Felicia Rhapsody Lopez is a proud Indigenous Chicana Feminist. She is currently serving as UC Santa Barbara’s first Postdoctoral Scholar in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Her research focuses on Indigenous-authored texts, language, gender, religion, and science, as well as on contemporary interpretations of Indigenous iconography and culture among Mexicans, Chicanxs, and Latinxs, and within dominant popular culture.
I specialize in the critical analysis of iconographic and literary texts related to Indigenous and mixed Indigenous people of Mesoamerican heritage, including diverse indigenous Nahua people, Aztecs, Mexicans, Chicanxs, and Central Americans. In my academic writing, I focus on the reinterpretation of Indigenous-authored texts from before and during the time of initial contact with Spanish colonizers. While my research focuses largely on Precontact Indigeneity, my work constitutes a decolonial project which seeks to recover indigenous knowledge for contemporary indigenous populations. Furthermore, by using Indigenous and Chicana/o theory, and by making Indigenous texts, voices and experiences central to my work, I challenge dominant representations of people of Mexican heritage in both historical and contemporary contexts.
