María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo is a Professor in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis Department & the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU, where she currently directs the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Her book, Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States (Duke UP 2016), received the 2019 Casa de Las Americans Literary Prize in Latino Studies; the 2017 ASA John Hope Franklin Book Prize; and the 2017 National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies Book Award. Nevertheless, Saldaña-Portillo’s first book, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Duke UP 2003) is still her personal favorite. With over thirty articles, in English and Spanish, on revolution, subaltern politics, indigenous peoples, racial formation, migration, narco-economies, and Latin American and Latinx cultural studies, her most recent include "Indians Have Always Been Modern: Roma, The Settler Colonial Paradigm & Latinx Temporality" (Aztlán, Fall 2020), which rethinks decolonialism from a Latin American perspective; and "The Violence of Citizenship in the Making of Refugees: The U.S. and Central America," which explores the integral role gendered labor and violence play in the drug economy (Social Text, Fall 2019). She has held elected offices in the American Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association, and appointed offices in the Modern Language Association. She has been a member of the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational Study of the Americas Collective for over a decade, as she is committed to its mission of decentering the United States in hemispheric scholarship production, especially in the study of race and ethnicity. She is currently the Chairwoman of the Coalición Mexicana, an immigrants' rights organization, and an expert witness for Central American asylum cases with legal aid agencies in the United States and internationally.