- Harvard University, Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights, Faculty MemberUC Berkeley, Ethnic Studies, Graduate Studentadd
- Dr. Marcelo Garzo Montalvo (he/they) is a musician, dancer, and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos. He is a first-generation Chilean-Canadian-American of Mapuche and Spanish descent. They hold... moreDr. Marcelo Garzo Montalvo (he/they) is a musician, dancer, and Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos. He is a first-generation Chilean-Canadian-American of Mapuche and Spanish descent. They hold a B.A., M.A. and PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, and were a community college transfer student from Mira Costa, Cabrillo and San Diego City Colleges. Their teaching and research focus on comparative and critical approaches to Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Xicanx Studies as well as Dance and Performance Studies. Before coming to CSUSM, Dr. Garzo Montalvo served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in Harvard University’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration and Rights, and as the Coordinator of Indigenous Technologies at the Berkeley Center for New Media. They have published articles on abolition, decoloniality and social movements for food, healing and ecological justice. His current book project, Armas Milagrosas/Miraculous Weapons, is a study of embodied knowledge, cultural decolonization and Xicanx indigeneities in the practice of Anahuacan ceremonial dance (Danza Azteca, Danza Mexica, Danza Chichimeca-Tolteca). They are also working on an experimental and collaborative research project called Conversations con Xochipilli, exploring questions of creativity, sexuality, science and consciousness through Queer and Two Spirit ceremonial knowledge.edit
Research Interests:
This short dispatch reflects on the recent cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) student movement at the University of California. We outline a short history of student labor activism at the University of California, Berkeley, and juxtapose it... more
This short dispatch reflects on the recent cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) student movement at the University of California. We outline a short history of student labor activism at the University of California, Berkeley, and juxtapose it with the struggles that have come out of the Department of Ethnic Studies since 1969. We discuss the context of COLA and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the aims, goals, and development of the movement from an ethnic studies perspective.
Research Interests:
a love letter, that is also a Dear John letter
an invitation, that is also a plea
a vision, that is also a grievance
that is also a call to action
an invitation, that is also a plea
a vision, that is also a grievance
that is also a call to action
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This dissertation explores questions of embodied knowledge, power and consciousness through the study and practice of Anahuacan ceremonial dance. Danza – also known as Danza Azteca, Danza Mexica, Danza Tolteca-Chichimeca, or Mitotiliztli,... more
This dissertation explores questions of embodied knowledge, power and consciousness through the study and practice of Anahuacan ceremonial dance. Danza – also known as Danza Azteca, Danza Mexica, Danza Tolteca-Chichimeca, or Mitotiliztli, Macehualiztli and Chitontequiza – is a rich tradition of Indigenous and syncretic dance rooted in transnational movements across Mexico, Central America and the United States. Reflections are offered on the nature of danza as a human movement system and as a social, cultural, political and spiritual movement. Centered in critical and comparative Ethnic Studies, theories of decoloniality, and “theory in the flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983) this work thinks from and about danza as an embodied modality of Anahuacan science, art, spirituality and activism. Research has been conducted through transdisciplinary, scholar-practitioner methodologies: combining analysis of archival sources, secondary research and Indigenous and Performance Studies approaches to ethnography, creative writing and “research as ceremony” (Wilson 2008). Body chapters consider questions of decolonial aesthetics, poetics, ethics and philosophy of science through danza theory and praxis. Evidence demonstrates the necessity of integrating embodied, communal and ceremonial ways of knowing into existing critiques of epistemology, cosmology and cultural memory. Re-membering to relate, danza serves as a medium of intergenerational and community-based healing for Indigenous Latinx, Xicanx communities in Abya Yala.