Simultaneous interpretation from Spanish into English will be available for the keynote and plenary sessions. Headsets can be picked up at the registration desk.

For this year's plenary, Dr. Melissa Villa Nicholas (Associate Professor, Information Studies, UCLA) leads a discussion with Drs. Diana Irina Córdoba Ramírez, Nithia Castorena Sáenz, and Diana J. Montaño, Latinx researchers from the U.S. and Mexico, on technologies, borderlands, and migration. Speaker bios follow below.

Dr. Diana Irina Córdoba Ramírez is a historian and researcher in Modern and Contemporary History at the Institute of Historical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She holds a PhD in History from El Colegio de México and is a member of Mexico's National System of Researchers. Her scholarship focuses on the social and political history of Mexico in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to migration, labor, gender, mobility, and the experiences of Mexican workers in the United States. Her current research examines Mexican labor migration to the United States and the histories of migrant and cross-border workers. She is a co-organizer of the Seminar on the History of Migrations in Mexico (SEHMIM), an interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars at UNAM, El Colegio de México, and the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica. Her publications include research on the Bracero Program, migrant citizenship, cross-border labor, and migration, memory, and photography.

Dr. Nithia Castorena Sáenz is a historian, writer, professor, and researcher at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua. Her research focuses on social history, with particular attention to gender, race, power, political movements, and the histories of women in northern Mexico. She holds a PhD in Philosophy with an emphasis in Cultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Nuevo León and an MA in History from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez. She is a member of Mexico's National System of Researchers and serves as Academic Coordinator of the UNESCO Chair on Active Citizenship for Peace in Northern Mexico at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua. Her scholarship includes Estaban ahí: Las mujeres en los grupos armados de Chihuahua (1965–1972) (They Were There: Women in the Armed Groups of Chihuahua, 1965–1972), which received the 2017 Chihuahua Prize for Research in the Humanities. Her work brings feminist and critical approaches to the social and political history of Chihuahua, with particular attention to women's participation in social movements, violence, resistance, and struggles for justice.

Dr. Diana J. Montaño is Associate Professor in History at Washington University. Her teaching and research focus on the construction of modern Latin American societies, with attention to technology and its relationship to nationalism, everyday life, and domesticity. Her first book, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City, examines how capitalinos (Mexico City's residents) shaped their city's electrification from the 1880s to the 1960s, and how electricity was lived, consumed, rejected, and even stolen in everyday life. The book received the 2023 Bolton-Johnson Prize and the 2023 International Committee for the History of Technology Turriano Prize, among other awards. Her article "Ladrones de Luz: Policing Electricity in Mexico City, 1901-1918," published in the Hispanic American Historical Review, received several prizes, including the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize. Her second book project, "Necaxa and the Engineering of a Mexican Energy Landscape," examines the construction of the Necaxa hydroelectric complex and the towns, indigenous workers, and water bodies it displaced. She is co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press book series Confluencias on Mexican history and convenes the Working Group: History of Science, Technology & Medicine in Latin America.