Isabela Seong Leong Quintana
Isabela Seong Leong Quintana is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan with a focus on gender, race, labor, and comparative imperialisms in the long 19th century United States. Dr. Quintana holds an M.A. in History from the University of Texas at Austin and her undergraduate years were spent at Oberlin College. Recently, she completed an Institute of American Culture Fellowship at UCLA, a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associateship in Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine. Previously, she was an Honors College Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University.
Dr. Quintana is the author of a book manuscript "Urban Borderlands: Neighborhood and Nation in Chinese and Mexican Los Angeles, 1870s-1930s" that is currently under review with UNC Press. It examines the spatial production of borders in Los Angeles’ Chinatown and Sonoratown neighborhoods surrounding the Plaza. Her “urban borderlands” framework takes Los Angeles’ Plaza area as a site of multiple, overlapping borders—where Chinese and Mexican diasporas shared daily living spaces and experiences of segregation, while also negotiating practices of exclusion aimed at restricting Chinese immigration and later repatriating Mexicans. Using space, gender, and work as vital categories of analysis, her study interrogates the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial geography of Los Angeles. Her manuscript demonstrates that, although this period is often seen through the eyes of reformers and public officials, residents—Chinese and Mexican men, women and children—shaped cultural geography daily through the configuration of public places, homes, schools, and businesses.
Dr. Quintana’s general research interests include: gender, race, work, and empire in the construction and negotiation of places for everyday living in the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-China borderlands, in particular the emergence of alternative spaces for the making of home and community. She teaches courses in Comparative Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina/o and Chicana/o Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and U.S. History.
Dr. Quintana is the author of a book manuscript "Urban Borderlands: Neighborhood and Nation in Chinese and Mexican Los Angeles, 1870s-1930s" that is currently under review with UNC Press. It examines the spatial production of borders in Los Angeles’ Chinatown and Sonoratown neighborhoods surrounding the Plaza. Her “urban borderlands” framework takes Los Angeles’ Plaza area as a site of multiple, overlapping borders—where Chinese and Mexican diasporas shared daily living spaces and experiences of segregation, while also negotiating practices of exclusion aimed at restricting Chinese immigration and later repatriating Mexicans. Using space, gender, and work as vital categories of analysis, her study interrogates the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racial geography of Los Angeles. Her manuscript demonstrates that, although this period is often seen through the eyes of reformers and public officials, residents—Chinese and Mexican men, women and children—shaped cultural geography daily through the configuration of public places, homes, schools, and businesses.
Dr. Quintana’s general research interests include: gender, race, work, and empire in the construction and negotiation of places for everyday living in the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-China borderlands, in particular the emergence of alternative spaces for the making of home and community. She teaches courses in Comparative Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina/o and Chicana/o Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, and U.S. History.
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