About the Author

Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda is Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Transnational Studies at Pitzer College and a member of the Intercollegiate Department of Chicano/a Latino/a Studies at the Claremont Colleges. 

As a historian, her research and teaching priorities, among others, include Central American history, migration to the US., gender and labor in Central America, LGBTTI Latina/o populations and queer (im)migration in the Americas. Her work focuses on the intersections between labor, gender, ethnicity, race and other marginalized identities in workers’ lives in Central America and in the U.S. Portillo Villeda is interested in documenting working class history and lives, their processes of labor and social movement organizing — challenging century-old stereotypes of the so-called “banana republics” in the Central American region. 

Her book, Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras (University of Texas Press) focuses on the working-class culture of resistance on the Honduran North Coast and the radical organizing that challenged US. Capital and foreign intervention at the onset of the Cold War, examining gender, race and place. In 2009, after the US-backed coup d’état that destroyed the fragile democracy in Honduras in 2009, Portillo Villeda worked tenaciously with organizations in Honduras and Latinx organizations in the U.S. to denounce the coup and organize transnational response among the intellectual community, local immigrant organizations and with embattled Hondurans, and particularly LGBTTI communities, on the ground defending their civil and political rights.

Portillo Villeda’s authored and edited works can be found in the bilingual journal Diálogo, an Interdisciplinary Studies Journal,  Resentir lo Queer en América Latina: Diálogos Desde/Con el Sur, edited by Santiago Castellanos, Diego Falconi, María Amelia Viteri (Barcelona, Spain: Egales, 2014), Rethinking Latin American Social Movements: Radical Action from Below, edited by Richard Stahler-Sholk, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014), and Revista Envio published in Honduras by the Equipo de Reflección y Investigación y Acción, as well as LASA Forum and in ReVista Harvard Review of Latin America and Oxford Research Encyclopedia on Latin America Social Movements and Multicultural America: An Encyclopedia of the Newest Americans.

She is a frequent media contributor in print, on radio and television, through outlets such as The Intercept, NACLA, Latino Rebels, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, Univision, KPFK and Radio Progreso in Honduras.