Maribel Alvarez is an anthropologist, folklorist, curator, community arts and non-profit organizational development expert who has documented the practices of more than a dozen of the country’s leading emerging and alternative artistic organizations from Maine to El Paso, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Miami. She holds a dual appointment as Associate Research Professor in the English Department and Associate Research Social Scientist at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona. She teaches courses on methods of cultural analysis with particular emphasis on objects, narratives, oral history, foodways, and visual cultures of the US-Mexico border. In the Fall 2011 term she is teaching a graduate seminar exploring the relationship between Folklore studies, ideology, identity, and authenticity. In the last few years, Maribel has written and published essays about poetry and food, intangible heritage, nonprofits and cultural policy, the theory of arts participation, artisans and patrimony in Mexico, and popular culture and stereotypes. In 2009 she was a Fulbright Fellow conducting research in rural Mexico. She is the lead folklorist and Chair of the Board of Arizona’s premier folklife festival, Tucson Meet Yourself. With her colleague Gary Nabhan, she co-founded and co-directs the binational foodways alliance Sabores Sin Fronteras. Maribel was the co-founder and Executive Director for seven years of MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, a contemporary, alternative urban arts center in San Jose, once described as a “lab for intelligent cultural interventions.” Maribel is a Trustee of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress; in addition, she has served as faculty for seven years at the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture’s summer Leadership Institute in San Antonio, TX. Her ethnographic work has involved documenting artistic practices of several Native American communities, including a current ethnohistorical project with the Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona. Currently, she is completing two books manuscripts for the University of Arizona Press, one on the verbal arts and lore of workers in the Mexican Curios cottage industry at the US-Mexico border and another on the cultural history of wheat and flour mills in the state of Sonora in Northern Mexico. Maribel worked for five years as a consultant to the Ford Foundation and the Ford-funded project “Leveraging Investments in Communities” focusing on issues related to emerging demographics and aesthetics in the USA. Maribel was born in Cuba and came to the United States at the age of 7; she lived in Puerto Rico for 11 years before moving to California in 1980 where she became active in the Chicano and Latino arts community and multicultural arts movement of that decade. In 2009 she was featured by The Community Arts Network as one of several national leaders who are “bridge people,” or leaders who work in the multiple worlds of scholarship and public engagement simultaneously (visit here to read the interview ).

Visit Maribel’s University of Arizona page.
Maribel’s Botkin Lecture