Jade Power-Sotomayor

Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at UC San Diego. Engaging with discourses of embodiment and embodied practices of remembering and creating community, her work focuses on the fluid reconstitution of Latinx identity ultimately produced by doing and not simply being. Overall, she seeks to promote an in-depth engagement with Latinx performance-making as a framework for taking up the most salient issues of our time: colonialism, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, economic disparity, patriarchy and misogyny, queer and transphobia, ableism and mental health access, climate catastrophe and environmental justice. More than just including historically occulted voices as a form of ethnographic encounter, she looks to these instances of performance for what they reveal about the structures of power and social dynamics that have shaped the world we collectively share. Her research and writerly interests span across Puerto Rican cultural studies, Latinx/Latine theatre and performance, dance studies, nightlife cultures, epistemologies of the body, land-based performances, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, race and language, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora.

Dr. Power-Sotomayor’s monograph ¡Habla! Speaking Bodies and Dancing Our América (forthcoming from NYU Press) examines the capacity of dancing to both incarnate and instruct towards a kind of survivance for people tethered to the conceptual axis of “our América.” Using Afro-Puerto Rican bomba as a point of departure the book theorizes the mutual indebtedness between the sonic and corporeal, demonstrating how these bodies “speak” and engage in practices of “embodied code switching” that index the interplay between the linguistic and the embodied, and re-route/switch from the logics encoded in the project of modernity. Examining performance artists, communities, and activist projects, the book’s chapters link bomba to son jarocho (from Veracruz, Mexico) and perreo (twerk-like Caribbean-originated movement).

Dr. Power-Sotomayor also works as a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego group Bomba Liberté. She is grateful to her many teachers and students for gifting her a lifelong experience of learning. 

Select publications include:

• “La bomba y su política: el batey en la Convención Nacional Demócrata del 2024.” Categoría Cinco: Revista de Pólitica y cultura Puerto Rico. 2025.

• “From the Last Acto to the First Chicano Play on Broadway: Brown Men and State Violence in Soldado Razo and Zoot Suit.” Co-authored with Guillermo Avilés-Rodríguez. In Luis Valdez. Routledge. 2024.
  
  
• “Racial Masquerade and Black Latinidades in Rachel Lynett’s Black Mexican.” Routledge Handbook of Latine Theatre. March 2024.
  
  
• “Un llanto colectivo: A PerformaProtesta.” Theatre Journal. 2023. (Winner of the 2024 Outstanding Article Award, Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and Winner of the 2024 Vera Mowry Roberts Award for Research and Publication, American Theatre and Drama Society)
  
  
• “Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to puertorriqueñxs.” Performance Matters. 2020. (Winner of the Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research and the American Studies Association’s Sound Studies Caucus Prize for Best Essay)
  
  
• “Moving Borders and Dancing in Place: Son jarocho’s Speaking Bodies at the Fandango Fronterizo.” TDR. 2020. (Winner of the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Dance Studies Association)
  
  
• “Puerto Rican Bomba: Syncopating Bodies, Histories, Geographies.” Co-edited special issue of CENTRO Journal for Puerto Rican Studies. 2019.
  
  
• “Putting Puerto Rico’s Best (Black)Face Forward: Ramón Rivero’s Diplo and Racialized Performances of Liberation” Latino Studies. 2019.