Lloyd D. Barba is Assistant Professor of Religion. He is a historian of religion in the Americas with training in Latinx history; American race, ethnicity, and immigration; and the American West/Mexico borderlands. His scholarship on Mexican farmworkers in California (1906-1966) is based on oral histories and extensive archival research he's conducted. It also draws from the fields of immigration history, material culture, and scholarship on Pentecostalism and Catholicism. His more recent and ongoing research on the Sanctuary Movement (1980s to present day) brings together questions from religious history and immigration studies to understand the context of social activism and politics.
Barba's teaching incorporates these research topics but more broadly asks questions about the many communities that comprise "American Religion." He's also deeply curious about ideas regarding the end of the world, the history of Evangelicalism, and immigration studies. As a first-generation college student and son of Mexican immigrants, he wholeheartedly enjoys teaching, mentoring, and publishing with students from all backgrounds. He received excellent mentorship as both an undergraduate and graduate student and only wishes to offer the same to Amherst College students.
Dr. Sandra Barrueco ‘96 is currently the Director of the Clinical Psychology PhD program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, after serving as Full Professor, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Research, and Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies at CatholicU in Washington, DC. Dr. Barrueco’s research has been cited in the development of national standards in bilingual assessment, and she has created and led national studies of migrant and immigrant children and families. At Amherst College, Dr. Barrueco double majored in psychology and economics. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Denver, culminating in an internship at Children's National Medical Center in clinical child and pediatric psychology. Dr. Barrueco completed postdoctoral fellowships in neurodevelopmental disabilities and prevention science at Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Dr. Barrueco’s appointments have included the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Forum for Children’s Well-being. For more, see this link.
Sony Coráñez Bolton is Associate Professor of Spanish and English; Faculty Equity and Inclusion Officer; Chair of Latinx and Latin Amer Studies. He is originally from Olongapo City, Philippines, the erstwhile location of the Subic Naval Base before US military bases were decommissioned in the early 1990s. His research interests were born from his own personal experience of US militarism. In the United States, he grew up in San Francisco and outside of Chicago.
Before coming to Amherst College, Sony Coráñez Bolton was an Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Before that he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship through the Creating Connections Consortium (C3) at Middlebury College in the Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he did dissertation fieldwork in Quezon City and Manila with the support of the Fulbright exploring the intersection of queer literary culture, activism, and party politics. He was also a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studying the Tagalog/Filipino language, a linguistic archive he hopes to incorporate in future research.
Personally, he enjoys cooking, food-writing, and reading & writing poetry. He is a low-brow pop culture connoisseur. He has a profound fascination with K-Pop.
Ed Camacho ’79: I began my legal career as a Visiting Attorney Fellow with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund, Inc., a civil rights litigation firm in New York City. Thereafter, I was staff counsel with Phoenix Legal Services, in Phoenix. Arizona. I returned to New York City to serve as Senior Attorney, and thereafter Administrative Law Judge, for the New York State Division of Parole. I entered the private practice of law in Bronx, NY, as a partner in Bernheim & Camacho, concentrating in parole revocation defense, criminal defense, family law, and civil and personal injury litigation. I later joined Hunter & Associates, LLC, an insurance defense firm in New York City. In 2003, I joined Ventura Ribeiro & Smith (VRS/currently Ventura Law), a plaintiff’s personal injury litigation firm in Danbury, Connecticut. In 2007, I returned to New York as a partner in Medina Torrey Mamo & Camacho, PC, a criminal defense, family, civil and personal injury litigation firm in Ossining, New York. In May 2009, I established Camacho Law, a criminal defense, family, and personal injury litigation firm in Norwalk, CT. In 2017, Camacho Law merged with Ventura Law (formerly VRS), where I am currently a partner managing our Norwalk Office.
Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 professor of Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1996. Corrales's research focuses on democratization, presidential powers, ruling parties, democratic backsliding, populism, political economy of development, oil and energy, the incumbent's advantage, foreign policies, and sexuality. He has published extensively on Latin America and the Caribbean. His latest book, Autocracy Rising (Brookings Institution Press, fall 2022), discusses the transition to authoritarianism in Venezuela since the 2010s, with comparisons to Colombia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua. It argues that deep democratic backsliding is determined by party system features, variations in autocratic legalism, institutional capture, and innovations in the use of coercion. Corrales serves on the editorial board of Latin American Politics and Society, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Americas Quarterly. Currently, Corrales is also working on two other projects: 1) Populism and Polarization: Incumbents, Expresidents, and Newcomers; and 2) Democratic Backsliding and Political Parties.
Rachel De La Cruz ’26: I am a Sophomore double majoring in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought & Practice of Art. I transferred to Amherst College after completing my A.A. in Communications from UCNJ. My academic interests lie at the intersection of legal theory, migration and displacement, and art as a form of care. My lived experience as an Afro-Latina inspired me to join La Causa as the Conocer y Resolver Chair last semester. In this position, I facilitate La Platica, a biweekly discussion group centered around issues and topics related to the Latinx community. Outside of La Causa, I am a Food Justice Recovery Volunteer and an Artist for the Indicator, one of the college’s literary magazines. I am a Programming Assistant for the Mead’s annual Black Art Matters Festival and an intern at the non-profit poetry press Get Fresh Books Publishing.
Miriam De La Riva Ovalle ’18: I’m originally from Mexico and have lived in the US since I was seven. I spent most of my childhood living in California. I moved to the East Coast to go to Amherst. During college, I spent the summers working with Girls Who Code. I graduated in 2018 as a computer science and art double major. After college, I started a software engineer job at Athenahealth. I am still there and am currently a senior software engineer working in the medications zone. In my free time, I love watching TV/movies and playing video games. I got married last November on the Amherst College campus to my husband who is also a 2018 Amherst alum. We live together in Cape Cod with two dogs and a cat.
José Espinosa ’11 is an actor in theater, film and television. He received an MFA from Yale School of Drama in 2019.
Thomas L. Gonzales ’76, of Washington, DC, was born in Monterrey, Mexico. His parents were
from Alabama and Arizona. The Arizona ancestors settled there before it became a US
territory. He was a US Senate page during high school. At Amherst, he co-founded La Causa
and was a WAMU radio DJ. His career includes corporate, legal, non-profit and
government staff and leadership experience. He graduated from Georgetown U. Law Center,
worked as a plaintiff’s trial attorney and was subsequently appointed the first General Counsel to the Secretary of the US Senate. Other positions include Acting Deputy Secretary for Administration at USDA, Chief of Staff for national NAMI (the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill), staff for the US Senate Appropriations Committee and counsel to the President pro tempore of the US Senate. Thomas also served as a member and Chairman of the Board of Directors of a large financial institution.
Les Purificacion '76 was among the first Latino students actively recruited by Amherst. He is a co-founder of La Causa. A sociology major, Les intended on going to law school. In his junior year, however, Les interned at Scholastic Magazines. He submitted a children’s book to Scholastic which was published in his senior year. He was offered an editorship at Scholastic, and so ended his quest to be a lawyer — or so it seemed. After 15 years in publishing, his thoughts again returned to the law. In 1989, he went to law school. After graduating, Les went into private practice. In 2007, he was elected as a Judge to the New York City Civil Court. In 2012, he was elected as a Justice to the New York State Supreme Court, where he served until he retired in 2021. Recently, Les was appointed as a Judicial Hearing Officer, where he again sits in the New York State Supreme Court.
Francheska Santos ’15 is the Assistant Director of Partnership Learning at Prepared to Teach, which promotes paid high-quality residencies for aspiring teachers.
Ilan Stavans has taught courses on a wide array of topics such as Spanglish, Jorge Luis Borges, Shakespeare in prison, modern American poetry, Latin music, Don Quixote, Gabriel García Márquez, Modernismo, popular culture in Hispanic America, world Jewish writers, the cultural history of the Spanish language, Pablo Neruda, the history of the Spanish language, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Yiddish literature, Jewish-Hispanic relations, cinema, Latin American art, and U.S.-Latino culture.
Ismée Williams '95 is a co-founder of the non-profit Latinx Kidlit Book Festival whose mission is to uplift Latinx voices while bringing these diverse stories to all students and educators in order to increase representation, empathy and connection. Ismée also serves on the SCBWI Impact and Legacy Fund. Ismée is a pediatric cardiologist and scientific researcher who practiced and taught at Columbia University Medical Center for 15 years. She currently sees patients at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx. Ismée has been an invited speaker at NCTE, ALA, The Virginia Festival of the Book, The Miami Book Fair, The NYC Teen Author Festival, The Southern Kentucky Book Festival, The Texas Book Festival, and The Bronx Book Festival among others. Ismée is the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and grew up listening to her abuelo’s bedtime stories. She currently lives in NYC with her husband, 3 daughters, 1 dog and 2 cats. Follow her on Twitter/X and IG @IsmeeWilliams.