Cristina S. Méndez (she/ella) is a Chicana educator, scholar, and poet. Her research focuses on the lived experiences and sense-making of Maya Mam women lideresas who organize for the vitality of their language, culture, and their communities across the United States, México, and Guatemala. Through her research and other collaborations, Cristina is committed to centering Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial epistemologies and methodologies. Cristina also engages in collaborative research with Mam community members on designing pedagogical resources for language reclamation, accessible at mamclass.com. She examines how revitalization movements offer the potential for coalition-building and pedagogical innovations for a decolonial future. As a transdisciplinary scholar, her work traverses Indigenous, Latinx, language, and feminist studies.
Formerly, Cristina was a proud elementary school teacher and worked as an preschool aide across California’s Central Valley and Bay Area regions. She received her B.A. in Rhetoric with honors and a minor in Education from UC Berkeley and her M.A. in Urban Education from Loyola Marymount University.
She is currently an American Education Research Association (AERA) Minority Dissertation Fellow (2024-2025). She is also a Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow with the National Council for Teachers of Education (NCTE) (2024-2026) and a Graduate Affiliate with the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies at UC Berkeley.
Specializations and Interests
Race, Language, and Education; Multilingualism; Indigenous Language Revitalization; Indigenous Latinx diasporas
