Aimee Villarreal

Dr. Aimee Villarreal is an Associate Professor and Program Head of Comparative Mexican American Studies at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. She also directs the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research and was a Clements Center Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at Southern Methodist University (2017 -2018). Her interdisciplinary research bridges history, anthropology, and ethnic studies and focuses on immigration politics, religious revitalization movements, and Latinx Indigeneities in the US-Mexico borderlands. Villarreal has been active in movements for immigrant rights and worker justice in New Mexico with Somos Un Pueblo Unido and in efforts to bring Mexican American Studies to Texas public schools. She co-produced an award-winning documentary animation about the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, Frontera! Revolt and Rebellion on the Río Grande (2014): https://vimeo.com/75840615. Her forthcoming book, Sanctuaryscapes: Movements, Enactments, and Revivals in the North American Southwest, reinterprets and expands the sanctuary concept through diverse historical and contemporary case studies of sanctuary movements at the intersection of the sacred and the secular.