While living in Santa Barbara, before his academic career, Michael worked with Global Voice Foundation for 3 years as an editor and filmmaker, working in our small office in Murphy’s private home. He traveled with Murphy to South Africa and Botswana to film a gathering on behalf of the Kalahari San Bushmen in 2007 and to Mexica to film the Pyramid of the Sun and the Moon in 2008. Michael claims from the experience of working with us, he became an anti-colonial activist!
Michael Lechuga is an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico where he researches and teaches rhetoric, media, theories of settler colonialism, and Xicana/o/x studies. He examines the communication technologies that participate in the colonial organizing of settler subjects and occupied lands, rendering indigenous people, black people, and the environment, incomunicable–a term Erick Torrico uses to describe colonial modes of communication. Lechuga's new book, Visions of Invasion, explores this phenomenon as it pertains to today's anti-migrant, techno-border regime.
Lechuga is also the founder of the MUVE Lab at UNM, a VR lab founded on the principle of vincularidad, a term indigenous thinkers like Nina Pacari and Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez use to refer to a social connections mediated through shared care for the natural world.
See his new book published in 2023, Vision of Invasions.
See his publications on his Academia’s page: https://unm.academia.edu/MichaelLechuga
