“[T]he “real” of settler colonial society is built on the violent erasures of alternative modes of mapping and geographic understandings. The Americas as a social, economic, political, and inherently spatial construction has a history and a relationship to people who have lived here long before Europeans arrived. It also has a history of colonization, imperialism, and nation-building."
Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) in Mark My Words

Sarah Montoya is a queer Mexican-American settler working at the intersection of Settler Colonial Studies, Critical Geographies, Feminist Technology Studies, and Critical Information Studies. She earned a Ph.D. in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her dissertation, “Electronic Empires and Digital Domains” examines representations and material histories of technological and computational development in the U.S. through the lens of settler colonial studies. The project addresses settler-state investments in telecommunications infrastructure and policy, interrogates settler colonial geographic imaginaries in narratives of computational development, and examines settler colonial logics embedded in the code and interface of digital cartographic projects. Additional research interests include histories of scientific racism, critical legal studies, queer and trans of color studies, and abolitionist discourse and activism

Act in Solidarity

Decolonization, or the return of land to its Indigenous, ancestral kin and relations, is necessary. Learn more about The Return of Stolen Land to the Wiyot and the Return of Tc’ih-Léh-Dûñ to the InterTribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council. To think about how to negotiate our ongoing occupation of Native land and what settlers can do in solidarity, learn about The Shuumi Land Tax. To learn about the land you occupy, visit the Native Land Digital project. Returning the land and repairing relations is possible.

2024
2017
2013
2009

Current Work

Sarah is the recipient of a National Park Service Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellowship on the Anza National Historic Trail where she will contribute to “research, interpretation, outreach, and educational and digital programming initiatives focused on the complexities of Indigeneity, identity and heritage of Spanish colonization and the Anza Expedition.” The position allows Sarah to utilize her experience as a curator, researcher, site designer, and programmer on a variety of public humanities projects. While at UCLA, she focused on digital mapping and digital explorations of race, space, and the legal system in both the US and Canada. She worked with Dr. Mishuana Goeman on Mapping Indigenous LA and Carrying Our Ancestors Home and worked with Dr. Sherene Razack on establishing The Racial Violence Hub and Race and Deaths in Custody

Previous Work

Before attending UCLA, Sarah received a Bachelor of Arts in Women’s Studies, English, and a Master’s in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her Master’s thesis  “Queer (Cyber) Spaces: Representations of Queer Subjectivities in Queer Digital Communities,” examines how online citizenship is shaped through software and site interfaces and how this impacts the staging and (re)presentations of queer identities online. She remains honored to be UTSA’s first Women’s Studies graduate. Her Honor’s Thesis entitled, “’No se raje, Chicanita’: An Exploration of Identity Politics, Social Scripts, and Power Negotiations in Latina Authors’ Youth Literature,” explores Latina-authored youth literature geared towards young Latinas and was specifically attentive to the politics of visual representation in children’s books. The thesis represented UTSA at the 2010 National Collegiate Honors Council’s Portz Scholars Award.