Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UNM, where she teaches courses in American literature, Southwest studies, and Chicana/o cultural studies, https://english.unm.edu/about-us/people/faculty/vizcaino-aleman-melina.html. Melina has been a Lobo since 1996, the year her daughter was born, and in 2010 she received her PhD from the Department of American Studies at UNM. In 2017, she saw the birth of her granddaughter and the publication of her monograph, Gender and Place in Chicana/o Literature: Critical Regionalism and the Mexican American Southwest (Palgrave Macmillan Literatures of the Americas Series). Her most recent essay appears in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (Spring 2021, 46:1), and an interview with Chicana librarian María Teresa Márquez appears in the latest issue of Blue Mesa Review (Spring 2021, 43). Both of these pieces are dedicated to the late Rudolfo Anaya. Her other work includes two articles in Aztlán (Spring 2013, 38.1, Fall 2019, 44:2), and articles in Western American Literature (Summer 2014, 49.2 ), Southern Literary Journal (Spring 2014, 46.2), and Southwestern American Literature (Spring 2012, 37.2).
Since 2014, Melina has been organizing the annual Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya Lecture on the Literature of the Southwest, https://english.unm.edu/dept-life/events/anaya-lecture/index.html. She worked closely with Mr. Anaya for several years planning the lecture, and now she’s working with a team of wonderful people to dedicate a space The Rudolfo Anaya Sala in UNM’s Zimmerman Library, https://www.unmfund.org/fund/rudolfo-anaya-sala-fund/.
Mr. Anaya’s fiction was extremely influential to Melina as a young girl growing up in Albuquerque. Her research, teaching, and service in the English Department is both intellectual and organic, relevant to the academy but also rooted in the people and place of the Southwest. Currently, Melina is co-teaching a summer course on Southwestern Literature and Culture with Dr. Leola Tsinnajinnie Paquin, an Asst. Professor in the Native Studies Department at UNM, https://nas.unm.edu/people/faculty/tsinnajinnie_leola.html. Dr. Paquin is co-author of the Land Acknowledgement statement at UNM, https://diverse.unm.edu/about/land-acknowledgement.html, and the class takes a collaborative, place-based approach to the Southwest from a Critical Indigenous and Chicana/o perspective. The course is part of a Mellon Summer Academy program and the New Mexico Humanities Now! initiative intended to ease the pathway from Central New Mexico (CNM) community college to UNM, https://artsci.unm.edu/advisement/cnmunm-humanities-transfer.html.
Note: Though the pandemic has presented many challenges to this course and its cross-departmental collaboration, at the same time it has allowed me to discover new ways to teach and learn from students how to be critical of place from any location, whether remote or in situ.