Suyapa Portillo Villeda

Suyapa Portillo Villeda (born July 1974) is a queer feminist scholar who primarily focuses on gender, labor, and migration in Central America. She is from Honduras but lived most of her childhood in Los Angeles, California. Her work often focuses on the intersection of these as well as with race, ethnicity, and LGBTQ+ identities in Central America, and more broadly in Latin America and the U.S. Since 2012, Portillo Villeda has been an Associate Professor of Chicano/a-Latino/a Transnational Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California.

Background

Educational background In 1996, Portillo Villeda earned a B.A. degree in Psychology and Spanish (Latin American Literature) at Pitzer College where she would eventually hold an Associate Professor position. Outside of the classroom, she has been involved in numerous organizations within intellectual and local communities in the U.S. and Honduras, especially regarding grassroots activism for the human rights violations of LGBTQ+ communities in Honduras after the coup d'état in 2009. The book was one of the two winners of the National Women's Studies Association's 2021 Sara A. Whaley Book Prize. She has also contributed to Queen and Trans Migrations, dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation and as a guest editor for the bilingual journal Diálogo. Outside of higher education, Portillo Villeda actively contributes work in English and Spanish to media outlets in print, on radio, and online such as Univision, Radio Progreso in Honduras, NPR's Take Two podcast, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), and Huffington Post.

Scholarly contributions

On Central America, Central American transnationalism, and Honduran social movements Portillo Villeda's research interests on Central America range from Central American history, gender and labor as a transnational subject between Central America and Latin America, and working class and LGBTQ+ and Queer experiences in Honduras and migration from Central America to the U.S. Other notable contributions are her works on Central American queer migration, her organizing efforts with Latinx LGBTQ+ organizations, and effort to change the heteronormativity of the binary family migration narrative. Her most cited works in Central American scholarship deal with migration and immigration discourses between the U.S. and Central America and the Honduran social response after the 2009 coup d'état. Her newest work, a book published just this year, presents an intersection of gender, race, and labor within the context of the social movement response and resistance from Honduras' North Coast banana republic's working class. Villeda’s work offers a transnational perspective because she works with Central American lived experiences in both the Central American and U.S. context.