Briseyda Barrientos Ariza

Briseyda Barrientos Ariza is a Guatemalan American and first-generation doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where she studies Central American orature and is pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. Her research explores how orature — and its practice throughout the Central American isthmus and its multidirectional diaspora — functions twofold: as a collective, de-nationalized revolutionary space comprised of multiple cultural agents, and as a rhetorical (method)ology that directly opposes colonial narratives, allowing alternative texts to emerge outside the page. Her other research interests include Central American/isthmian and diaspora studies, performance studies, archival studies, decolonial theory, Black and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies, the politics of temporality and memory, cultural autonomy, film, sonic art, and sonic territories and imaginations.

Barrientos Ariza is a 2025 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow, and a Graduate Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). She also serves as an advisor to Teaching Central America, a curriculum-building project supporting K-12 schools in teaching about Central America and its diaspora.

Barrientos Ariza completed a B.S. in English literature and psychology, summa cum laude, from Towson University (2022) and an M.Phil in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar (2024). As a writer, her poetic work has been published and awarded in Grubstreet Literary Magazine (Towson, 2020 and 2021), Reclamation Magazine (New York, 2020 and 2021), The Trinity Review (Cambridge, 2023), and most recently La Horchata Zine (Washington, D.C., 2026). She has also served as an Editor of The Scholar Magazine’s 2024 issue entitled This Bridge Called ____ and as Lead Editor of Yale’s Variantes Issue No. 2. Her most recent academic publication appears in the bilingual anthology entitled Liberation through destruction: From fantastic creatures to marginalized social groups / Liberación a través de la destrucción: de criaturas fantásticas a grupos sociales marginados (2025).

Prior to Yale, Barrientos Ariza worked in philanthropy, providing grant support to grassroots organizations across Central America and the U.S. that advance women and girls’ access to education and sexual reproductive health and rights in the toughest regions to be female or gender diverse. She believes it is imperative that the work of the pen and mouth be tied to the work of the people, and emphasizes that we cannot afford to neglect the archives, narratives, and methodologies that convey the epistemologies, hearts, and life politics of the populations who shape our collective history and future.

Recent conference presentations:

“Espectrealidades: Diálogos de memoria, duelo y desobediencia visual en las obras artísticas de Ricardo Martínez Teruel y Regina José Galindo,” Latin American Studies Association: Centroamérica, San José, Costa Rica (August 2026).

“The Sounded Word in the Sounded World: Central American Orature in The Cacophonous Bizarre,” Latin American Studies Association, Paris, France (May 2026).

“(Re)Turning to Memory: Transnational-Cultural Memory as Revolutionary Space,” The Cambridge History of Memory & Emotions Conference, Cambridge, U.K. (March 2024).

“¡Aaayyy Mis Hijos!: La Llorona and La Siguanaba as Central American Counterstories,” Northeast Modern Language Association, Niagara Falls, N.Y. (April 2023).