices and seemingly every day routines.”

“As a fiction writer, I am finishing the draft of my fourth book, the story of a mestizo character whose many crossings (including gender, geographies and time) create a constant state of paranoia, blurring the lines between dreams, present and the historical memory of ‘las chuntás,’ a cuir community from southern Mexico that embodies the colonial, the contemporary and the Indigenous and mestizo heritage of the region.”    

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

“My favorite class to teach is Spanish as a second or heritage language. It allows me to understand better where I come from and why Spanish and English are still imperial linguistic systems. These systems express inherited colonial and imperial legacies and the historical struggles we have challenged to change them. Being a writer has made me deeply aware of language as my main ‘home’ beyond my geographic origins. But having been born in Chiapas (a deeply racialized state) and being an immigrant scholar in the U.S. made me aware of its political relevance.

“I am equally enthusiastic about teaching literature. I am thrilled to read with students a list of Latin American writers (including Caribbean and Indigenous authors) whose projects defy the Eurocentric traditions that have dominated the field for generations and instead amplify minority perspectives by foregrounding local cultures, language varieties and the shape-shifting energy that emerges from ancestral and diasporic communities marked by a diversity of voices, visions, ideologies, geographies, backgrounds, struggles, commonalities and tensions.”

What is something about yourself that is not typically included in your bio?

“I always include ‘music’ in my bio because of my years at the School of Music in Chiapas. However, the story of my mother´s family is behind that statement. My grandfather, a carpenter and self-taught musician, taught me to play the instrument in my childhood and built a marimba that I treasure as an affective object (I can still smell his patio through the wood). My path as a writer, scholar and professor started with that object since listening, as a practice, taught me forms of memory that went far deeper than formal education. In the same vein, I would like to explore with students other practices of learning within and outside the classroom that evolve models of vital situated knowledge (such as those we know in our affective places).” 

Nadia Villafuerte (Chiapas, 1978) studied music, literature and journalism in Mexico. She also earned an MFA in creative writing in Spanish and a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures at NYU. Her stories and essays have appeared in magazines in Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina and the United States.

She has published three fiction books: “Barcos en Houston” (Mexico, 2005, translated into English and published in the U.S. in 2023), “¿Te gusta el látex, Cielo?” (Mexico, 2008), and “Por el lado salvaje” (Mexico, 2011). Villafuerte is also part of the literary anthologies “México20: New Voices, Old Traditions” (U.K., 2015, as part of the British Council/HAY Festival), and “Palabras mayores, nueva narrativa Mexicana” (Spain, 2015), among many others.

While studying at NYU, she received the Global Research Initiative Fellowship, the Migration Network Award, the Outstanding Teaching Award and the Penfield Fellowship. Additional grants have been received from the National Foundation for Culture and Arts, the Foundation for Mexican Literature, the Fellowship for Academic Excellence and Studies Abroad CONACYT-FONCA, as well as a Mexican national grant for an artistic residency in New York City in 2013.