KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr. Elizabeth Gonzalez
Dr. Elizabeth Gonzalez is a scholar-practitioner and executive leader who has held leadership roles at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and San José City College, where she managed multi-million dollar grants. She is recognized for her research on Indigenous Mexican youth and her commitment to advancing educational access, making significant contributions to the field through both her scholarship and leadership.
Dr. Gonzalez is a seasoned administrator with a proven track record in securing significant funding for her initiatives, including a $3 million gift to expand infrastructure and affordability programs at UCLA.
A product of California’s public higher education system, Dr. Gonzalez earned her B.A. in Psychology and Education Studies from UCLA and both her M.S. and Ph.D. in Psychology from UC Santa Cruz.
Dr. Diego Pascual y Cabo
Dr. Pascual y Cabo is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics as well as the Director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Florida.
He is an applied linguist who studies and cares deeply about Spanish heritage speaker bilingualism. He teaches, researches, and speaks widely about this.
As testimony of his personal and professional commitment to the field, in 2014, he founded the Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language. He is also the founder and Editor-in-chief of the Spanish Heritage Language journal, an international refereed journal co-published by the University of Florida Press and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida.
Dr. Rachel Showstack
Dr. Rachel Showstack is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Wichita State University. She received a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin and an MA in Spanish from Sacramento State.
Her areas of interest in research and teaching include Spanish as a heritage language, language and healthcare, and community-based language education.
At Wichita State, she teaches Spanish language and linguistics courses, and she currently serves as the Spanish Division Director. She also leads an organization called Alce su voz that addresses language barriers in healthcare in Kansas.
