The University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Candy Martinez, has chosen UCLA’s World Arts and Culture/Dance Department as her awardee resident affiliation. Martinez's will complete her PhD this Spring in Latin American and Latinx Studies from UCSC. Her dissertation committee includes anthropologists, visual and cultural studies scholars and feminists: Catherine Ramírez, Pat Zavella, Renya Ramirez and Rosa Linda Fregoso. In her work, Candy analyzes how Oaxacans from rural and urban Mixtec, Zapotec, communities construe inequality and emotional injuries such as profound sadness, susto (fright), and emotional healing. Her dissertation explains how Oaxacan and Oaxacan communities process and channel emotions related to historical, structural, and ongoing inequalities and migration. In her larger research trajectory, she applies theories of cultural memory, decoloniality, and Indigenous epistemologies to understand emotional healing, emotional injuries, and cine comunitario (community-centered filmmaking) in Oaxaca, Mexico.
During her year at WAC/D she looks forward to organizing her research findings on Indigenous medicine (plants, herbs, rituals) from Oaxaca with the guidance of Dr. David Delgado Shorter, Professor and Director of the Archive of Healing: Martinez notes that, "The purpose of this systematic organization will be to share it in an accessible format back to the communities where this knowledge stems from." In preparation for her monograph, Candy will also use this next year to write chapters on " translocal health," the act of sharing Indigenous knowledge about medicinal plants and rituals across urban and rural territories within and outside Mexico. For this work, Candy will conduct textual analysis of a few cine comunitario films including Tiempo de Lluvia (In Times of Rain) (2018), and Nudo Mixteco (Mixtec Knot) (2020) that reveal an unarticulated mode of community-based emotional health. Her analysis of these films will take this emerging mode of healthcare and further study how Oaxacan communities respond to the affective states of trauma, susto, and profound sadness related to ethnic, gender, political, and historical inequalities via fictional cine comunitario (community-centered film).
"I am excited about meeting and working with faculty at UCLA who merge arts activism, visual culture, and critical theory together. I especially hope that interactions and PPDF opportunities help prepare me for my position as Assistant Professor of Vassar College's Latin American and Latinx Studies program which I'll start in Fall 2023.”
To learn more about Candy Martinez’s exciting research, visit her essay on susto recently published on the Archive of Healing.