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Catherine Sue Ramírez, PhD

Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Leader

  • About
    • Bio
    • CV
  • Research & Writing
    • Assimilation
    • Precarity and Belonging
    • The Woman in the Zoot Suit
    • Chicanafuturism
    • Undocutime and Bioprecarity
    • Selected Publications
  • Teaching
  • Honors & Awards
  • Media
  • Photography
    • Mexican Food of the World
    • My UCSC
    • The World of Letters
    • Murals & Street Art
  • About
    • Bio
    • CV
  • Research & Writing
    • Assimilation
    • Precarity and Belonging
    • The Woman in the Zoot Suit
    • Chicanafuturism
    • Undocutime and Bioprecarity
    • Selected Publications
  • Teaching
  • Honors & Awards
  • Media
  • Photography
    • Mexican Food of the World
    • My UCSC
    • The World of Letters
    • Murals & Street Art
MUJAM eye cdmx

Chicanafuturism

Since 2002, I’ve published a dozen essays about Latinx speculative fiction, a field I helped build with my catalytic 2004 article, “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez.”

Stemming from Afrofuturism (and a seed of Latinofuturism and Latinxfuturism), Chicanafuturism interrogates the relationship among past, present, and future in the Americas. Chicanafuturist works include literature, visual art, sound/music, and performance that explore the nexus of race, gender, science, technology, the environment, and the future from a Chicanx and decolonial perspective. Using the tropes of speculative fiction (for example, science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and horror), Chicanafuturist works excavate and retell histories of contact, colonialism, displacement, labor, migration, resistance, and social and cultural transformation in the Americas. Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar, thereby calling attention to that which tends to be taken for granted, such as tradition and the norm. And Chicanafuturism reckons with the past as it rethinks the present and envisions the future of the “New World.”

Cyborg Coatlicue in Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity (1940), San Francisco, CA
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Eye in the Sky, Mexico City
Poster in Japanese for Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, Queens, NY
different tomorrows art ctr
Different Tomorrows, Art Center, Pasadena, CA (November 2017)

Related Materials

  • In the company of artists Beatriz Cortez and Clarissa Tossin courtesy of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
  • How I became a sci-fi nerd
  • Why we need Latinx futurity and Hispanic heritage
  • How I, an English major, ended up on Science Friday
  • My list of recommended alternative futurist books and films
  • Guadalupe Maravilla’s powerful, healing Latinxfuturist art

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Contact

Professor Catherine S. Ramírez
University of California, Santa Cruz
Merrill Faculty Services
1156 High Street
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
cathysue@ucsc.edu

CV

Copyright © 2025 Catherine Sue Ramírez
All photos © Catherine S. Ramírez unless otherwise indicated