Big Screen: Wakanda Forever and Indigenous Worldbuilding

Gerardo Aldana is professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of Calculating Brilliance: An Intellectual History of Mayan Astronomy at Chich’en Itza (University of Arizona Press, 2022), and The Apotheosis of Janaab Pakal: Science, History and Religion at Classic Maya Palenque (University Press of Colorado, 2010), among other books and articles. Professor Aldana’s academic intervention has been to introduce a history-of-science-based approach to the study of Ancient Mayan astronomy. Following methods developed to study modern and ancient sciences, he investigates astronomical records relative to their historical, political, religious, and economic contexts in addition to reconstructing their internal logic and quantitative utility.

Dr. Giovanni Batz is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a 2020-2022 President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis and a 2018-2019 Anne Ray Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Batz’s publications have focused on human and Indigenous rights, extractivist industries, Guatemalan history, and U.S. foreign policy in Central America.

Dr. Daina Sanchez is an Assistant Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. She was previously the Mellon-Sawyer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include transnational migration, identity and community formation, and immigrant adaptation and assimilation among the children of immigrants. Her research examines how Indigenous Oaxacan youth form and negotiate their ethnic, community, and national identities away from their ancestral homelands.

Cristina Venegas is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies where she teaches courses related to history, criticism and theory with an emphasis on Latin American film and media. She is the author of Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual and Digital Culture in Cuba (Rutgers, 2010), a Choice Book Award recipient and is co-editor of Digital Activism, Community Media, and Sustainable Communication in Latin America (Palgrave, 2020). Her current book project is titled Julio García Espinosa and the Imperfect Imagination which examines the global legacy of the eponymous Cuban filmmaker’s (1926-2016) theory, creative practice and cultural work. She is co-editor of the Media Matters book series for Rutgers University Press.