 Last, but not least, we have Juliana Loera-Wiggins. She's a PhD candidate in the Department of American Culture and Program of Latina and Latino Studies. Get ready to laugh because Juliana's talk titled, Our Laughter is a Symphony, will address how we can use humor as a tool to process our experiences as a fish out of water. As a practitioner and researcher of stand-up comedy, Juliana understands how humor has a place in every aspect of our lives. Individually, we carry multitudes of expression and markers of difference, even among folks who share our identities. This is the dissonance she wishes to address or the jangling discords we sound. But there is one bridge across difference that corresponds to how we make ourselves seen, heard and legible that she calls laughter as a symphony. Two interesting facts about Juliana are that she plays bass in a band and she's been playing rugby for almost 10 years. Please welcome to the stage Juliana. So, I am Mexican-American. I know I look like Anna Outdoorsy-White, but the mustache I've been growing since the third grade would say otherwise. I'll admit I wanted to try stand-up comedy because I like to laugh, but I love to make people laugh. There's no better feeling than watching someone's face crack open into a smile and hearing the sound of their laughter. And selfishly, my own will join in as well. But as a researcher and a comedian, studying comedy has made me make a deeper commitment to myself and stay true to my identity. My scholarship is inspired by growing up in a small rural Northern California town as one of the few Mexican-Americans and people of color. Luckily, I was raised looking up to numerous strong women in my life, including my sister, my mother, my grandmothers and Dora the Explorer. How can she afford to travel so much? I was growing up in a home where if I had fun today, I can't have fun tomorrow, but this little Latina can pick up her backpack and walk out the door with no consequences. Now that you're in the mood for laughing, I want you to think about your own laughter. Where in your body does it start? And to where does it bubble up to? Now I want you to consider how we can use laughter and humor as tools for social change. What if I told you that laughter can be a radical act of resistance? As comedians, when we sit down to write our material, we often begin with a moment that left us feeling embarrassed or confused. A comedy writing handbook calls this exercise a fish out of water. Who or what made you feel out of place and write down in detail what happened. This exercise certainly gives you perspective and for folks who inhabit marginalized identities and conditions, this can definitely turn your pain into a punchline and luckily I have a lot of material. For example, the bit that I opened up with about being an outdoorsy white was actually a comment I received from someone after I had performed in a comedy show. I typically welcome advice, but the degree this person went to would be with what some might call unsolicited. This person commented that I did not look Mexican enough or sound Mexican enough to deliver my material. They added that my racial ambiguity didn't make me suitable for something like comedy. And then they called me an outdoorsy white. And at the moment, I had absolutely no idea how to respond, but I'll admit images like this or like this did come into my head. But if we're gonna be real here, I wouldn't be in any of these photos because I'd be at home washing my brother's joanese. But I do remember how my body felt in that moment at someone questioning my racial identity. I felt dizzy and a little sick and even while I was trying to go to bed that night, the descriptor outdoorsy white, outdoorsy white, outdoorsy white, kept repeating over and over in my head until a light bulb went off and I wrote down in my phone, outdoorsy white. This person had given me the gift of a punchline in a totally inconsiderate and racially insensitive way, but a punchline nonetheless. The pain of being called an ethnic fraud had turned into a tickle. And this is a pretty simple, yet effective way of calling out someone's perception of me. It's a strategy that can resist what someone should look like and what they're capable of. I love researching humor and comedy because we can take moments like this and play with them in a million different ways. Comedy also offers us ways that we can inform audiences. We can also readjust your social world as comedians and we can add truth to a perspective. Yaki Chikana, scholar Yolanda Boyles-Gonzalez once wrote that laughter has a social importance to the oppressed. When we point at the skewed logic of hate, we can take away its power. With humor, we can turn our fears and our insecurities into a punchline and for those of us who belong to marginalized communities, we can take that painful stitch in our side and turn it into a tickle. Just think about how laughter and humor, when used as tools for social justice, have the potential to lead to action. Just as laughter moves the diaphragm, can also move your mind. And so I had an idea, why not bring my research to the University of Michigan? And this idea was really motivated by this feeling of not seeing enough Latinx folks in one room. We are, after all, only 8% of the student body here on campus and Latinas, specifically, make up less than 1% of comedians and doctoral holders in the country. When I told my parents I was making it in the 1%, this isn't exactly what they had in mind. But thanks to the Department of American Culture, the Center for World Performance Studies and the program of Latina and Latino Studies, I produced a Latina comedy show right here on campus for free. I invited Latina comedians who have participated in my doctoral research and who I have also performed with all across the Midwest. On the night of the show, when I walked on to the stage to introduce myself as one of the hosts and emcees for the evening, my breath was taken away. Every seat was filled, the show had already started and people were still walking into the theater trying to find a seat. What followed was nearly two hours of Latinas making fun of their bodily functions, humorously describing their relationships with their family and loved ones and expressing love and appreciation for the diversity that exists within our community. That feeling of not seeing enough of us turned into a precious sentiment of abundance. And I wasn't the only one who felt this way. A few days following the show, a student contacted me and in their message, they said that it is common to feel like the only Latinx person in the room and it's difficult to find communities here on campus. They added that at the comedy show they felt the most naturally Latinx that they've ever felt at this university and it especially warned my heart when they shared the following with me. You brought our true natural culture to us and gave us a safe space to reconnect to it. This student felt like they were given the freedom to laugh at the most beautiful and difficult parts of being Latinx and they felt the impact of seeing Latin, Latinas performs experiences similar to their own. Humor allows us to respond to the moments that made us feel powerless. At times we were made to feel different by systems that weren't built with us in mind but when marginalized voices speak out, we can set the record straight, we can offer solutions for more inclusivity and we can also explore the ways that humor can quiet the dissonance around us and we can soften it with our laughter. Although we can't all be explorers like Dora. Thank you, that's my time. Give it up for your featured speakers tonight and for your host, Chloe Luyet.