Maite Zubiaurre
· ProfessorUniversity of California, Los Angeles · Spanish and Portuguese
Active 1999–2025
About
Maite Zubiaurre is a professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) at UCLA. She holds a degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and has taught at USC, ITAM, UNAM, and the University of Texas at Austin before joining UCLA. Her research interests include comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, urban studies, cultural studies, and migration studies. Zubiaurre is the author of several scholarly works, including 'El espacio en la novela realista' and 'Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898-1939,' the latter being the first scholarly monograph analyzing visual and textual representations of the erotic in Spanish popular culture during the Silver Age. She is also the creator of a virtual repository or erotic Wunderkammer that serves as a digital companion to her scholarly work, housing extensive collections of images and texts related to Spanish erotica. Additionally, she has contributed to feminist thought anthologies, authored 'Talking Trash. Cultural Uses of Waste,' which won the Vanderbilt University Press 2020 Goldberg Prize, and co-authored 'Urban Humanities. New Practices for Reimagining the City.' Zubiaurre is involved in interdisciplinary projects such as 'Forensic Empathy,' focusing on migrant death, forensics, and border activism, and she is also an artivist and visual artist under the alter ego Filomena Cruz, engaging in artistic interventions related to discarded objects and border issues.
Research topics
- Humanities
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Art
- Geography
- Media studies
- Civil engineering
- Archaeology
- Computer Science
- Engineering
- Operating system
- Visual arts
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
Selected publications
“Mujer Migrante Memorial (MMM)” and Necro-Art
2025-07-04
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding“Mujer Migrante Memorial (MMM)” is an urban art installation that honors the lives of female migrants who have died in the desert of Arizona since the 1990s. “MMM” is a guerrilla street-art-style memorializing effort that happened on June 19, 2021 as part of yet another ongoing intervention, “The Wall That Gives/El MURO QUE DA,” created by artist Filomena Cruz (Maite Zubiaurre’s alter ego) in 2015. In this case, “The Wall That Gives/El Muro Que Da,” which routinely gives away art for free, gave its surface to a migrant memorial that calls attention to the close to four hundred female migrants whose bodies have been recovered from the Sonoran Desert from 2000 to 2021. “MMM” seeks to raise awareness about violent death and the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border, and to ignite reflection about the ethical implications of necro-art.
6 “Mujer Migrante Memorial (MMM)” and Necro-Art
2025-12-11
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingEl documental Aguilas: historia de una génesis Testimonio documental
2025-08-01
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThis reflection describes the inception and development of Aguilas/Eagles , a short documentary directed and produced by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Maite Zubiaurre in 2021. This award-winning documentary narrates how a group of volunteers searches for the bodies of undocumented migrants in the Arizona desert.
“Mujer Migrante Memorial (MMM)” and Necro-Art
2025-07-04
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding26 Everything is Rubbish/Nothing is Rubbish: Basurama and the “Trashformation” of Public Space
Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- Computer Science
- Philosophy
Everything is Rubbish/Nothing is Rubbish: Basurama and the “Trashformation” of Public Space
2023-01-17
other1st authorCorrespondingEverything is Rubbish/Nothing is Rubbish:
2022-11-18
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe MIT Press eBooks · 2020 · 26 citations
- Humanities
- Sociology
- Humanities
Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies. Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field. Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim—Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote “literary justice” in Los Angeles.
Urban Humanities: New Practices for Reimagining the City
2020 · 8 citations
- Humanities
- Sociology
- Political Science
Original, action-oriented humanist practices for interpreting and intervening in the city: a new methodology at the intersection of the humanities, design, and urban studies.Urban humanities is an emerging field at the intersection of the humanities, urban planning, and design. It offers a new approach not only for understanding cities in a global context but for intervening in them, interpreting their histories, engaging with them in the present, and speculating about their futures. This book introduces both the theory and practice of urban humanities, tracing the evolution of the concept, presenting methods and practices with a wide range of research applications, describing changes in teaching and curricula, and offering case studies of urban humanities practices in the field.Urban humanities views the city through a lens of spatial justice, and its inquiries are centered on the microsettings of everyday life. The book's case studies report on real-world projects in mega-cities in the Pacific Rim?Tokyo, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Los Angeles?with several projects described in detail, including playful spaces for children in car-oriented Mexico City, a commons in a Tokyo neighborhood, and a rolling story-telling box to promote ?literary justice? in Los Angeles.
Litter and the urban imaginary
2018-09-28
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingMore often than not, waste attracts artists because of its threatening monumentality. This chapter, however, is not about the monumental nature of trash, or about the dystopian urban imaginaries that mega-trash immediately inspires, instead, it is about imaginaries of a more amiable kind, suggestive of cities that embrace humans instead of overwhelming and even crushing them. The chapter is a reflection of what art does with, and to, urban refuse at its early stages when it is still tiny, a newborn really that will only later accumulate and grow into gigantic proportions, and about what British street artist Ben Wilson and Mexican artists Ilana Boltvinik, Mariana Mañón, and Rodrigo Viñas, the members of art collective TRES, are able to accomplish with the help of one particular type of litter – the spat-out chewing gum one routinely finds on the streets. Artists sitting on the pavement and bending over discarded chewing gum are imagining new possibilities for the city they inhabit. When Ben Wilson paints a quaint micro-landscape on a chewing gum blob, he is not only “decorating” it, but suggesting that urban life could be quite different from what it is. Similarly, TRES’s archeological study and lab work around spat-out chewing gum amasses biological and environmental data not only to determine the nature of human behavior and urban reality, but, more importantly to create new imaginaries for the city they inhabit.
Frequent coauthors
- 3 shared
Todd Presner
- 2 shared
Anastasia Loukaitou‐Sideris
- 2 shared
Jonathan Jae-an Crisman
University of Arizona
- 2 shared
Dana Cuff
University of California, Los Angeles
- 1 shared
Eilene Powell
- 1 shared
Amanda Valenzuela
- 1 shared
Jonathan Banfill
Awards & honors
- Vanderbilt University Press 2020 Norman L. and Roselea J. Go…
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