Profile

Dr. Yesenia Navarrete Hunter is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oregon, Eugene as part of the Just Futures Initiative in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies program, and an Assistant Professor History at Heritage University in Washington State.

Dr. Hunter was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. as a child. She is the daughter of Guadalupe Marquez and Alberto Marquez, now of Wapato, Washington, where she grew up as a migrant farm worker. Her current work, called “Entangled Histories of Land and Labor,” centers on the braided histories of immigrants and Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. By looking at movement, migration, and material practices, Yesenia looks at how groups made places of belonging and crafted opportunities for new relationships. Her work is guided by the question: How do people make place and create rhythms of belonging in fragile spaces? The aesthetics of her work are guided by elements of place, memory, embodied practices, and relationality.

Dr. Hunter is a scholar and an artist. Her work is fueled by her role as a mother and is deeply influenced by the material practices of the music, poetry, and community building elements of the practice of the transnational movement of fandango.