PhD, Urban Planning & Policy — University of Illinois Chicago
Chicago-born writer, researcher, and organizer of Mexican campesino descent — studying collective care as both a subject and a practice.
I research how communities build systems of care when institutions fall short, and I have spent more than twenty years helping build them. My work moves between the university, the school board, and the neighborhood — and the three keep teaching each other.
I fell in love with reading in a Chicago Public Schools library. That is not a figure of speech — it is the specific thing that set the rest in motion, and it is why I have spent a career arguing that access to knowledge is never neutral. Somewhere in there I found Paulo Freire, and the idea that reading the word and reading the world are the same act.
I took the long road through school: an associate degree at College of DuPage, then a bachelor's, a master's, and a doctorate at the University of Illinois Chicago. Along the way I was a paralegal on civil rights and employment cases, a program mentor, a campaign staffer, and the director of a national Latino research consortium's Chicago office. I have been organizing for more than twenty years — youth organizing, racial justice, mutual aid, and most recently electoral work in my own town.
My research asks who does the work of care when institutions do not, and what it costs them. My dissertation followed Chicago's mutual-aid networks through the 2022–2024 new-arrival crisis. But I am not a researcher who studies movements from outside them — I have co-founded two youth organizing collectives, written the grants that keep an all-volunteer network running, and sat on the school board that has to make the decisions.
I work from Freire's idea that reading the word and reading the world are the same act. Whether I am teaching a class, running a training, or sitting on a board, the goal is the same: people leave with a clear analysis of their own conditions and a plan to act on it. — Cynthia Brito
I teach at UIC, serve on the Board of Education for Berwyn North School District #98, and work in English and Spanish. I am currently a member of the Reparative Democracy Design Lab at UC Berkeley's Othering & Belonging Institute.
How neighbors build systems of support that formal institutions do not, and what makes those systems last.
Who absorbs the labor of care during a crisis, and how race, gender, and class decide that.
Alternatives to punitive systems, and the political imagination it takes to build them.
Urban governance, displacement, and how cities respond — or fail to — when people arrive with nothing.
Non-capitalist life worlds, solidarity economy, and organizing practice that adapts as conditions change.
An original qualitative study of Chicago's 2022–2024 new-arrival crisis, built on 35 semi-structured interviews with mutual-aid organizers, city officials, and alderpersons. It examines how race, gender, labor, and urban governance shape who ends up responsible for care when formal systems leave a gap — and what that responsibility costs the people who take it on.
Built for movement spaces, schools, and organizations. Each runs as a single session or an ongoing series, in English or Spanish.
The Praxis of Critical Environmental Justice
How to Form a Mutual Aid Network in Your Community
Abolition: Flexing Your Radical Imagination
Latinx History 101
Talleres de Justicia RacialEspañol
Racial Justice & Allyship
Identity, Intersectionality & Equity
Nothing About Us Without Us: Centering Student Leadership in Building Systems, Not Initiatives, to Advance Equity Work
Community Defense, Mutual Aid, & Organizing in Action
We Keep Us Safe: Collective Action in a Resilient Anti-Trafficking Movement
"Sin, Contra y Desde el Estado": A Multifaceted Response to the 2023 Chicago Migrant Crisis
For workshops, trainings, speaking, research collaboration, or consulting — tell me about your group and what you are trying to build. I read everything that comes in.