Yale Alumni College: Speaking Truth to Power: Working for Social Justice in Contemporary Latin American Film

Susana S. Martínez completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University in 1999. Since then she has taught in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University in Chicago. As an Associate Professor, she teaches Spanish as well as Latin American and Latina/o Literature and has taken students on Study Abroad programs to El Salvador, Mexico, and Peru. Her research focuses on the representation of violence and lived experiences in Central American and Mexican literature and popular culture. She is working on a book on the depiction of youth migration from Mexico and Central America in young adult literature. Her literary studies are rooted in themes of social justice, the forces of globalization, neoliberalism, and state sponsored repression. 

She has published articles on the Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos, the ethnographic memoir by Cuban American writer Ruth Behar, as well as travel narratives, reality television, and crime novels based in Guatemala. Her chapter on Julia Alvarez’s young adult fiction appears in Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez. Her chapter “Contemporary Coming of Age(ncy) Narratives of Political Violence and Death in El Salvador and Guatemala” appears in Global Perspectives on Death in Children’s Literature. The chapter “The Spectrality of Political Violence: Exhuming Guatemala’s Haunted Past in Tanya Maria Barrientos’Family Resemblance and Sylvia Sellers’ When the Ground Turns in its Sleep” appears in Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives.