Hilos Press
​​​With a focus on Central America, Hilos Press seeks to unravel and weave existing intellectual and political threads on issues of violence, migration, diaspora, ethnicity, race, memory, war, imperialism, identity, and community. Recognizing that Central American Studies is a new and emerging field, we interrogate what it means to produce knowledge about Central America and its related communities inside and outside the university as well as inside and outside Central America. Our mission is to foster an intellectual space that engages across disciplines and invites participation from individuals, communities, researchers, artists, and organizers. Our goal is to complicate what constitutes Central American Studies, contemplate current trajectories in the field, and envision future directions through an abolitionist lens that identifies and addresses entangled modes of dispossession across populations and regions within and outside the scope of Central America.​
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Press titles:
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Abolitionist Dialogues in Central American Studies,
edited by Katy Maldonado Dominguez and Alejandro Villalpando
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Director: Katy Maldonado Dominguez
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Katy Maldonado Dominguez was born in Honduras and migrated to the United States when she was seven years old. Her experiences as a Central American immigrant shape the question at the heart of her work: How do people find belonging? She uses displacement and belonging as frameworks to understand the way various communities respond to and challenge social, political, legal, and economic systems that disenfranchise them and insist on stripping them of community, place, and identity. She is interested in exploring these themes in the lives of Central American students, undocumented queer parents, migrant caravans, and undocumented scholars. As an interdisciplinary scholar she positions her work at the intersections of Ethnic Studies, Central American Studies, Critical Human Geography, Critical University Studies, and Public Humanities. She received her Bachelor’s Degrees in Chicana/o Studies and Geography from UCLA and is currently a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Her dissertation, Displaced Kinship: A Politics of Belonging Among Central American Students, explores how children of Central American immigrants inherit and draw from legacies of displacement to articulate their identities, develop a political consciousness, and navigate higher education.
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