This Mama Create-ups was recorded live on July 25, 2020 and it invited the full global online community to a presentation focused on the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) with Dr. Dulcinea Lara, an associate professor in the Criminal Justice department and Director of the Borderlands & Ethnic Studies program at New Mexico State University. Part lecture, part discussion and collaborative project, Dr. Lara gave a basic overview of FMLA through the lenses of legality and personhood. Throughout the talk Dr. Lara explored the formulation and evolution of the FMLA laws and explored motherhood from the vantage point of scarcity vs. abundance. .
Image may be NSFW.
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Dr. Lara identifies as Chicana Indigena, honoring her Apache and Rarámuri ancestry that is deeply-rooted in the region now called southern New Mexico. Dr. Lara earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies from University of California-Berkeley (2006). Her teaching and research center the critical viewing and questioning of systems and knowledges that are designed and operationalized to advance some people/groups while creating obstructions for other people/groups. Dr. Lara’s scholarship is multi-method and multi-media. She collaborated in the creation of an interactive, bilingual museum exhibition about social justice and inequalities in the Borderlands region called, Trotando Pasos Ajenos (2017). She co-authored the article, “Mirrored Repressions: Students and Inmates in a Colonial Landscape” (Critical Education, 2018). Her current book project details the story of teachers, Nadine and Patsy Cordova, in their reasonable-radical commitment to a social justice-centered education in Vaughn, New Mexico, in the late 1990s. Dr. Lara’s work explores various kinds of residual evidence of colonization in colonias, poor and rural communities, and other “sacrificial zones.” Her generative work aims to restore these zones into sacred places through collective dreaming, healing, and making.
*Babies and small children welcome with their parents at all events (including lectures)!
