The Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies Community Engagement Scholarship

Hope Casareno is a PhD student in Ethnology and a Hibben Fellow in UMM’s Department of Anthropology. She comes to UNM from the Anthropology and Social Change program at California Institute of Integral Studies with an MFA in Writing and Consciousness. Her research interests include recognition, sovereignty, indigeneity, security (housing, food, and water), art and social justice, language revitalization, nature, and the environment. Examining the intersections of exile, erasure, and emergence in the Americas, she is particularly interested in how displaced, marginalized, and forgotten communities work together to express resistance, peace, and liberation. Hope is a member of The Esselen Tribe of Monterey County in California.    

In addition to her work with the Ethnology collections at UNM’s Maxwell Museum, Hope assists Ethnology Curator and Ortiz Director Lea McChesney with the annual Intergenerational Hopi Pottery Festival in Arizona, a collaboration of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, the Smithsonian’s Recovering Voices Program, and the Ortiz Center. In July 2018, she received the Center’s Community Engagement Scholarship for this work.