Borders: El Norte

Colin Gunckel is a historian of Latina/o and Mexican popular culture, art, and media. He is currently an associate professor of film, television, and media, American culture and Latina/o studies at the University of Michigan and the author of Mexico on Main Street: Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II (Rutgers University Press, 2015). He has published essays in the journals American Quarterly, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Film History, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Social Justice, and Velvet Light Trap, in addition to editing multiple edited collections and exhibition catalogs, including LA RAZA (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2020). He also serves as Associate Editor of the A Ver: Revisioning Art History monograph series on individual Latino/a artists, published by the UCLA CSRC.

Mirasol Enríquez is the Acting Director of the Moody College’s Latino Media Arts and Studies program, and an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Departments of Radio-Television-Film and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As a film and media scholar and arts administrator, she has devoted her career to community building through film and the arts. Her scholarship focuses on U.S.-based Latina producers of narrative feature films and media production culture, Chicana/o film, independent film, and representations of race and gender in media. Her article, “Josey Faz: Traces of a Tejana in Chicana/o Film History,” was recently published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and she and Dr. Mary Beltrán are currently co-editing a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on the topic of Latina Media Histories, which is forthcoming in the fall of 2021. Dr. Enríquez has been a guest curator for the Cine Las Americas International Film Festival in Austin, and she served as the Director of Community Media for the Austin Film Society, where she oversaw their education programs and spearheaded the community media program at Austin Public, the community media center AFS manages for the city of Austin.

Ross Melnick specializes in U.S. and global film exhibition, media industry studies, film and media history, archival theory and practice, silent cinema, and moving image journalism. He is the co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018) and the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908-1935 (Columbia University Press, 2012). His articles have been published in journals such as Cinema Journal, Film History, The Moving Image, and Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and he was named an Academy Film Scholar and a NEH Fellow for his forthcoming book on Hollywood’s global exhibition operations from 1923-2013.