Barbara Galindo,

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures

Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Office Location: Balch Hall, 302
Office Hours: Tuesday & Thursday 4:30-5:30pm in Person / Friday: online by appointment
Personal Website: http://barbaragalindo.phd/

Biography

I was born in Northeastern Brazil and raised by my mother and grandmother, both from a working-class background. My engagement with ecosocial justice is rooted in these experiences and in my grandmother’s stories of the 1932 Northeast drought, which forced her family to migrate. From 2010 to 2012, I lived and worked in Lamas, in the Peruvian High Amazon, collaborating with Kichwa teachers, youth leaders, and elders at the Sachamama Center for BioCultural Regeneration. While studying Quechua, I coordinated the Qinti Qartunira handmade book project, bringing community narratives into Quechua-Spanish editions for bilingual schools.

This experience became foundational to my doctoral work at UCLA and led me back to the Amazon, Lima, and the Central Andes, where I studied cultural production around the rubber boom and industrial mining and met women activists whose experiences deepened my interest in cultural responses to extractive violence across literature, film, and other media. After earning my PhD from UCLA in 2021, I held an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Academic History

PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles
MA in Hispanic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Los Angeles
MA in Theory of Literature, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil
BA in Letters, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

Postdoctoral Fellowships:

Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California, Riverside
ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Graduate Certificate:

Genocide and Human Rights University Program (GHRUP), Zoryan Institute, University of Toronto

Additional Training:

Filmmaking — Academia Internacional de Cinema (AIC), São Paulo, Brazil

Academic Focus

I am a scholar of Latin American literature, film, and environmental humanities, specializing in Indigenous epistemologies, extractivism, and visual sovereignty. My work brings together literary and audiovisual analysis, archival research, and collaborative filmmaking to examine mining dispossession and environmental justice across the Andes and Amazon. Alongside my scholarship, I am developing a creative filmmaking practice focused on screenwriting and editing.

Courses Taught

Fall 2026:

SPAN101 Introducción al análisis literario
SPAN 172: Global Mining and Environmental Justice: Indigenous and Black Perspectives from Abya-Yala/Amefrica Ladina.
SPAN 33: Intermediate Spanish

Books

Book project: Tortured Zones, Orphanized Lives: Decolonizing Mining Dispossession through Collaborative Filmmaking in South America.

Selected Research and Publications

Galindo, Bárbara. “Orphanization Beyond the Human: Conceptualizing Extractive Dispossession from Abya Yala.” Accepted for publication in the book Spatial Woundings and Entanglements of Minings, Metals, and Extractions, edited by Erin Adams and Bretton A Varga. It is under contract with the University of Exeter Press and is expected to be released in 2026.

Galindo, Bárbara. “Visualising Lithium Extraction as the Decapitation of Mother Salt in Cartier and Longo’s En el nombre del litio (2021).” Convection Currents in Latin American and Caribbean Geo-Aesthetics, special issue of Bulletin of Latin American Research (BLAR), edited by Salomé Lopes Coelho and Alejandro Ponce de León, vol. 44, Issue 3, 2025, pp.248-262.

Galindo, Bárbara. “The Andean Salt Flats, the Climate Crisis, and the Banality of Mining Evil.” LACIS Review, Issue #03, Fall/Winter 2024. https://www.lacisreview.org/blog-issue-03/the-andean-salt-flats-the-climate-crisis-and-the-banality-of-mining-evil

Galindo, Bárbara. “The Andean ‘Blue Book’ of Dora Mayer: Mining Terror and Coercive Prole-tarianization in The Conduct of the Cerro de Pasco Mining Company.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JLACS), vol.33, no. 4, 2024, pp.547-568.

Galindo, Bárbara (ed.). Mester: General Issue on Human Rights, Special Issue on Ecosocial Hu-man Rights, vol. 49, issue 1, 2020. This volume contains 11 articles, 1 essay, 1 interview, 3 book reviews. https://escholarship.org/uc/mester

Galindo, Bárbara. “Introduction”. Mester: General Issue on Human Rights, Special Issue on Eco-social Human Rights, vol. 49, issue 1, 2020, pp. v-xii. https://escholarship.org/uc/mester

Galindo, Bárbara and Ludmila Porto. “‘Em um futuro distópico, não existe mais lugar para onde ir’; Uma entrevista com o cineasta Dhiones do Congo.” Mester, vol. 49, issue 1, 2020, pp. 207-212. https://escholarship.org/uc/mester