Karina Alma

Assistant Professor
Department: César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies
k.alma@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Latin America, Central America

Karina Alma (formerly Oliva Alvarado) was born in El Salvador and grew up in Westlake and Pico Union in Los Angeles. She earned a B.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley with a focus on U.S. Central American literature. She was a U.C. President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at the University of California Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor in the Chicana/o and Central American Studies department at UCLA. In 2014, she was given the opportunity to design classes focused on Central America. Since 2015, she began teaching on Central American diasporic studies in her areas of expertise on (U.S.) Central American cultural memory, (U.S.) Central American race and gender constructs, and (U.S.) Central American literature and narratives. Implicit in her research is the question of the development of U.S. Central American studies as an interdisciplinary field.

Karina Alma critiques systems of race-class-gender that intersect un/documented people and migrations as outcomes of neoliberalism, settler neocolonialism and anti-Central Americanism. Her interdisciplinary work continues to examine intercultural and transcultural texts, cultural memories, and identities especially in Central Americans community formations as these relate to Latinas/os/x. She is currently completing a manuscript on Central American diasporic cultural memory. She has also been researching anti-Blackness by the Salvadoran nation-state as her future project. She coedited the anthology, U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles and Communities of Resistance (Arizona University Press, Spring 2017). Some of her publications include “Cultural Memory and Making by U.S. Central Americans” in Latino Studies XV.4 Winter 2017, and “A Gynealogy of Cigua Resistance: La Ciguanaba, Prudencia Ayala and Leticia Hernández-Linares in Conversation” in U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles and Communities of Resistance by Alvarado et al.