Profiles of 2023-2024 CSWR Fellows

Hakim Bellamy

Hakim Bellamy is a UNM alumnus who received his Master of Arts in Communications from UNM in 2014 and is currently in his second year of studies at UNM School of Law. Prior to Law School, Bellamy was appointed Deputy Director of the Department of Arts & Culture for the City of Albuquerque by Mayor Tim Keller. The Inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of Albuquerque (2012-2014), Bellamy is a W. K. Kellogg Foundation Global Fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and Citizen University Civic Seminary Fellow. In 2012 he published his first collection of poetry, SWEAR (West End Press/University of New Mexico Press), and it landed him the Working Class Studies Tillie Olsen Award for Literature in 2012. His latest title, Commissions y Corridos (UNM Press) published in 2022, is his seventh book. Bellamy has held adjunct faculty positions at UNM (in both the the Chicano Studies and University College programs) and at the Institute of American Indian Arts (Performance Studies). Bellamy has shared his work, in person, in at least five countries and continues to use his art to change his communities.

Madison Garay

Madison Garay is a Master’s student in Art History at UNM, with an emphasis in Art of the Americas, and a research fellow for the CSWR. Her research at UNM focuses on transient spaces (interstates, highways), placemaking through material culture, and formulation of regional identities on historic Route 66 through the American Southwest. Generally, she is concerned with the internet space as a new facet in the visualization of geographic identity in the United States, and how it can platform communal archival projects. Madison holds a B.A. in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Madison has previous experience in digitization and collections management for the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery at UCSC. She is interested in expanding her Route 66 photographic research with interdisciplinary creative practices, such as poetry, zine-making, and video collage. Walking, driving, and cloud-watching are her favorite meditative pastimes.

Carlyn N. Pinkins

Carlyn N. Pinkins is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of New Mexico with research interests in African American history in the Southwest and twentieth-century North American Indigenous history.  Her dissertation research focuses on black homesteaders in the territory and state of New Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, exploring the motivations, urban and rural networks, and outcomes of black homesteaders who settled in and near Las Cruces, Roswell, Albuquerque, and Raton.  For the past six years, she has served as a researcher for the African American Museum and Cultural Center of New Mexico.  She is a 2017 Margaret T. G. Burroughs and Charles H. Wright Fellow of the Association of African American Museums as well as FY21 and FY22 graduate student fellow for the Center for Regional Studies at the University of New Mexico.  She has a B.A. and M.A. in History from Georgia Southern University.  As the 2022-2023 Dr. Charles Becknell, Sr., fellow at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, Ms. Pinkins will process a collection which documents the life and career of Dr. Charles Becknell, Sr.: Educator, author, minister, Civil Rights activist, founding Director of the African Studies program at UNM, New Mexico Cabinet Secretary, and State President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Carlyn is also an avid soccer fan, supporting Liverpool FC and New Mexico United.

Travis Torres Thompson

Travis Torres Thompson was raised in Taos, New Mexico and is a graduate student in the Department of Chicana/o Studies and a Distinctive Native American Collections Fellow at the Center for Southwest Research. Travis holds a B.A. in Native American Studies and in Anthropology from the University of New Mexico. As an El Puente Research Fellow at UNM, he researched traditional and contemporary running practices in Native American communities and among Indigenous diasporas. From his own experience with long-distance and prayer running, Travis looked at how this activity, rooted in cultural knowledge and land-based practice, can itself be a means of research and raising consciousness. In Spring 2023, he co-organized the Traditions of Endurance conference which invited primarily Indigenous voices to celebrate and discuss the many roles of dancing and running in their lives and communities. In his graduate program, he aims to continue this research into running epistemology, as well as look at how Chicanx and Indigenous storytellers enrich and infuse the pop culture phenomenon of comics with personal and culturally relevant narratives and representation. Travis hopes to use this medium of graphic storytelling in his own presentation of research and personal narrative, highlighting its importance in disseminating regional stories and worldbuilding.