Position Title
Assistant Professor of Teaching | Chicana/o/x Studies
Dr. Marcelo Garzo-Montalvo (he/they) is a musician, danzante, and ethnic studies scholar-activist. Their teaching, research, and creative work focus on pedagogies of cultural resistance, abolition, and decolonization through aesthetic movements and the visual and performing arts. Their work is cross-disciplinary and rooted in the tradition of Third World Studies – founded by the Third World Liberation Front – the intercommunal student movement that envisioned, created, and continues to sustain projects of Black, Native, Chicanx, and Asian American Studies. As a scholar, practitioner, and pedagogue, Dr. Garzo-Montalvo studies and teaches about food, music, dance, poetry, art, media, and power.
As a musician, Garzo-Montalvo has been playing and studying various forms of music since childhood, starting with classical Spanish guitar at age 8, before finding Jimi Hendrix and the Misfits at age 12. They play guitar, bass, drums, and various traditional instruments from throughout the Americas. They have toured with punk and hardcore bands, supported many community and ceremonial events, and played in experimental soundscape projects such as Bio-Ofrenda. Prof. Garzo-Montalvo also serves their communities as a danzante, a ceremonial dancer in the Danza Azteca tradition.
Born in Toronto, raised in North County San Diego, with roots in Central and Southern Chile, Prof. Garzo-Montalvo’s work emerges from interstitial spaces of exile, diaspora, and migration. Their current book project, Armas Milagrosas, is a hemispheric study of various forms of popular music and dance traditions in the Americas (cumbia, blues, tango, son jarocho, etc.) and their mobilizations as forms of anticolonial struggle and cultural resistance, resilience, and re-existence. Other works in progress include various chapters on Danza Azteca, co-authored works on Chicanx art exhibitions in San Diego, and an experimental rock album entitled Brokenhearted Brujx.
Before joining the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies at UC Davis, Prof. Garzo-Montalvo served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies at Harvard University’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration and Rights, and as Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University, San Marcos.
- B.A. – Comparative Ethnic Studies, 2009, UC Berkeley
- M.A. – Comparative Ethnic Studies, 2012, UC Berkeley
- Ph.D. – Comparative Ethnic Studies, 2020, UC Berkeley
- Harvard University, Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Certificate of Teaching Excellence
- University of California, Lili Fabilli and Eric Hoffer Essay Prize, "Con Confianza"
- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Collective Safety Fellow
- UC Berkeley Center for American Cultures and Engaged Scholarship, Chancellor’s Public Fellow
- Institute of Noetic Sciences Consciousness in Action Award
- Critical, Comparative, and Relational Approaches to Black/Afro-Diasporic, Native/Indigenous, and Xicanx/Latinx Studies
- Cultural Resistance in the Americas – Dance, Music, Poetry, Visual Art, and Performance Studies
- Abolition and Decolonial Pedagogies
- Garzo Montalvo, Marcelo. “Mitotiliztli ←→ Teochitontequiza: Consciousness and Corporeality in Anahuacan Ceremonial Dance.” Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2027. (forthcoming)
- Garzo Montalvo, Marcelo. “Tlacuiloliztli: On the Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics of Danza Azteca.” Nawi Olin: Aztec Dance Across the United States. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2027. (forthcoming)
- Garzo Montalvo, Marcelo. “Ancestral Technologies of Re-membering: Dance/Story/Ceremony and the Heart/Circle.” The Media Crease: Theorizing Culture, Repetition, and Social Difference. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2026.
- Garzo Montalvo, Marcelo and Isaac Ginsberg Miller. “Star Wars: Andor – An Abolitionist Study Guide.” Feminist Pedagogy, Dec 2025. Special Issue – “Abolitionist Principles and Pedagogy: Teaching to Build the World Anew.”
- Garzo Montalvo, Marcelo. “Within and Without the Settler University: Reflections on Decolonization, Spirituality, and Research as Ceremony.” Agitate!: Unsettling Knowledges, Summer 2024. https://agitatejournal.org/article/within-and-without-the-settler- university-reflections-on-decolonization-spirituality-and-research-as-ceremony/
- Catrileo Araya, Antonio; Manuel Carrión Lira, and Marcelo Garzo Montalvo. “$hileyem (Chile se acabó, The End of Chile): Indigenous Media and Decolonial Futurities beyond the Settler State.” Dismantling the Nation: Contemporary Art in Chile. Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2023.
- UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Collective. “COLA, COVID, and 50/500 Years of Struggle: A Dispatch from the University of California, Berkeley Wildcat Strike.” Critical Times 3.3 (2020): 559-565.
- Bio-Ofrenda. "Elements Cycle." Bandcamp, 2019.
- Garzo Montalvo, M. F. (2015). “To the American Food Justice Movements: A Critique that is also an Offering. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 5(4), 125–129. http://dx.doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2015.054.017
- BadAss Visionary Healers (Tieraney Carter, Rico Kleinstein Chenyek, M’kali-Hashiki, Marcelo Felipe Garzo Montalvo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Jonah Aline Daniel). “A Babe-ilicious Healing Justice Statement: from the BadAss Visionary Healers (BAVH).” nineteen sixty-nine: an ethnic studies journal 2.1 (2013): 1-13. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1z61z54j