(In)Visibilities in the U.S. Imperial Academy: Central American Knowledge Production from Outside of Disciplinary Borders

Abstract

In the U.S. academy, Central American knowledge faces severe epistemic invisibility and a lack of disciplinary investment, with only two Central American Studies departments nationally. Within the discipline of higher education, there is a dearth of studies related to Central Americans that follow the pattern of erasure in the national landscape wherein U.S. Central Americans are excluded from the academy, knowledge production, and even the national imaginaries of minoritization in the U.S. (Padilla, 2022). This study aimed to better understand the systems that produce Central American invisibility by examining how U.S. Central American faculty experience three forms of (in)visibilities in the academy: invisibility, hypervisibility, and visibility.Designed as a project of epistemological disobedience (Mignolo, 2009), the study’s framework, Colonialities of the U.S. Imperial Academy, is a tool for fugitive scholarship (Harney & Moten, 2013), which employs the framings of coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), gender (Lugones, 2007), knowledge (Lander, 2000; Quijano, 2000), and being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) to interrogate the academy as an arm of empire. Combined with Central American-informed methods that include research accompaniment (Tomlinson & Lipsitz, 2019; Abrego, 2022). Central American diasporic storytelling (Contreras, 2024), and Black and Indigenous Central American feminist practices of re/memory (Ramsey, 2024; Guzman, 2025; White, 2025), the study’s findings are drawn from the storytelling of five U.S. Central American faculty. Co-constructed from a research relationality of Central American kinship, this study offers a larger story of the interconnectivity between coloniality, (in)visibilities, U.S. Empire, and its academy; articulates a Black Central American Caribbean consciousness; and weaves together testimonial narratives of Central American knowledge production as struggles for epistemic sovereignty.