William Calvo-Quirós

Professor Calvo-Quirós’ research and teaching is all about connections and intersections between the multidisciplinary fields of Design, Aesthetics and Space with Latina/o Chicana/o Studies. His early work focused on car subcultures, race, and class and how cars manifest American values and anxieties. In particular, he studied lowrider car customizations and their use of color and design methodologies. He explored lowrider car aesthetics as part of a visual language linked to Chicana/o Latina/o oral traditions and the struggles against discourses of aesthetic regulation and normalization in the American Southwest.

His most recent research titled "Insatiable Appetites: Transborder Monsters, Saints, and Sinners" investigates the U.S. - Mexico border region during the twentieth century, not only as a sociopolitical space of conflict and struggle, but simultaneously as a 2,000-mile strip of "haunted" land, inhabited by many imaginary creatures and fantastic tales. He uses a variety of primary sources, including government juridical proceedings, literary and cultural products, (e.g. corridos, murals, art, etc.), as well as interviews and ethnographic visits to popular shrines in order to study border folk saints and monsters. He approaches these tales and fantastic entities as sophisticated community archives and cultural productions that unveil the sociopolitical and economic struggles experienced along the border in the last hundred years, especially in the context of the post cold war years, the signing of NAFTA, and the events of Sept 11, 2001.

Professor Calvo-Quirós interests also include Chicana/o Latina/o feminist, queer de-colonial methodologies and spiritualities, as well as the explorations of the power of empathy and forgiveness to formulate new racial, gender, and sensual discourses in America. You can find more about his research and teaching at Barriology.com