Clarissa Rojas

Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo is deeply rooted in the beloved desert lands of Mexicali, Baja California and Calexico, California. Rojas Durazo’s family migrated to Chula Vista, California when she was 12. These lands are traditionally stewarded by the Cahuilla, Kumeyaay and Cocopah peoples. Clarissa traces her matrilineal ancestral roots to Nogales and Douglas, Arizona, and Magdalena and Villa Hidalgo, Sonora, the traditional homelands of the Yoeme, Apache, Tohono O’odham, Pima and Opata. Clarissa’s patrilineal roots are in the state of Jalisco. 

Clarissa Rojas’ transdisciplinary scholarly and activist work explores the interrelatedness of myriad manifestations of violence and the possibilities for the transformation of violence. Her research and teaching center decolonial movements, theories and abolitionist transformations. Rojas Durazo’s publications have garnered multiple awards, and she has authored and edited many path-breaking feminist essays and collections including Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology, Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence, and Ending Heteropatriarchal Violence in Chicano Studies. Profe Rojas’ long-term public and community engaged scholarship led to co-founding INCITE! a movement of feminists of color working to end violence. Her recent work traces the potential for the transformation of violence as enlivened through Chicanx and Queer Chicanx art, poetry, and performance. Clarissa is an internationally published poet who believes in caracoles and trusts the creative spirit.

Research Interests:
Violence and the Transformation of Violence; Medical Violence, Decolonizing Healing and Health Justice Movements; Border Violence, Cultures, and Migration; Chicana, Indigenous, Women of Color and abolition feminisms; Queer of Color and Two Spirit
Studies; Critical Chicanx/Latinx, Decolonial and Zapatista Movements and Theories.

Affiliations:
Cultural Studies Graduate Group, Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research, Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, Graduate Group in Public Health Sciences, UC Davis Medical School.

Selected Works:

• Betita Taught Us We Are the Revolution: An Exhibition on the Life and Legacies of Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez, University of California, Davis Library (2022) https://library.ucdavis.edu/exhibit/betita-taught-us-we-are-the-revolution/ 

• “Notes on growing love: Cherríe Moraga’s “If,” a world-making incantation conjuring collective consciousness through Chicana lesbian po(i)esis,” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 27(3) (2023) https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2023.2216124

• Clarissa Rojas and Nadia Zepeda, “Fuego: unleashing collective Queer Chicanx/Latinx rebellion, counterpublics and imagination,” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 27(4) (2023) https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2023.2213472

• Clarissa Rojas and Nadine Naber, “Genocide and “US” Domination ≠ Liberation, Only We Can Liberate Ourselves: Toward an Anti-Imperialist Abolition Feminism,” Abolition Feminisms Vol. 1: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice, Haymarket Press, Chicago. 11-57. (2022)

• “For Breath to Return to Love: B/ordering Violence and the War on Drugs,” Carlos Salomon, (ed), Routledge History of Latin American Culture, Routledge Press. (2018) 323-337. Awarded the National Chicana/o Studies Association Antonia Castañeda Prize in Chicana Feminist History

• “We morph war into magic: the story of the border fence mural community art project in Calexico/Mexicali. Special Issue on Transnational Women’s Activism along the U.S. Mexico Border.“ Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 38(1): 140-164. (2013)

• “In Our Hands: Community Accountability as Pedagogical Strategy.“ Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, 37(4): 76-100. (2012)

• Clarissa Rojas, Alisa Bierria, Mimi Kim. “Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence.” Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict and World Order, 37(4): 1-11. (2012)

• “Fighting Violence Against Women and the Fourth World War,” The Revolution will not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Duke University Press. (2017) Book Awarded the Gustav Myers Outstanding Award for Advancing Human Rights. 113-128 

• “Medical Violence Against People of Color and The Medicalization of Domestic Violence,” Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology, Duke University Press. 179-188 (2016)

• “The Color of Violence: An Introduction,” Andrea Smith, Julia Sudbury, Janelle White, Beth Richie, Clarissa Rojas, Color of Violence: the INCITE! Anthology, Duke University Press. (2016) 1-10

• “Decolonizing Chicano Studies in the Shadows of the University's Heteropatriracial Order,” Piya Chaterjee, Sunaina Maira, (ed), The Imperial University: Race, War and the Nation-State, University of Minnesota Press. (2014)