Herrera said the field is connected to thinking about how locations in any sense, such as a neighborhood, a city or a country, are produced and how people inhabit them in dynamic ways – such as thinking about how colonization has shaped inequalities and power relations in America. After multiple undergraduate research programs at UCLA, he said he became interested in geography in graduate school. What started off as a personal project turned into a lifelong passion for Herrera. It was kind of like doing autobiography work.” “Research became a way for me to find out more about myself. “I really wanted to learn about my home country of Guatemala but I found that most of the classes that were on Latin America were either about Brazil or Mexico or the big countries,” Herrera said. As an immigrant from Guatemala, he said he wanted to learn more about his roots beyond what was taught in his classes, so he turned towards conducting his own research. He entered UCLA as an undergraduate business student, but he said his lack of passion for the topic steered him in a new direction – Latin American and Chicano studies. Herrera, a first-generation scholar and UCLA alumnus, said he never predicted he would someday be in the shoes of his past professors. Geography professor Juan Herrera embodies the notion that representation matters in academia.
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