Orlando Ochoa, Jr.

Orlando Ochoa, Jr. (they/them) was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. They are a fourth-year African & African Diaspora Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies candidate. Orlando is broadly interested in critical theory, anti-colonial thought, poetics, cultural geographies, time, and questions and elaborations of what it means to be human. Under the guidance and mentorship of professor Mónica Jiménez, Orlando’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship thesis asks questions of pleasure, domination, and performance in a genre of pornography that represents policing and border patrol violence. Orlando is working on another project that meditates on the violence of border landscapes and asks how we might think of the manipulation of the natural world for terror in and as the afterlife of racial slavery and coloniality as ecological catastrophe. As a life-long student, Orlando hopes to continue their studies after graduation to become a professor.