Professor, Communication
- PhD, University of California San Diego, Communication
- MA, San Diego State University, Communication
- BA, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Political Science
Antonieta Mercado has a PhD in Communication from the University of California, San Diego, a Master’s in Communication from San Diego State University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales at the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM). She was born in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and currently lives in the US/México border, in the territory of the Kumeyaay nation.
Antonieta is currently a Professor of Communication and Social Justice at the University of San Diego’s Department of Communication and she is the Director of the Program in Latin American Studies. She got the 2021 Freire and hooks Decolonial Pedagogy Award by the Center for Education Excellence for her commitment to pedagogies and content on racial justice and BIPOC scholarship. She was also nominated by students as a Woman of Impact, and was awarded the Community Engagement Award by the Mulvaney Center for Community Awareness and Social Action at the University of San Diego for her engagement in the community. Antonieta is also a founding member of USD’s Decolonization Working Group.
She studies transnational communicative practices, civic advocacy journalism, Indigenous migration, decolonial pedagogy, diasporas, grassroots cosmopolitanism, festivals and public rituals as journalism, and comparative intersectionalities. She has published her work in journals, such as Comunicación y Sociedad, Journalism, Research and Practice, Ethnicities, and Communication Teacher. She has also published in edited volumes on Social Justice and Civic Engagement, Critical Intercultural Communication, Media and Diasporas, among others.
Areas of Expertise
Her research focuses on cross border communicative practices, such as festivals and public rituals, alternative media, Indigenous diasporas, grassroots cosmopolitanism, decolonial pedagogy, comparative intersectionalities, Day of the Dead as a celebration and the cultural practices involved, the creation of Day of the Dead altars, alebrije, and calaveras
Scholarly Work
Antonieta has an ongoing collaboration with the leadership of the Mixtec community in Linda Vista promoting the creation and maintenance of a community garden. In this project, she is currently working on supporting the recording and collection of community stories around the garden, as a way to preserve intergenerational narratives of caring for the environment and food as resistance.
She is the co-creator of the project “Comparative Race/Class and Gender Formations and Popular Culture,” a binational collaboration to compare how colonialism has produced race, gender and class in different societies around the world. Specifically, the project seeks to analyze how these formations are represented in media and popular culture.
Antonieta is also an artist who has organized and curated Day of the Dead altars and community events in the San Diego region since 2004, and organizes a yearly altar at the University of San Diego since 2012. Antonieta teaches alebrije- and calavera-making workshops, as a way of passing and transmitting the knowledge of this tradition onto her students and community members. She learned the alebrije-making techniques from Don Joel García, who learned and worked from Pedro Linares in his studio. Since 2015, she has been making papier-mâché sculptures related to the Day of the Dead altars.
Selected Works:
Mercado, A. and González-Hernández, D. (Forthcoming-2022). The Power of Critical Bilingual Spaces in School and Community to Counteract Subtractive Assimilation of Latinx Migrants in the US. In, Retis J., and Sánchez, A. (eds.) Communicative Spaces in Bilingual Contexts: Discourses, Synergies and Counterflows in Spanish and English. New York, NY: Routledge.
Mercado, A. (2021). Mujeres de la Comunicación: a fundamental book in the discipline. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 4:1, DOI: 10.1080/25729861.2021.1999164
Mercado, A. and González, J. (2021, October 2). We must honor Día de los Muertos’ Indigenous roots. San Diego Union Tribune. Available: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/story/2021-10-29/dia-de-los-muertos-history-traditions-altar
González-Hernández, D., Mercado, A. González, J.M., Delgado, E. (2020). Televisión, melodrama y bioseries: Juan Gabriel, Luis Miguel, y José José [Television, melodrama and bioseries: Juan Gabriel, Luis Miguel, y José José]. Comunicación y Sociedad. doi: https://doi.org/10.32870/cys.v2020.7492
Mercado, A. (2019). Mediated images of success: Hegemonic media representation and social justice. Communication Teacher, 33:2, 94-98, DOI: 10.1080/17404622.2018.1500701
Mercado, A. (2019). Decolonizing national public spheres: Indigenous migrants as transnational counterpublics. In Roza Tsagarouisianou & Jessica Retis (eds.), The Handbook of Diasporas, Media and Culture. Hoboken, NJ: Willey Blackwell and IAMCR.
Mercado, A. (2018). When borders are the intervention and colonialism the framework: Indigenous migrants in the US. In D. Travers Scott & Adrienne Shaw (Eds.), Interventions: Communication theory and practice. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Romero D. & Mercado, A. (2018). Cleaning San Diego: Migration, geography, exclusion and resistance. Ethnicities. doi: 10.1177/1468796817740174
Mercado, A. (2018). Civic engagement: Learning from teaching community praxis. Mari Castañeda & Joseph Krupczynski (Eds.), Learning from Diverse Latina/o Communities: Social Justice Approaches to Civic Engagement (pp. 21-35). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Mercado, A. (2015). El Tequio: Social capital, civic advocacy journalism and the construction of a transnational public sphere by Mexican Indigenous migrants in the US. Journalism, 16(2), 238-256. doi: 10.1177/1464884913509782
Mercado. A. (2015). Medios Indígenas Trasnacionales: El fomento del Cosmopolitismo desde abajo. [Transnational Indigenous Media: Fostering Grassroots Cosmopolitanism]. Comunicación y Sociedad 23:171-193. issn 0188-252x
Areas of Interest
Her teaching focuses on Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice, and she regularly teaches classes such as International Media, Media and Conflict, Latin American Media and Popular Culture, Media Criticism, Public Relations and Community Advocacy, and Introduction to Media.