Dr. Blackwell is a Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her latest book, Scales of Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Transborder Organizing (Duke UP, 2023), draws on twenty-five years of research accompanying indigenous women’s organizing in Mexico and its diaspora and over 70 oral histories.
She is the author of the landmark ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement (University of Texas, 2011) as well as a co-editor of ¡Chicana Movidas! New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era (University of Texas, 2018). She is the co-editor of the Critical Latinx Indigeneities special issue of Latino Studies and has organized the working group of the same name.
Dr. Maylei Blackwell’s research on social movements in the US and Latin America, transborder activism, and Indigenous politics and migration have appeared in the U.S., Mexico, and Brazil in journals such as Latino Studies, Meridians, Signs, Aztlán, Journal of Latin American Studies, Desacatos and Revista Estudos Feministas.
Dr. Blackwell co-created and co-directed the digital story platform Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles and is currently working on rematriating historical memory and seeding Indigenous social movements through the Mobile Indigenous Community Archive (MICA) in collaboration with Indigenous social movements.
Dr. Blackwell has a PhD and an MA from the History of Consciousness Department (Women’s Studies) at UC Santa Cruz (2000; 1996) and a BA in History and Interdisciplinary Studies of Race and Gender (double major) as well as a minor in Spanish from CSU Long Beach (1993).
Professor Maylei Blackwell 