Long Biography

Salvador Herrera was born in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of the city of Chicago. He attended a small, local elementary school that emphasized reading and writing, along with an aspirational ethos that influenced his work ethic and worldview. He later attended a selective enrollment high school on the far north side of the city. Eventually, he left Chicago to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, NY as a first generation college student. In his junior and senior year he was awarded funding from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) program to conduct research in literary studies. He graduated from Cornell with a BA in English literature and a minor in Latina/o studies after completing his honors thesis on “simulative reading.”

Herrera completed his PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he studied contemporary TransBorder literature and performance in the department of English. As an interdisciplinary scholar of English, Performance, and Latinx Studies, he studies TransBorder aesthetics in order to address the limitations of identity politics for confronting the violence of the border apparatus, along with media outlets that exploit narratives of migrant trauma. TransBorder art is an experimental form situated between dystopic political realities and a speculative future beyond borders as imagined through queer and trans* modalities.

He also received a graduate certificate in the urban humanities as part of the Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI). In the UHI program he conducted field-work based projects with architects, urban planners, and other humanities scholars in downtown Los Angeles and the city of Shanghai; these experiences had a strong impact on the interdisciplinary nature of his current work. During his candidacy he was awarded a Mellon dissertation completion fellowship from the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR), and is currently serving on the Communications Committee for the Latina/o Studies Association.

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