DETAINED Team
Daniel Hernandez is Content Development Manager. Daniel promotes the Florence Project’s mission through social media posts, emails, newsletters and videos about their clients and their work. Daniel was a longtime contributor to The Guardian newspaper, and his writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, VICE, the LA Review of Books, and other publications. He won the 2015 Richard J. Margolis Award as a promising new writer whose work shows concern for social justice. Project role: Interview coordination and facilitation and maintenance of client confidentiality.
Greer Millard is the Florence Project's Communications Manager. She joined the organization in January 2017 and has been in her current role since 2018. Greer is responsible for managing the Florence Project's external, non-legal communications, including press releases, statements, emails to supporters, and collaborating with her colleagues on Florence Project publications, such as annual reporters and biannual newsletters. She also works with the advocacy and leadership teams to establish messaging priorities, write talking points, and advocate for our clients with local and federal elected officials. Project role: Interview coordination and facilitation and maintenance of client confidentiality.
Astrid Riley was born and raised in Tucson, AZ. She received her B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Arizona and started a career in hospitality working for Marriott for over six years. Astrid is the daughter of immigrants from Los Mochis, Sinaloa, Mexico and has always been passionate about immigrants’ rights and issues. In September 2020, she changed her career path and joined the Florence Project team as the Volunteer Coordinator. She is excited to transition into non-profit work and is looking forward to growing at the Florence Project. In June 2022, Astrid transitioned to the Communications Assistant role and joined the DETAINED team. Project role: Interview coordination and facilitation and maintenance of client confidentiality.
Susan Briante is the author of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state. In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “a superb examination of the ethical issues facing artists who tell others’ stories.” Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders (Ahsahta Press). Briante has received grants and awards from the Atlantic Monthly, the MacDowell Colony, the Academy of American Poets, the US-Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Ucross Foundation. She is a professor of creative writing at UA, where she also serves as co-coordinator of the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings MFA students to the US-Mexico border to engage in reciprocal research projects with community-based environmental and social justice groups. Project role: Interviews, translation, coordination of interpretive projects.
Francisco Cantú is a writer, translator, and the author of The Line Becomes a River, winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. A former Fulbright fellow, he has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Award, and an Art for Justice fellowship. His writing and translations have been featured in The New Yorker, Best American Essays, Harper’s, and VQR, as well as on This American Life. A lifelong resident of the Southwest, he now lives in Tucson, where he coordinates the Field Studies in Writing Program at the University of Arizona and works to support incarcerated migrants through correspondence and accompaniment programs. Project role: Interviews, translation, coordination of interpretive projects.
Anita Huizar-Hernández is an associate professor in the ASU School of International Letters and Cultures. Huizar-Hernández's teaching and research focus on the literatures and cultures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and investigate the ways that stories—past, present, and future—shape our ability to cultivate just and inclusive communities within the borderlands. Her book Forging Arizona examines these themes through a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme in which a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to present his wife as the heiress to a spurious Spanish land grant with the intention of claiming ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Huizar-Hernández's other writing has appeared in edited volumes as well as MELUS, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and English Language Notes, among other places. Project role: Project management, interviews, coordination of archive creation and interpretive projects.
David Taylor is a professor in the UA School of Art. His work examines place, territory, history and politics. Exhibited widely, his projects reveal how borders can function not only as spatial demarcations, but also as an amplifying device particularly attuned to changing geo-political, environmental and social conditions. Taylor’s recent work frames for-profit immigrant detention as a vast industrial landscape of incarceration which has commodified human displacement. Awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, his artwork is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including the Library of Congress and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Taylor’s projects have been featured in outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, and Places Journal. Most recently he was awarded a 2019 residency at Proyecto Siqueiros: La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Project role: Project management, interviews, coordination of archive creation, interpretive projects.
aems emswiler is a second year PhD student in the University of Arizona School of Information. Prior to joining UA, they spent ten years in Texas organizing to support incarcerated people’s access to information and mediums of personal expression through art and writing. They founded the archive for the books-to-prisons project and also work with the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). Their contributions to these projects include direct correspondence with creators, digitization and processing, preservation, and web-publishing. They also developed the calls for submissions, permissions questionnaire, and description forms for incarcerated contributors. These documents assure that creators maintain agency and autonomy over their stories and the ways their narratives are shared, described, and accessed on Omeka. Project role: creation of archival protocols, creation of interview permissions, coordination of collaborative metadata development, Omeka site development.
David Blanco Gaitan is a second year law student at the University of Arizona specializing in immigration law. Through an externship for Dr. Maurice Goldman, an immigration attorney in Tucson, David has gained professional experience conducting interviews with people who have recently immigrated to the U.S. and translating those interviews from Spanish to English. Project role: interviews, immigration law, translation.