Saudi Garcia 2021-22 Mellon Fellow

Saudi Garcia is an Afro-Caribbean, queer, first-generation immigrant Ph.D. candidate at New York University. She is a graduate of NYU’s Culture and Media program, a public scholar and a facilitator for the Dominican-Haitian peace and reconciliation organization In Cultured Company. Deeply concerned with Black subjects’ relationships to land, ecology and environmental health, Saudi researches the history and contemporary forms of resistance to gold mining in the Dominican Republic as an entry point to examine how Black Caribbean communities construct alternative visions of human relations to the region’s climate-vulnerable and toxic ecologies. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Unearthing Blackness: Race, Mining Toxicity and Bio-Geo-Social Health in the Dominican Republic,” analyzes how the forms of activism and everyday survival of rural Black Dominicans impacted by gold mining reveal the gap between the project of Hispanic Caribbean racialization and the anti-colonial and maroon imaginations, philosophies and cultural practices of the rural people of Ayiti (Hispaniola). She teaches bio-social anthropology, anthropology of Afro-Latin America and Dominican Studies.

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Land Acknowledgement

The Hemispheric Institute at New York University acknowledges with respect the Lenape nation, whose traditional homelands NYU now occupies. We recognize the longstanding significance of these territories for Lenape nations past and present. We acknowledge that we work in a city with the largest urban Native population in the United States. Even as we work to increase the historical awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure, we acknowledge the effect of that legacy in educational institutions, at NYU, and across the hemisphere. We are committed to work revealing Indigenous history and life-worlds and to the inclusion of Indigenous voices and participation, in allyship with Indigenous makers and communities across the Americas.

About Us

The Hemispheric Institute gathers artists, scholars, writers, learners, and activists from across the Americas. We focus on social justice and research politically engaged culture and performance. We share this work in digital archives and amplify it through dialogues and public scholarship, residencies, publications, and gatherings. Our dynamic, multilingual network traverses disciplines and borders and is grounded in the fundamental belief that artistic practice and critical reflection can spark lasting cultural change.