Briseyda Barrientos Ariza

About Briseyda Barrientos Ariza

Saturated in a culture of storytelling, Briseyda Barrientos Ariza was born in the Central American diasporic hub of Hyattsville, Maryland and spent the majority of her childhood summers hanging off jocote trees and running through her grandparents' llanos in Guatemala. 

Breathing in sticky air, Briseyda grew up listening to her grandfather’s stories about his encounters with regional folkloric figures: shapeshifting horse-women, weeping murderous-mothers, and gnome-like men who braided hair. In autumn, Briseyda would return to Hyattsville, where she would become an interloper, nestled under the safety-blanket of citizenship. Briseyda grew up listening to migration and refugee stories, sharing testimonies, and contributing to Central American diasporic life in the United States.

Motivated by the lore that captivated her during girlhood, Briseyda revisited Guatemala and its storytellers to examine their oral stories distinctly as cultural and archival work during her undergraduate studies at Towson University (TU) Honor’s College, where she majored in English literature and psychology. After receiving the Leadership for Public Good Fellowship, Briseyda recorded, transcribed, and translated 21 oral histories on Guatemalans’ folkloric encounters, which served as fieldwork in her undergraduate honors thesis. At TU, Briseyda founded the Honorables of Color organization and $1,000 scholarship to champion intentional spaces for students of color within Honors Colleges. 

After graduating summa cum laude, Briseyda committed to expanding her work on Central American orature and was awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue her MPhil in European, Latin American, and comparative literatures and cultures at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, Briseyda published her poetry in The Trinity Review, edited The Scholar magazine, presented at the Cambridge History of Memory & Emotions Conference, and was invited to attend the first Central American Futurities Conference in the Northeastern United States, hosted at Yale University. Soon after graduation, Briseyda joined The Summit Foundation in Washington, DC as the Equality for Women and Girls Program Assistant, supporting grassroots organizations across Central America and the US that focus on advancing girls and women’s access to education and sexual/reproductive health. Most recently, Briseyda was published in a bilingual academic anthology entitled Liberation through destruction: from fantastic creatures to marginalized social groups. 

Briseyda is continuing her scholarship on Central American orature and its revolutionary potential via a PhD in Spanish & Portuguese at Yale University as a Dean’s Emerging Scholar Fellow and Graduate Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). She aims to establish Centers of Orature Studies across (inter)national institutions to proliferate its study and vernacular intellectuals, while connecting all her communities in the US, UK, and Latin America.