Application for Professional Leave

(Note: Effective Fall 2011, faculty professional leave applications will be submitted
electronically. Please contact your college dean’s office for application submission
information specific to your college.)

Applicant Lysa M. Rivera Rank Associate Professor

Department English Date of initial WWU service September 2007

Date and duration of previous N/A Years of full-time service N/A

professional leave(s) since previous paid
professional leave

Numbers of quarters of leave 3 (Sept. 2015-June 2016) Applicant W# W00873193

requested, and dates of those
quarters

Purpose of professional leave (please check one):

☐For research or to participate in other creative endeavor.
☐Study program designed to improve teaching techniques.
For a complete statement on Professional Leave, see Section 10 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Include the following material to this application as numbered appendices (copy and paste as appropriate):
Appendix 1: Detailed statement of plans for utilizing time requested
Appendix 2: Detailed description of how proposed activities contribute to area of study, professional development, and
contributions to the university.
Appendix 3: Names of institutions and individuals with which the applicant will be associated, with pertinent itineraries
and specific dates.
Appendix 4: A statement of any time to be spent on other duties and any compensation to be received.
Appendix 5: A current vita.
Appendix 6: In cases where technical support is required for the project, a statement of support costs and how these
will be met.
Appendix 7: Additional material in support of the proposed program, such as examples of applicant’s work.
Appendix 8: Copies of reports of previous professional leaves and reports of summer research or teaching grants, or
faculty development grants from previous three years. Include descriptions of pending applications for
summer research or teaching grants or faculty development grants.
Please forward via email this application to your chairperson after completion.

Appendix 9: To be inserted in the application materials by the chairperson. See instructions below.

In preparing your application, please be aware that more applications are received than leaves available and the review process can be
competitive. Incomplete applications will not be considered. A written report to the chair, dean and Provost describing accomplishments
and benefits of the leave is due within one quarter after return. *Note* Approval of professional leave quarters does not include funding
for travel proposed in the application. Funding for travel during the professional leave period is subject to established department and/or
college policy related to professional travel, the same as during periods of regular faculty service.

If a leave is awarded, you must agree to return to Western Washington University for a period equal to that of the leave. If you do not
return to Western Washington University, you will be required to pay any remuneration received from Western Washington University
during the leave. (Chapter 173, Washington Laws 1977, 1st Ex. Session). In compliance with RCW 28B.10.650 (4), remuneration for
professional leave shall not exceed the average of the highest quartile of a rank order of salaries for all full time teaching faculty.

Typed Applicant Signature Lysa M. Rivera Date 9/15/2014

Office of the Provost 4.19.13

Please answer the following questions. You may either copy and paste text into the boxes or type in directly.
Appendix 1: Detailed statement of plans for utilizing time requested
I request a three-quarter sabbatical to help me complete a book manuscript on Chicano/a (Mexican-American) speculative fiction.
Palgrave Macmillan has expressed early interest in this project for their Latino Pop Culture series, edited by Dr. Frederick Luis
Aldama. I have cut and paste Dr. Aldama’s letter of interest here. I am also pasting a copy of the letter below for your convenience,
should the link above not work. I am quite confident that with three terms of uninterrupted writing and research time, I can
complete and submit the full manuscript by December of 2016.

Below, I offer you a detailed outline of how I intend to use my professional leave:

Introduction: ~7-10K words

Five chapters: ~15K words per chapter
Chapter One: Alejandro Morales’s Rag Doll Plagues (partially written)
Chapter Two: Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech (partially written)
Chapter Three: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Friendly Cannibals
Chapter Four: Ruben Ortiz, Alien Toys
Chapter Five: The Future of the Future: Post-2001 Chicano/a Cyberpunk

Fall 2015: [INTRODUCTION and CHAPTER 1]

Weeks 1-6: The first half will be devoted to researching and writing the manuscript’s Introduction, which will be essential in
articulating the goals, scope, and stakes of the forthcoming study. In it, I will not only provide chapter outlines, but also historicize
Chicano/a cyberpunk by framing it as a post-Chicano Movement aesthetic (perhaps a euphemism for the turn to neoliberal
U.S. politics. Briefly, the “Chicano Movement” refers to a brief period in Mexican American history in which Chicanos/as
nationwide began vocalizing dissent and demanding agency. A political, intellectual, and artistic movement of unprecedented
magnitude, el movimiento witnessed a renewed pride in indigenous Mexican culture and history as artists and intellectuals began to
recognize the political power of uniting behind a shared cultural heritage of oppression, racism, and colonization. This brief and
important period helped to generate and influence gains, though modest, in the education, labor, and civil rights of Mexican
Americans. Because one goal of my project is to document how the emergence of Chicano cyberpunk was actually a post-
Movement cultural, political, and aesthetic phenomenon that returned to the pre-Columbian past from more futuristic, and
speculative perspectives, which itself reflects shifts in attitudes towards cultural identity, it is essential that I conduct this
preliminary research into the Movement itself. To this end, I will travel between Bellingham and Seattle to research the papers of
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, which are currently held in the Special Collections department at the University of Washington (see
Attachment X). Ybarra-Frausto was involved in the establishment of the Chicano studies program at UW. He also collected papers
that document the activities of Chicano artists, students, and organizations on the West coast and, combined, these materials reflect
the mood of the Chicano Movement of the 1970s.

Weeks 7-12: For the second half of the quarter, I will complete a draft of the first chapter, which looks at Alejandro Morales’s 1992
(pre-NAFTA) speculative novel, The Rag Doll Plagues. This is the first of three chapters that share a mutual preoccupation with
how Chicano cyberpunk from the 1990s demonstrated a sustained concern with the advent of free trade, which became international
law in 1994 with the passage of the North American Freed Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Winter 2016: [CHAPTERS 2 and 3]

I plan to spend Winter quarter researching and writing drafts of Chapters 2 and 3, both of which will continue to probe the politics
of Chicano cyberpunk during the 1990s. Specifically, I will revisit work I have already conducted preliminary research on –
namely, Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech (Chapter 2) and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Friendly Cannibals (Chapter 3), both of which
dramatically and convincingly epitomize what I am arguing is a post-Movement turn towards the transnational – or the hemispheric
– contexts of Chicano/a cultural and political history. In other words, whereas Movement-era texts and artists were more or less
preoccupied with articulating a sovereign Chicano nationalism to unify and rally around, post-Movement texts like these, I argue,
begin to question the political efficacy and desirability of nationalist ideology and, through the idiom of science fiction (cyberpunk
in particular) begin to imagine, stage, even produce alternative models for identity, both individual and communal.

Spring 2016: [CHAPTER 4]

I intend to devote an entire quarter to Chapter 4, which is the only chapter to explore Chicano cyberpunk in visual art at the time
(the 1990s). I will need an entire quarter for this particular chapter, because I am more or less trained in literary analysis and will be
working outside of my area of expertise a bit. For example, because all of the artists in this chapter are visual artists whose work has
appeared in various museum settings, I need to familiarize myself with theories in visual rhetoric, art history, and curation – areas
that are new to me but indispensable to the project and its interdisciplinary scope (literature, scientific discourse, visual art). This
chapter will reference a host of visual artists at the time, including Marion Martinez and Laura Molina, but its central focus will be
on Chicano visual artist, Ruben Ortiz-Torres, whose work in the 1990s represents a stunning visual companion to the literary texts
examined in the first three chapters. I am particularly interested in his installation Alien Toy: La Ranfla Cósmica (1997), a short
science-fiction inspired video that uses the tropes, metaphors, and conventions of cyberpunk, including smart machines and

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 humanoid robots, to explore race and immigration politics in Los Angeles during the 1990s. I settled on Alien Toy because it
emblematizes Ortiz’s tendency during this decade to turn to science fiction to expand upon and interrogate the narratives of
alienness, nativism, and nationalism that dominated the political landscape of Southern California at this time. At this point in my
thinking, my argument is that Alien Toy, like the literary cyberpunk texts, demonstrates how visualizing cyberpunk (something
Gómez-Peña himself will eventually do in the 2000s) enables Ortiz-Torres to consider how media technologies frame issues of
immigration and globalization (both central to cyberpunk’s milieu) in decidedly xenophobic – alienating – terms.

Summer 2016: [CHAPTER 5]

The summer following my sabbatical will be devoted to researching and writing a complete draft of the fifth, and final, chapter. At
this point in my thinking, Chapter 5 will function in many ways similar to a coda or conclusion in that, rather than exploring a
single text from the designated period (1991-2001), it looks forward to Chicano/a cyberpunk produced in the 21st century or, more
to the point in my way of thinking, after 9/11, which marks a new era for U.S./Mexico border politics as I see it. The goal of this
chapter will be twofold: to present readers with my concluding remarks on the subject at hand (the political stakes of 1990s-era
Chicano cyberpunk) and to articulate a call for future scholarship by looking ahead at the current state of Chicano/a science fiction
(in this case, texts produced after the turn-of-the-century).

Fall 2016 [SUBMISSION]

After my sabbatical, I will use Fall quarter of 2016 to prepare the manuscript for submission. Because Palgrave MacMillan has
already expressed interest, and because this project falls squarely in the field of their “Latino Pop Culture” series, I am fairly
confident this sabbatical will be a very productive enterprise.

Appendix 2: Detailed description of how proposed activities contribute to area of study, professional
development, and contributions to the university.

Contribution to Area of Study (Chicano/a studies and/or Science Fiction studies)

Aside from the work of a handful of scholars, including Catherine Ramirez and Miguel Lopez-Lozano, a surprisingly scant amount of
critical attention has focused on Chicano/a speculative fiction. Yet, as my award-winning essay signals, scholars in science fiction
studies are quite receptive to examining critically the work of underrepresented SF writers and artists. And as a recent call for
submissions issued by the most widely read Chicano studies journal makes clear, scholars in Chicano/a studies recognize all too well
how “much of the Chican@ and Latin@ speculative arts has yet to be researched and disseminated,” despite the fact that they have
emerged as “dynamic and visionary” component U.S. Latino/a cultural expression over the past several decades. Given these and
other indicators, I have no doubt that the time is ripe for a project of this nature, filling as it will a void in both Chicano/a and Science
Fiction studies.

In what I am tentatively calling Raza Cosmica: Chicano/a Cyberpunk after the Movement (1991-2001), I look specifically at
Chicano/a science fiction produced in the 1990s, a particularly dark and tense time for people of color living in the Southland, where
the majority of the writers were themselves based and where most of the texts are in fact set. While many will recall the Rodney King
riots of 1992, far fewer will remember the xenophobic wave that overcame the Southland during this time. By the mid-1990s, a deep
economic recession led to an all-out media war on Latino/a and Asian immigrants of color. In his extensive study of journalistic
coverage of immigration in the United States from 1965 to 2000, cultural anthropologist Leo Chavez notes that 1994 witnessed an
unprecedented number of magazine covers that depicted the fearful “specter of multiculturalism” and signaled pervasive U.S. cultural
anxieties over the impending demise of a white U.S. majority (2001, 174). This “new nativism” rigorously “criminalized Mexican
migration” and sought to police brown bodies by militarizing the U.S./Mexico border and aggravating the internal borders that
relegate people of color to the margins of society and culture (Jacobson 2008, 136). This anti-immigration sentiment culminated in the
1994 passage of Proposition 187, also known as the “Save Our State” peoples’ initiative, which drew support from those who were
“tired of watching their state run wild and become a third world country” (Wood 1994). While proponents of the measure insisted the
issue was not a racial one, dominant representations of the debate – in print and on television – regularly framed it as a patriotic fight
to preserve white America from an all-out “alien” invasion, one that brought the “third world” dangerously close to the first.

This manuscript looks at how Chicano/a writers and artists, working largely independent of each other, responded to the dystopian
1990s through science fiction, specifically the stimulating subgenre known as “cyberpunk,” which emerged forcefully the mid-1980s
in response to the accelerated pace of the information age and its new “cybernetic” technologies. Frequently set in familiar near-
futures and typically concerned with the social, economic, and ecological impacts of these new technologies, cyberpunk cannot be
extracted from its socio-historical contexts, of which there are plenty. Yet, while this incisive literary genre has received an abundance
of critical attention throughout the past two decades, said criticism has yet to focus on its Mexican-American contributors and their
texts. My manuscript promises to fill this gap, for I contend that in failing to recognize cyberpunk’s underrepresented writers, we
remain blind to how the same technologies (that are too often uncritically celebrated by cyberpunk) communities of color, many of
whom have historically functioned as dumping grounds for twentieth century technology. If the familiar motifs of science fiction are
in fact the “power tools of imperial subjects,” it is worth considering how the very same tools function in the hands of imperialism’s
colonized subjects who, as science fiction writers, refuse to take the status quo for granted and demand alternative frameworks for
thinking about the future (Csicsery-Ronay 236).
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 Contribution to Professional Development:
My interest in this subject has not only manifested in new and exciting scholarship; it has also enriched, and will continue to enrich,
the types of courses I offer at the upper-division level. For example, last Winter quarter I designed and taught a new upper-division
literature seminar called “Reading Chicanofuturism,” which examined how, beginning in the 1990s, contemporary Chicano/a writers
appropriated science fiction tropes and conventions to interrogate and imagine alternatives to the radically changing social, economic,
and political landscape of the U.S./Mexico borderlands region in the wake of globalization and the passage of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Coming out of my research, this seminar cast important critical and historical light on the impacts
of multinational capitalism and free trade on indigenous and impoverished communities along both sides of the highly volatile border.
Students were very enthusiastic about the class and found it to be relevant to today’s increasingly globalized geopolitical landscape.

Contribution to the University:

A regular comment I encounter on my students evaluations is how students appreciate learning and thinking about writers, texts, and
cultural groups and experiences they, the students, did not even know existed prior to taking my class. They come to our English
classes knowing Shakespeare and Twain; but only rarely do they know who, for example, Americo Paredes or Chela Sandoval are.
Being able to teaching “multiethnic” literature puts me in the position of being able to introduce and frame these new texts and
authors, a fact that always guides what I research. Thus while this project is clearly a research-oriented endeavor whose goal is the
completion of a full book manuscript, it is also an opportunity for me to get even more current with new directions in my fields of
expertise, something that I believe is indispensable to teaching excellence. Moreover, because this project is interdisciplinary insofar
as it looks at literary texts, pop culture, and visual art, it honors Western’s broader university commitment to innovation and diversity
in our curriculum and the classroom.

Appendix 3: Names of institutions and individuals with which the applicant will be associated, with pertinent
itineraries and specific dates.
University of Washington, Department of Special Collections (see attachment).

Appendix 4: A statement of any time to be spent on other duties and any compensation to be received.
I plan to dedicate the entire duration of my sabbatical to completing a full draft of this manuscript.

Appendix 5: A current vita.

CV
Lysa Rivera

EDUCATION
University of Washington, Seattle WA
Ph.D., English 2006
Dissertation: Potent Fusions: Science Fiction and Critical Race Theory

University of Washington, Seattle WA

M.A., English 2000

University of California, Santa Cruz CA

B.A., English (graduated magna cum laude) 1995

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Asssociate Professor of English 2007 – Present
Western Washington University

Acting Instructor (English) 2006 – 2007

University of Washington

Interdisciplinary Writing Program Instructor 2003 – 2005

University of Washington

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 Graduate Teaching Assistant ( E n g l i s h ) 1999 – 2003
University of Washington

Adjunct Instructor (English) 2002 – 2004

North Seattle Community College

TEACHING & RESEARCH AREAS

African-American Literature & Culture
U.S. Latino/a Literature & Culture
American Cultural Studies
Film Studies

GRANTS, AWARDS and HONORS

Winner of SFRA’s Pioneer Award for Best Critical Essay 2012
Faculty Technology Grant Summer 2012
Research & Sponsored Project Grant-in-Aid October 2010
Faculty Summer Research Grant Summer 2008, 2010
Faculty Summer Teaching Grant Summer 2009
Susanna J. McMurphy Dissertation Fellowship March 2005
Phi Beta Kappa, UC Santa Cruz June 1995

SCHOLARSHIP
Refereed Publications:
“Mestizaje and Heterotopia in Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech.” Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in
Science Fiction. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi. October 2014.

“Neoliberalism and Dystopia in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Fiction.” Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: North
American Dystopian Literature. Ed. Brett Josef Grubisic et al. Vancouver: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Spring
2014.

“Future Histories and Cyborg Labor: Reading Borderlands Science Fiction after NAFTA” Science Fiction
Studies. Winter 2012. (Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association’s 2012 Pioneer Award for Best
Critical Essay of the Year.)

“Los Atravesados: Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Ethno-Cyborgs.” Aztlán: Journal of Chicano Studies. Spring 2010.

“Appropriated Cyborgs: Diasporic Identities in Dwayne McDuffie’s Deathlok.” MELUS: The Journal of
the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Fall 2007.

Non-Refereed:
Pioneer Award Acceptance Speech, SFRA Review, Spring 2013

“Guillermo Gómez-Peña.” Hispanic American Literature Volume of the Encyclopedia of Ethnic American
Literature. Ed. Luz Ramirez. New York: Facts on File (2008).

“Screening the Postmodern: A Review of Vivian Sobchack’s Screening Space.” Film-Philosophy

(2003)

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 SELECTED CONFERENCE PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS
“Mestizaje and Hybridity in Ernest Hogan’s High Aztech. Latino Studies Association. Chicago. Summer 2014. (Invited
Talk)

“Chicano Art in Context,” Chicanitas: Small Paintings from the Cheech Marin Collection. Whatcom Museum Speaker
Event. Spring 2013 (Invited Talk)

“Chicano/a Cyberpunk: A Case Study.” Annual Eaton Science Fiction Conference. Riverside, CA. (April 2013).
(Invited talk)

“Race, Nation, and Anxiety in Black SF from the Nadir.” Global Science Fiction Symposium. Wellesley College, MA
(March 2013). (Invited talk)

“Notes Toward Chicano/a Cyberpunk.” Pacific and Ancient Modern Language Association. Seattle University, WA
(November 2012).

“Race No More: Science Fiction and Satire in George Schuyler’s Black No More.” Pacific and Ancient Modern
Language Association. Scripp’s College, CA (November 2011).

U.S. Latino/a Literature (presiding officer). Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Honolulu, HI
(November 2010).

“‘A New Way of Doing Things:’ Chicano/a Futurist Fiction.” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association.
San Francisco, CA (November 2009)

“Adventures in Intervention: Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood.” Association for the Study of African American Life
and History. Cincinnati, OH (October 2009)

“Race and Rasquachismo in Gomez-Pena’s Cyber-Art.” National Association of Ethnic Studies 37th Annual
Conference. San Diego, CA (April 2009)

“‘Virtual Aztlán’: Rethinking ‘Greater Mexico’ in Morales’s Rag Doll Plagues.” American Comparative Literature
Association. Harvard University (March 2009)

“Los Atravesados: Guillermo Goméz-Peña’s ‘Ethnocyborgs.’” Popular Culture/American Culture Association. San
Francisco State University (March 2008)

“What’s in a Name? The Label Problem in Chicana/o Contexts.” 15th Annual MEChA Regional Conference.
Western Washington University (February 2008)

“Guillermo-Gómez Peña’s Ethno-Cyborgs.” Western Libraries Readings Series, Western Washington University
(February 2008)

“Appropriate(d) Cyborgs: Diasporic Identities in African American Comics.” Modern Language Association.
Chicago, IL (December 2007)

“’The Souls of Cyberfolk’: McDuffie’s Deathlok.” Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.).
Portland State University (April 2007)

Panel Chair, “Contemporary Paradigms of Human-Machine Hybrids.” Fifth Annual Meeting of

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 the Cultural Studies Association. Portland State University (April 2007)

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE (WWU)

Program Coordinator, Raza Latina Studies Program 2008 – Present
Faculty Advisor, Latino Student Union 2007 – Present
Advisory Committee 2009 – 2011
Chair, Activities Committee (English Department) 2012-2013
Writing Studies Search Committee Participant 2011-2012
Intensive English Language Program Search Committee Participant 2013
U.S. Multiethnic Literature Search Committee Participant 2013-14

Appendix 6: In cases where technical support is required for the project, a statement of support costs and how
these will be met.
N/A

Appendix 7: Additional material in support of the proposed program, such as examples of applicant’s work.
(Please provide hyperlinks to items such as journal articles, book titles, or music files)

Department of English
421 Denney Hall
164 West 17th Avenue
Columbus, OH 43210-1370

Phone (614) 292-6065

Fax (614) 292-7806

September 30, 2014

Dear Professor and Chair, Bruce Goebel:

As series editor of the Latino Pop Culture book series with Palgrave I write in support of Dr. Lysa
Rivera’s book project, Raza Cosmica: Chicano/a Cyberpunk after the Movement. The book will be a
first. As of yet, there are no scholarly books that investigate the significant output of science fiction
Chicano/Latino texts (film, literature and otherwise). It is clear from her proposal that Dr. Rivera’s
approach will be rigorous and reader friendly. It is clear that she will deploy a critical approach that will
bring a critical race and ecological theoretical paradigm to bear on her analysis of late 20th century and
early 21st century Chicano/Latino productions of sci-fi that have at once carved out their own niche and
transformed the genre globally. With the publication of his book, Dr. Rivera will certainly establish
herself as the foundational scholar in the field of Chicano/Latino sci-fi studies.

Sincerely,

Frederick Luis Aldama

Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English
University Distinguished Scholar

Office of the Provost 4.19.13

 Appendix 8: Copies of reports of previous professional leaves and reports of summer research or teaching
grants, or faculty development grants from previous three years. Include descriptions of pending applications
for summer research or teaching grants or faculty development grants.
Proposal for a Summer Teaching Award to Develop Cluster Courses in U.S. Multiethnic Literatures

REPORT:
This summer (2014) I received a Summer Teaching Grant to develop a cluster of new courses on “multiethnic literatures,” which I
believe our studnets need in order to appreciate how different ethnic groups, though varied by culture, language, and custom, also
share experiences and aesthetic responses to these experiences. I believe I was awarded this award because my proposal was a direct
response to the expressed needs and desires of our students (at both the undergraduate and graduate level) for more courses on
American ethnic literatures. While our department does offer a series of BCGM GURs that focus on individual American ethnic
communities (African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, and U.S. Latino/a literatures), we are currently unable to
provide our students with courses that emphasize a comparative and/or intersectional approach to the study of American ethnic
literatures, which I believe to be essential to cultivating an appreciation for the ways in which American ethnic literatures function
both on their own terms and within the broader contexts of race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century United States, a time when
developments in globalization (migration, diaspora) and new technologies are radically reshaping what constitutes otherness,
nationality, and ethnicity in our contemporary multi-culture .

I am happy to report that my project has been very successful insofar as I was able to familiarize myself with recent scholarhip in the
field of multiethnic literature, including (but not limited to) Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American
Ethnic Literatures (Eds. Singh et al); Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (Mary Jo Bona); and Re-Framing the
Transnational Turn in American Studies (Eds. Pease and Rowe). I also spent most of August reading primary texts across
ethnicities, including both Asian American and Native American novels, short-stories, and personal memoirs. Because I
am not trained in either of these areas, this preliminary research was necessary. My next step is to draft an annotated
syllabus to accompany a formal course proposal. This project is still in the works and I look forward to submitting my
final report to the University in December of this year.

Appendix 9: (To be inserted in the application materials by the chairperson.) Chairperson’s recommendation
to the dean, including an evaluation of the merits of proposal and benefits the proposal could provide the faculty
member and programs offered in the Department. Chair shall also provide a description of the impact of leave
on the department’s course offerings and students’ progress. The chairperson will submit the completed
application to the Dean’s office by October 15.
Click here to enter text.

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