Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Popular Music Project of the Norman Lear Center. He is the author or editor of several books, including Audiotopia: Music, Race and America, and his writings on music and culture have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Los Angeles Magazine, and many other publications. As a curator and consultant, he has worked with The Getty Foundation, the GRAMMY Museum, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Autry Museum, the Skirball Cultural Center, and others.

Tyree Boyd-Pates is a dynamic history curator, professor, writer, and speaker who expounds on Black culture from a millennial vantage and mobilizes communities of color through journalism, social media, education, and history. With his work featured in The New York Times, Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, Fast Company, Fortune Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and other media outlets, Tyree's groundbreaking history exhibitions have inspired thousands to visit museums and engage with history anew. Additionally, he is a regular lecturer at universities to discuss American history, curation, and museums. Tyree is also a TEDx speaker who champions inner-city youth across the country.

Suyapa Portillo Villeda is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Latina/o Transnational Studies at Pitzer College. Her research and teaching priorities include Central American history, migration to the U.S., gender and labor in Central America, LGBTTI Latina/o populations and queer (im)migration in the Americas. Her work focuses on the intersections between labor, gender, ethnicity, race, and other marginalized identities in workers’ lives in Central America and in the U.S.

Natalia Molina is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two award-winning books, How Race Is Made in America:  Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts and Fit to Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1940, as well as co-editor of Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice. Her work examines the interconnectedness of racial and ethnic communities through her concept of "racial scripts" which looks at how practices, customs, policies and laws that are directed at one group and are readily available and hence easily applied to other groups. She continues to explore the themes of race, space, labor, immigration, gender, and urban history in her forthcoming book Place-Making at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant in Los Angeles Nourished its Community (University of California Press, 2022). Professor Molina is working on a new book, The Silent Hands that Shaped the Huntington: A History of Its Mexican Workers. 

D. J. Waldie is the author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out. His narratives about life in Los Angeles have appeared in Buzz magazine, Kenyon Review, the Massachusetts Review, the Georgetown Review, Salon and Dwell magazine. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times. He is a contributing writer for Los Angeles magazine. D.J. Waldie lives a not-quite-middle-class life in Lakewood, in the house his parents bought in 1946.

Carolina A. Miranda is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times where she reports on art and culture. She has also been a reporter for Time magazine and worked as an independent journalist, contributing to outlets such as NPR, ARTnews and Architect. She is a regular contributor for KCRW’s “Press Play” and was the founding co-chair of the Los Angeles Times Guild employee union.

David Kipen was born and raised in Los Angeles. He founded the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen teaches full-time in the UCLA writing program. A familiar voice on public radio, he also serves as book critic for Los Angeles magazine and is critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times.

David Kipen was born and raised in Los Angeles. He opened the nonprofit Boyle Heights lending library Libros Schmibros in 2010. Former literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, book editor/critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, and contributor to multiple volumes of California cultural history, Kipen teaches full-time in the UCLA writing program. A familiar voice on public radio, he also serves as book critic for Los Angeles Magazine and critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times.

Francisco Cantú served as an agent for the United States Border Patrol in the deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas from 2008 to 2012. A former Fulbright fellow, he is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award. His essays and translations have been featured on This American Life and in Best American Essays, Harper’s, Guernica, Orion, n+1 and Ploughshares. The Line Becomes a River is his first book. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Ruxandra Guidi, a native of Caracas, Venezuela, is an independent journalist with more than fifteen years of experience working in public radio, magazines, and multimedia. She has reported throughout the United States, the Caribbean, South and Central America, as well as Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border region. She’s also worked as a reporter, editor, and producer for NPR’s Latino USA, the BBC daily news program, The World, the CPB-funded Fronteras Desk in San Diego-Tijuana, and KPCC Public Radio’s Immigration and Emerging Communities beat in Los Angeles. She collaborates regularly with her husband, photographer Bear Guerra, under the name Fonografia Collective.

Steven J. Ross is a professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life. He is the author of Hollywood Left and Right, recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Award and nominated for a Pulitzer; Working-Class Hollywood, nominated for a Pulitzer and the National Book Award; Movies and American Society; and Workers on the Edge. He lives in Southern California.

Rob Eshman is the former Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Journal.

Bob Holman has played a central role in the spoken word and slam poetry movements of the last several decades. He is the author of 16 poetry collections, most recently Sing This One Back to Me. He is a co-founder and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, and his study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages. Holman is the producer and host of various films, including The United States of Poetry and On the Road with Bob Holman. His most recent film, Language Matters with Bob Holman, won the Berkeley Film Festival’s 2015 Documentary of the Year award and aired on PBS in January 2016. Holman is working with language revitalization centers across Alaska and Hawaii, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. He has taught at Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. He was the original Slam Master and director at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the founder/proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club.

Vincent Medina is an indigenous language activist and a leader of the movement to revive Chochenyo as a spoken language. He served as the assistant curator at Mission Dolores in San Francisco and worked to change the narrative of Indian history to focus on Native resistance and survival. Vincent is a contributor to the publication News from Native California and author of the blog "Being Ohlone in the 21st Century."

Odilia Romero Hernández is an indigenous Zapotec from the village of Zoogocho in the northern mountains of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, and is based in Los Angeles, CA. She is the Vice Binational Coordinator of Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales/Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB). She served six years as Binational Women’s Issues Coordinator of FIOB and, for more than a decade, has worked with indigenous Mexican and binational organizations in human rights and cultural and political education. She has been published in many academic papers that appear in “Otro Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Cultural Politics” and “Indigenous Migrants and Language Barriers in the United States,” as well as "Mujer rebelde: testimonio de Odilia Romero Hernandez."

Virginia Carmelo was born in Orange County, California, and raised in Fullerton, California. In 1998, Carmelo and her family began endeavors to revitalize Tongva tribal song, dance, and regalia. In 2004, Virginia started to research the Tongva language. From 2001 to 20012, Virginia served as a Tribal Council Member of the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation, the tribe indigenous to the Los Angeles Basin. She served as Tribal Chair from 2006 to 2010. Virginia lives in Anaheim, California.

Leanne Hinton is a professor emerita of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and an advisory member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. She works with endangered languages as an advocate and practicing trainer in language revitalization. With other language activists, she has helped found organizations devoted to language revitalization and helped design language learning methods that are now used worldwide. Hinton has written, edited, and co-edited numerous books and articles on Native American languages and language revitalization, including her most recent Bringing Our Languages Home, and The Routledge Handbook on Language Revitalization.

Ali Noorani is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration. Growing up in California as the son of Pakistani immigrants, Ali learned how to forge alliances among people of wide-ranging backgrounds, a skill that has served him well as one of the nation’s most innovative coalition builders. In 2015, Ali was named a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a Master’s in Public Health from Boston University and is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Ali lives in Washington, D.C.

Pilar Marrero is a journalist and author with long experience in covering social and political issues of the Latino community in the US. She is the author of Killing the American Dream, which chronicles the last 25 years of US immigration policy mishaps and was published in Spanish with the title El Despertar del Sueño Americano. Marrero is currently covering the impact of President Donald Trump’s policies on the immigrant community for Impremedia, a company with media outlets in 15 markets across the US, including the flagship La Opinion Newspaper in Los Angeles.

Judith Freeman has published a collection of short stories and three novels, including The Chinchilla Farm and A Desert of Pure Feeling.

Irene Borger is a journalist and novelist, writer-in-residence at AIDS Project Los Angeles, and the editor of From a Burning House: Stories from the APLA Writers Workshop.

Alex Raksin is a member of the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times and for many years was a columnist and deputy book editor for the LA Times book reivew.