John Kennedy Godoy

John Kennedy Godoy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he is also affiliate faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies and core faculty in the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies. 

 

He is an interdisciplinary scholar of migration, borders, literature, and film. He received his PhD and MA from Cornell University, with graduate concentrations in Latina/o Studies and Latin American Studies. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Diacritics, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Ámbitos Feministas, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and the Latin American Literary Review, among other venues. His community-oriented projects have been featured in People en Español, Harper's Bazaar, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also the translator of the book Letters from Inside a U.S. Detention Center: Carla's Story (2023). His article, “The Architecture of Nayib Bukele’s Deceit,” won the best article from an emerging scholar award in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2025). 

 

His book in progress, Unaccompanied Figures: The Grammars of Migrant Childhood, traces the history of the terms unaccompanied child and unaccompanied alien child and analyzes legal and literary documents to consider their meaning. It focuses on whether or not these terms bear upon any meaning not conferred by the state to migrant youth and it considers the byzantine legal apparatus that constrains their movement. By explicating legal, literature, and human rights documents, the manuscript questions what forms of representation are imputed to migrant youth, and how they reflect wider social questions and themes. 

 

John is also in the initial stages of a second manuscript entitled Border Rivers, which considers the Mexico-Central America border region through ethnography, history, literature, and film.