José-Guadalupe Ortega

Associate Professor
Department of History
Africana & Black Studies Coordinator
Gender Studies 
Latino Studies
jortega@whittier.edu

Academic History

Bachelor of Arts, UCLA

Master of Arts and Ph.D., UCLA

Academic Focus

  • Race
  • Black Atlantic
  • African Diaspora
  • Anti-Slavery Freedom Suits
  • Social Justice Movements
  • Coloniality of Gender
  • Gender Parallelism
  • Afro-Cuban Religion
  • Voices, Intellectual, and Cultural Knowledge of Underrepresented Peoples

Courses Taught 

  • Introduction to African History
  • Introduction to African Diaspora and Liberation Movements
  • Introduction to Colonial Latin American History
  • Black Atlantic
  • Gender and Sexuality in Latin America
  • Modern Cuba
  • Cuban Revolution
  • Popular Rebellions and Conspiracies in Latin America
  • 1968 Social Movements
  • The Beatles

José Guadalupe Ortega is Associate Professor of History serving multiple curricular programs, including the Environmental Studies, Anthropology, and Music majors, and Liberal Education. His courses concern global peoples, especially on the Latin American and African continents, Cuba, and Central Mexico. Ortega served as Chair of the History Department from 2015-2018. Ortega has served as program coordinator of Gender Studies from 2015 to 2019, and since 2019, Africana & Black Studies. He has earned multiple research fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since 2011, Ortega has served as a faculty advisor and mentor for student fellowships.

In service to Whittier College, Ortega has also served on the Curriculum Committee 2019-20, the Faculty Affairs Committee, and currently serves on the student conference committee, Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (URSCA).

Book projects

Ortega’s book manuscript, Freedom, Identity, and the History of Empires in Atlantic Cuba, 1791-1842, is part of a growing body of literature examining enslaved peoples as they engaged their masters and the law in their claims to freedom while navigating transnational contexts, and centers on women.

Articles

  • “Freedom, Identity, and the Social History of Empire in Atlantic Cuba, 1795–1817,” Slavery & Abolition (2014).
  • “Seeking a Righteous King: a Bahamian Runaway Slave in Cuba,” in Nicole Aljoe and Ian Finseth, eds., Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas, University of Virginia Press, 2014.
  • “Machines, Modernity, and Sugar: the Greater Caribbean in a Global Context, 1812–1850,” Journal of Global History 9:1 (March 2014).
  • “Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808–1848 (book review),” The Americas 67:2 (October 2010), pp. 298–300.
  • “From Obscurity to Notoriety: Cuban Slave Merchants and the Atlantic World,” in Toyin Falola and Matt Childs, eds., The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa, Carolina Academic Press, 2009, pp. 287–307.
  • “Cuban Merchants, Slave Trade Knowledge, and the Atlantic World, 1790s–1820s," Colonial Latin American Historical Review, 13:3 (2009), pp. 225–251.

  • “Black Coachmen and Autonomous Social Networks in Colonial Cuba,” Latin American Studies Association, Boston, MA, May 24, 2019. 
  • “Memory of the Middle Passage: Women, Kinship and Freedom Suits in Cuba,” Liberated Africans and Digital Humanities: African Diaspora Reconsidered, UC Irvine, October 1–2, 2013.
  • “Memory of Enslavement: Women, Slavery, and Protest in Cuba, 1794–1816,” Latin American Studies Association, Washington, D.C., May 30, 2013.
  • “Networks, Knowledge, and Slavery in Colonial Cuba,” Latin American Studies Association, San Francisco, CA, May 23, 2012. 
  • “The Imperial, Regional, and Local Legal Implications of the Case of Bárbara Falero, Carabalí,” Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies Conference, Los Angeles, November 6, 2010. 
  • “Cuban Slavery and the Science of Work,” UC Irvine, Cuba Research Reflections, May 2, 2008.