Sirena Pellarolo is an activist-scholar, published poet and playwright and educator born in Argentina. She is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at California State University, Northridge.
She is the author of numerous articles on Latin/o/a American performance and gender studies, globalization, and new social movements. Her book Sainete criollo/ democracia/ representación. El caso de Nemesio Trejo (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1997) is a study of the popular and ethnic theater of Buenos Aires at the turn of the XX century, that portrays the vast immigration flows into Argentina and the push towards democratization that immigrant organizations effected on national politics. Her book De minas y tangos, sainetes y cabaret. Una antología (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, forthcoming 2009) is an anthology of sainetes de cabaret, with a critical introduction that studies the gendered performance of modernization in Argentina (1910-1930), staged within the French-influenced cabaret culture and the internationalization of tango.
Sirena works with the Eastside Cafe, El Sereno, an autonomous space in Northeast Los Angeles, inspired by the Zapatista example of autonomy, horizontality and self-determination. She firmly believes in the decolonization of individualistic and competitive attitudes internalized from our capitalist upbringing and in the construction of new emancipated subjectivities towards collective “we’s”. She is currently walking the politics of resistance and creation with autonomous movements of the Americas (Chiapas, Los Angeles, Argentina) from an observing participant perspective.
Her research interests include Politics and Performance in the Americas, Globalization and Transnational Autonomous Movements, Hemispheric Indigenous Studies, Radical Women of Color Theory, Decolonization Studies, Gender, Sexuality and Queer Studies, Oral History and Ethnography, Latin/o/a American Cultural Studies of Race and Ethnicity and Popular Cultures.