NEW UC PRESIDENT'S POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW Jorge Omar Ramírez Pimienta to join the Global Latinidades Project as Research Associate for 2022-2024

The Global Latinidades Project is excited to welcome Jorge Omar Ramírez Pimienta (Omar Pimienta), who will be joining the GLP as a Research Associate. Omar’s research and creative work focuses on the US-Mexico border region and explores the thematics of trans-nationality, identity, emergency poetics, landscape, and memory in transborder artists, scholars, and writers who traverse competing nationalist claims to geographies of space and culture. Looking to the sociopolitical cauldron in this region, his work considers the effects of mass deportations, mutually-dependent commerce and labor exchanges, and gentrification that extends from US barrios to Tijuana colonias. As such, Omar not only explicates transfronterizo culture and politics, but also traces the “Emergency Poetics,” art and literature produced with experimentality and transculturality, of autochthonous cultural workers in interstitial spaces between, and also beyond, imaginary nationalist spaces and interrogates nationalist discourses that attempt to undergird them.

Omar himself is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who lives and works in the San Diego / Tijuana border region and has published four books of poetry, including Escribo desde Aquí for which he has been awarded the 10th International Publication prize Emilio Prados from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain in 2009. His ongoing community based bureacrartistic project Welcome to Colonia Libertad was awarded in 2017-18, the Art Matters Foundation grant. His work has been presented in galleries, museums, and cultural centers in U.S, México, Germany, Spain, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Germany and Denmark. He is currently a Member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores in Poetry 2019-2022 and a national poetry tutor for the 2021-2022 Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes in the area of poetry. While at UCSB Omar will conduct research in the UCSB Special Collections, present two guest lectures, and participate in ongoing research clusters.