Simón Trujillo

PhD. (English Language and Literature), University of Washington, 2013; M.A. (English Language and Literature), University of Washington, 2007; B.A. (English and Philosophy), University of New Mexico, 2003

Chicanx and Latinx studies and literature; US multi-ethnic literature; ethnic studies; comparative indigeneities; Borderlands theories and methodologies

Faculty Research Fellow. NYU Center for the Humanities. 2017-18.

Latin American Studies Association Latina/o Studies Section Outstanding Article Award for “USA is Trespassing in New Mexico: La Alianza Federal de Mercedes and the Subaltern Historiography of Indo-Hispano Mestizaje,” 2016.

Mellon-Sawyer Pre-Doctoral Fellow. “B/ordering Violence: Boundaries, Gender, Indigeneity in the Americas: The John E. Sawyer Seminar in Comparative Cultures," 2012-13.

Office of the State Historian of New Mexico/Historical Society of New Mexico Scholars Program Fellow. 2011-12.

Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the English Department at New York University.

His book, Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2020), explores Indigenous land reclamation to rethink connections between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. It centers on the cultural production of the New Mexican land grant reclamation movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. A formative organization of the Chicanx movement known for its armed raid of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in 1967, La Alianza waged a dynamic and controversial campaign for the recovery of Mexican and Spanish land grants that had been lost in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. This book situates La Alianza’s writings alongside a heterogeneous archive of Indigenous and feminist borderland literature by Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, his work explores unexamined intersections between Indigenous, Chicanx, and Latinx cultural politics and contributes to critiques of colonial modernity and settler sovereignty in the Americas.

Professor Trujillo teaches courses on Latinx Studies, American ethnic literatures, 20th century literature and culture, intersectional theories of race, indigeneity, and decolonial social movements. His pedagogy engages the practices of textual analysis, writing, and collaborative research to study how the social construction of identity—including race, gender, sex, class, and nationality— occur as a function of language. His students explore how work on language generates alternative identities, histories, and spatial imaginaries that resist historic forms of oppression and inequality.