A name familiar to many in the Latinx community at Cornell is Ernesto Javier Martinez Ph.D. ’05, Department of English/Latina/o Studies graduate minor.
Dr. Martinez’s short film, La Serenata, based on his award-winning bilingual children’s book When We Love Someone We Sing to Them, was recently released. La Serenata, directed by Adelina Anthony, is about two parents struggling with their beloved Mexican musical tradition when their son requests a love song for another boy. Martinez’s short film has earned multiple film festival awards and is now available on HBO.
An interdisciplinary literary critic, Dr. Martinez is an award-winning writer and a professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon. His writing on identity, experience, and subjugated knowledge has appeared in several journals. He is the author of On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility (Stanford UP, 2012), as well as the co-editor of Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke UP, 2011) and The Truly Diverse Faculty: New Dialogues in American Higher Education (Palgrave, 2014).
Dr. Martínez has served as the Interim Head of the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES), the Co-Chair of the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), and as a member of the Coordinating Team for the Future of Minority Studies (FMS) research project.
