Elvira is a writer and a public and digital humanist. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She received her BA from the Universidad de la Habana in 2014, and her doctorate from Vanderbilt University in 2022. Her dissertation explores how various twentieth and twenty-first-century Cuban and Cuban diaspora artists and writers have presented the Abakua Society—an Afro-Cuban religious male confraternity—and how the Society’s colonial legacies have shaped modern and contemporary cultural practices.

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Her work as a research assistant in the Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA), as an interpreter for the Vanderbilt University School of Law’s Immigration Practice Clinic (“IPC”), and as a community volunteer with Children of Hispanic Immigrants Collaborating to Overcome Stress (CHICOS) motivated her to create a searchable database of selected artworks made by LatinX artists, known as ContArte Latinoamerica (CAL). Under the umbrella of CAL, she is developing a series of interdisciplinary and trans-institutional workshops that links Spanish creative writing, literature, and other means of artistic expression.