Alexandra Lossada works on immigration, citizenship, and language in contemporary American ethnic literatures, especially in Latinx and Chicanx writing. Her current manuscript project, tentatively entitled The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention, reevaluates the figure and the role of the interpreter in post-9/11 literary works that depict detention, deportation, and/or family separation via the legal apparatus of crimmigration, or the intersection of criminal law with immigration law. Her work has recently been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for 2025-2026.
We’re delighted to welcome you to UC Berkeley English, Professor Lossada! Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your research interests, and what excites you about UC Berkeley?
Hello, I’m Alexandra Lossada and I’m a new assistant professor in Chicanx/Latinx studies. I’m originally from Los Angeles and I love to fly or drive down to see my family and cats, eat at my favorite restaurants, hang out with my friends, and enjoy everything that LA has to offer. I have a strong relationship with the country of Japan, since I lived in Kyushu for three years, and I consider myself a fan of tea, Japanese comics, and hot springs. In the Bay Area, I love going to bookstores and libraries because browsing through the shelves gives me a lot of ideas for courses and research angles. I’m also a runner—and the relatively cloudy and cool weather of the Bay Area has been so wonderful for outdoor running!
In terms of my research interests, I’m currently interested in comparative approaches to contemporary immigration literature. In other words, I don’t find that the story of immigration can be told by exclusively focusing on one demographic, but rather I want to see how different groups are narrating their histories and stories through literature and locate the convergences between these moments that create the immigration system that we know today. For me, this has meant looking specifically at the creation of illegality, the rise of the immigration detention center, and family separation not as new or recent events, but rather as a longer project of immigration law and practices—and often in tandem with other histories of oppression—that literature offers unique insights into. In relation to these interests, I find myself interested in the field of human rights and literature, multi-ethnic studies (with more familiarity with Latinx studies), and American studies. I also have a secondary interest in contemporary Japanese literature in translation.
It's hard to pick what excites me about UC Berkeley. Part of it feels personal—I got my undergraduate degree at UC Irvine, which was where I first got the idea of becoming a professor, and I had always hoped that I would return to the UC system. I never allowed myself to dream that it would be Berkeley, though, because—and this is not at all meant to be a self-serving comment—I always felt that only geniuses end up there. So sometimes when I’m walking through Sather Gate and into Wheeler, I get really excited by the thought that I’m here. That feeling gets further amplified by the kindness, intelligence, and energy of my colleagues, the delightfulness of the undergraduates and graduate students, and the fact that the libraries have everything I could ever want for my research projects. I’m also excited about all of the wonderful events planned for this semester! In short, I could not be more grateful for being a part of this community and I look forward to becoming more integrated as time goes on.
I saw you’re teaching a class, “Liminal Lives in Chicanx/Latinx Literatures” - can you tell us a little bit about that class, what it means to represent “liminal lives,”? I’m also wondering about teaching students in this particular moment. As someone who has held positions teaching elsewhere over the past few years - do you see any unique challenges or opportunities for pedagogy in the present moment?
“Liminal Lives in Chicanx/Latinx Literatures” is an ENG 190 course that focuses on contemporary literature in which characters, narrators, subjects, and authors inhabit lives that are caught or moving between different aspects of their identity and citizenship status. I’m very interested in the kinds of writing that can emerge based on the proximities and distances writers may have with their subjects experiencing liminal lives—and it’s something that we also have to consider in relation to ourselves, as the readers and interpreters of these works. (These are my thoughts on liminality, but my students are actually the ones generating much more interesting thoughts on the topic: they have discussed liminality in terms of disguises, hiding, and working from the shadows to desiring liminal bodies and considering liminality in relation to game theory!) In terms of the authors, we’re reading Helena María Viramontes, Demetria Martínez, Luis Alberto Urrea, Yuri Herrera, (our very own) Alberto Ledesma, Javier Zamora, Valeria Luiselli, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio as they give us a fuller picture of the relationships between the US, Mexico, Central America, and (at the very end) South America and the Caribbean. The desire to represent these sometimes elusive lives means that these authors write in many different genres, so we’re reading novels, short stories, memoir, poetry, investigative journalism, and creative nonfiction. Every week is something different.
In terms of teaching in this particular moment, I’m incredibly lucky in that my students have been so receptive to the material and eager to discuss it—that attitude enables us to reach more difficult and high-level conversations faster. And it’s not to say that we always agree or are on the same page about interpreting a text or an idea, but there is this shared sense that the course material is important and urgent. However, even the noblest of intellectual pursuits can fall flat on its face if we don’t take time to consider our needs as a small community—and this is where I am seeing opportunities for pedagogical growth. On the first day of class, I had my students create a community pact: a series of promises that we make to each other about how we’re going to prepare for class and conduct ourselves in it. My students were quite clear that they wanted time to get to know each other, so I created four different icebreakers for the first four weeks of class and, moving forward, I’m going to have the students rearrange their seating so that they can continue in this endeavor. I have also frequently involved them in reflecting on pedagogy, such as when I asked them to help me think through how we want to prepare ourselves for the moments where we encounter sensitive or disturbing material in the texts. Perhaps it’s evident that I have been thinking about inclusivity for a while, but reading bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress this past summer made me consider the role of reciprocity for the first time. When I asked my students to write letters introducing themselves and their reading and writing practices, I wrote a letter of my own answering the same questions and shared it with them. I had never done that before and I was nervous, but perhaps in this day and age we need more mutual recognition for the fact that we’re humans grappling with profound questions about life, society, and personal values through discussions of these texts. Based on these experiences so far, I see the seminar course as spaces for connectivity, reflection, and collaboration in the face of all of the forces that seek to divide us and make us feel isolated and hopeless. It’s not just a class, but an experience that each member plays a role in holding up. At the end of the semester, I always hope that the students will take the readings that resonated the most with them and pass them on to communities that I don’t have access to. In that sense, it’s really the students who have the most potential to reach and teach others.
I was fascinated by recently listening to a talk you gave called “The Crimmigration Subgenre and Latinx Child Interpreters.” In particular, how common the trope of bilingual character as narrator seems to be in the work you’re discussing, and how that form of translation overlaps with interpretation, often in the space of the immigration detention center as a setting. Could you say a little more about this element of your research?
Thank you so much for listening to the talk. My inspiration for the talk—and the larger project from which it comes—begins with the trope of the bilingual character (or narrator or author) in ethnic literature. I am fascinated by the moments where these characters are suddenly expected to become ad hoc interpreters and mediate between different parties. For anyone who has grown up interpreting for family members, one might say that this is simply a fact of life, but when we’re looking at the way these scenes play out in literature, these interpretative acts often take on huge significance because they rarely end up being about (or just about) bilingual translation. Rather, they can be moments to examine racism, loyalty and/or betrayal to communities of belonging, legacies of imperialism and colonization, conflict with other forms of interpretation (like the law), liminality, and modes of resistance, among other things. Once we hit post-9/11 multi-ethnic literature, which marks an acceleration of anti-immigration discourse, laws, and practices that have been pivotal for accelerating today’s war on immigration, these interpreters take on increasingly dangerous and complicated interpretative acts in order to mediate what’s happening to us, the readers. Part of the reason for this change, in my view, has to do with the rise of the immigration detention center as a setting in the archive of literature that I am examining.
In the early stages of the project, there was less scholarly material on immigration detention centers than there is now, so I read a lot of government-authored documents and personal accounts. In the peripheries of these documents—reading between the lines, a sentence here or there, occasionally a paragraph—ad hoc interpreters (bilingual detainees) started to appear. These ad hoc interpreters fascinated me because, apart from bridging a (sometimes deliberate) withholding of language access services for detainees (in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), they also seemed to offer other modes of connectivity and mediation with detainees, such as prayer circles, storytelling, and legal help of different sorts. Their presence also indicates, though, that within the demographic of the incarcerated, there are people who are bilingual because they have been living in the US for most of their lives, are long-term residents, or are even sometimes citizens. That’s when I realized that when I encounter the interpreters of post-9/11 multiethnic literature, we can read these stories as authors paralleling the experiences of their interpreter characters with those of real-life ad hoc interpreters in the immigration detention centers or, in the case of fiction, these ad hoc interpreters are being allegorized through the story. Detainees are being held indefinitely and/or being deported, and when we encounter these interpreters in literature, we have to think about the real-life detainees, who have been hidden from sight. And these authorial strategies are even being applied retroactively: part of my research involves looking at contemporary depictions of the Japanese internment camp and something similar seems to be happening in reappraising the internment camp not as a finished episode, but one that continues to be an event.
Congratulations on your ACLS Fellowship! Can you tell us a bit about that project and the program?
Thank you! The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship is an opportunity for scholars primarily in the humanities or using humanistic inquiry to devote a year to furthering their research projects and it was a huge honor to receive one. I’m using the fellowship to complete the draft of my first book, tentatively entitled The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention. The book places the figure of the ad hoc interpreter within the context of what I am calling the “crimmigration subgenre.” A term coined in legal discourse, crimmigration refers to how criminal law is wielded against immigrants in inappropriate ways and with pernicious outcomes, as for example increasing rates of incarceration, family separation, and deportation. Authors are documenting and memorializing the effects of crimmigration in contemporary multi-ethnic literatures, which in turn is producing a phenomenon of fiction and non-fiction that is recognizable by tropes stemming from the convergence of crime and immigration, and is ultimately mediated by the ad hoc interpreter. The project is comparative in scope: I analyze extraterritorial policies for Haitians via the refugee works of Edwidge Danticat; post-9/11 modes of home imprisonment and surveillance in Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them; family separation, reading pedagogy, and child interpreters in Valeria Luiselli and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s works of fiction and nonfiction; and the destabilizations of crime tropes by Julie Otsuka, Julie Shigekuni, and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto in relation to critical reappraisals of the Japanese internment camp in light of current incarceration practices. Most importantly, I consider the kinds of strategies and modes of solidarity that these authors are proposing through the crucial presence of the ad hoc interpreter, whose interpretative acts become the central force of this project that interrogate notions of citizenship, social justice, and community. Doing justice to four different groups and their literary traditions come with many challenges, but practicing intersectionality is a personal and intellectual goal of mine. I hope that the final version will clearly and effectively relay the story that these authors—interpreters in their own rights—are telling about the crimmigration subgenre.
Is there anything about Berkeley as a place that you’re interested in exploring more?
I want to learn more about the history of the city of Berkeley. Over the summer, I read Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis and I learned that the Sanctuary Movement began here. It got me thinking that I’d like to find a way to incorporate the living history of this location into a future course. Berkeley is also a location in works by Julie Otsuka and Isabel Allende, so there are additional histories of Japanese incarceration and contemporary immigration, respectively, that I would like to explore in relation to these works. Additionally, I’m interested in exploring different museums here in Berkeley and in San Francisco to see what can be incorporated into a future course. On a less serious note, I also want to find the best hojicha latte in Berkeley. It’s news to me that this is even a thing now—the only place where I could drink hojicha latte before returning to California was in Japan.
What are three books you would recommend?
I would recommend Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (and everything that she has written) because every encounter with her work upends my beliefs and values as a reader and as a person, and I find the experience very necessary. I would also recommend Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for the same reasons. Finally, I have a special fondness for Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus and its main character Estrella. The open-endedness of Viramontes’s endings are beautiful invitations to imagine that the world and its leaders could be otherwise.