A conversation with Lorgia García-Peña and Jasmine Mitchell
Thursday, April 24, 2025; 12:30 to 2:00 PM
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Brooklyn College
Dr. Lorgia García-Peña is the Director of Princeton University’s Program in Latino Studies and is affiliated with Princeton’s Department of African American Studies and its Effron Center for the Study of America. She is a writer, activist and scholar who specializes in Latinx Studies with a focus on Black Latinidades, the intersection of Blackness and Latinidad. She is concerned with how anti-blackness and xenophobia traverse the Global North producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. Through her writing and teaching, Dr. García-Peña highlights the knowledge, cultural, social and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives. She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016); Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, 2022) and Community as Rebellion which was translated and published in Spanish as La comunidad como rebellion.
She is an engaged scholar committed to liberating education and bridging the gaps that separate Black, immigrant, Latinx and working-class communities. She has been celebrated and recognized for her activism and public-facing work. in 2022 she received the Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship, in 2021 the Margaret Casey Foundation named her a Freedom Scholar, and in 2017 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented her a Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Additionally, her scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship and the Mellon Foundation. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Univision and Telemundo and is a regular contributor to NACLA and Asterix Journals.
As part of her visit to campus, Dr. García-Peña will also be in conversation with Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies Department Professor Jasmine Mitchell, in a public lecture in the Woody Tanger Auditorium and hold a private meeting with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellows.
Community as rebellion : a syllabus for surviving academia as a woman of color by
A meditation on freedom making in the academy for women scholars of color. Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia. Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers--in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women--to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world's tokenizing and exploitative structures. García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls "teaching in freedom": a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.
Translating blackness : Latinx colonialities in global perspective by
In Translating Blackness Lorgia García Peña considers Black Latinidad in a global perspective in order to chart colonialism as an ongoing sociopolitical force. Drawing from archives and cultural productions from the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, García Peña argues that Black Latinidad is a social, cultural, and political formation--rather than solely a site of identity--through which we can understand both oppression and resistance. She takes up the intellectual and political genealogy of Black Latinidad in the works of Frederick Douglass, Gregorio Luperón, and Arthur Schomburg. She also considers the lives of Black Latina women living in the diaspora, such as Black Dominicana guerrillas who migrated throughout the diaspora after the 1965 civil war and Black immigrant and second-generation women like Mercedes Frías and Milagros Guzmán organizing in Italy with other oppressed communities. In demonstrating that analyses of Black Latinidad must include Latinx people and cultures throughout the diaspora, García Peña shows how the vaivén--or, coming and going--at the heart of migrant life reveals that the nation is not a sufficient rubric from which to understand human lived experiences.
Santana, Nelson, and Amaury Rodríguez. The Borders of Dominicanidad—Interview with Lorgia Garcia Peña.
Garcia Pena, Lorgia. “New Freedom Fights: The Creation of Freedom University Georgia.” Latino Studies, vol. 10, no. 1–2, 2012, pp. 246–50, https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2012.2.
Regarding Freedom University, which she co-founded in 2011.
An interview with Prof. García-Peña on themes raised by her "Community as Rebellion" book
Her views on anti-Blackness in Latinidad
