José Galarza
BOARD OF ADVISORS, CO-FOUNDER
José is a first-generation Puerto Rican American who was raised with a strong sense of pride in his cultural heritage. He also spent his youth frequently relocating with his US military family. While this provided him with rich experiences to draw upon, this itinerant state was in constant tension with his strong sense of ethnic identity, leaving him untethered to a sense of place. He was drawn to Dinétah because it embodies non-Western knowledge systems and lifeways that in his culture, have been largely dismantled or absorbed by dominant modes of knowledge production. He feels strongly that his work with the Navajo people provide him a practice and a framework to address the tensions in his own intellectual and cultural identity.
José received his Master of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Arts from Southern Methodist University in English Literature with minor studies in Philosophy and Visual Art. Through his training as an architect, José was fortunate to have multiple opportunities in community-engaged design-build as it intersects Indigeneity. This included the study of adobe houses for Yaqui single mothers in Obregón in Sonora, Mexico, and a mapping and infrastructure development project for Indigenous Mayans in Guatemala. While these undertakings concluded with mixed results, they inspired a sense of purpose, ultimately leading him to a directorship at DesignBuildBLUFF, a graduate architecture program at The University of Utah that builds full scale projects in partnership with rural and native communities in Southeast Utah and Navajo Nation. Due to the success of the program, José was approached by Navajo Nation Council Delegate Nathaniel Brown with an invitation to start what would become Nááts'íilid Initiative. Through this new initiative, José intends to move beyond community-engaged work and build agency and power on Dinétah to realize their own projects. José is now the director of the Center for Teaching Innovation & Exchange at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
