Two Latinos among MacArthur Fellows in 2024

This year, a diverse group of 22  talented individuals each received an unrestricted grant of $800,000 from the MacArthur Foundation for their extraordinary creativity and impact across the fields of technology, art, social justice, and more. The no-strings-attached award, commonly known as the “genius grant,” is paid out over five years. Individuals do not apply for the award; they are nominated.

Among them were two Latinos, Juan Felipe Herrera, a poet, educator, and writer who uplifts the Chicano culture, and Martha Muñoz, an evolutionary biologist. They join past Latino awardees, affectionately known as “Los MacArturos,” including musician/artivist Martha Gonzalez, playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, anthropologist Jason De Leon, and many more.

The MacArthur Foundation focuses resources on promising solutions to pressing challenges and embraces creative thinking to increase the odds of meaningful change. They believe that the people closest to the ground know best how to respond to the pressing challenges.

The foundation follows the lead of individuals and organizations rooted in spaces, communities and experiences, investing in their ideas and giving them space to grow.

Poet Juan Felipe Herrera

Herrera’s literary output, in both English and Spanish, crosses genres and spans five decades. His work is united by deep empathy and joy for all groups in the act of artistic creation. His work shares experiences of solidarity and empowerment through poetry and prose for adults and children. 

Herrera has chronicled the changing social and cultural dynamics of the Mexican American community, from the activism of the Chicano Movement to the fraught politics of immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border today. 

In his 1974 publication, “Rebozos of Love / We have Woven / Sudor de Pueblos / On our Back,” which was republished in 2021 as “Rebozos of Love: Floricanto 1970–1974,” Herrera exalts ideas embedded in the Chicanx nationalist movement while experimenting with linguistic syntax and structure. 

In his collection called “Notes on the Assemblage” (2015), Herrera laments state violence inflicted upon citizens in the United States and elsewhere. The opening poem, “Ayotzinapa,” is a stream of consciousness, bilingual account of the killings of 43 Indigenous students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, likely at the hands of the police in Guerrero, Mexico, in 2014. 

Herrera puts the reader in the position of both witness and victim in the poem “Almost Livin’ Almost Dyin,” , about police killing Black men in the United States. It subtly shifts to include the reader in the collective first person “we.” In this way, Herrera imagines a future in which people are in solidarity with one another, no matter their differences.

In addition to poetry, Herrera has written several books for children. He recounts fond memories of his childhood among migrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley in the picture book “Calling the Doves / El canto de las palomas” (2014). “Jabberwalking” (2018), an introduction to writing poetry for young readers, showcases Herrera’s delight in linguistic experimentation and lifelong devotion to teaching.

Evolutionary biologist Martha Muñoz

Muñoz, 39, is an evolutionary biologist investigating the factors that influence rates and patterns of evolution. Muñoz integrates behavioral observation in natural habitats and lab-based environments; analysis of morphological, physiological, and biomechanical traits; and phylogenetics to explore why some organisms and traits evolve rapidly while others remain unchanged for millennia. 

Her research with reptiles, amphibians and fishes yields novel insights into the impact of behavior and biomechanics on evolution. 

In early work with tropical anole lizards, Muñoz challenged the assumption that environmental pressures are the primary drivers of evolution. She showed that anole lizard species living in warm, sea-level habitats are not physiologically different from those living on colder mountaintops. For example,  the lizards on the mountains did not develop different bodily functions to tolerate the colder habitat. 

Instead, Muñoz found behavioral differences that enable both the mountaintop and sea-level lizards to thermoregulate in different habitats. The mountaintop lizards get warm by basking on boulders, and the sea-level lizards stay cool by sheltering from the sun in moist vegetation. Muñoz also determined that while mountain lizards’ physiological evolution was slowed by their behavior, their morphology (body structure) evolved rapidly. They developed shorter hind legs and flatter skulls, which enabled them to hide from predators in rock crevices. 

Muñoz expanded on this work to examine adaptive radiation—rapid diversification into new species—among the anole lizards on Caribbean islands. Through phylogenetic analysis, she determined that it was not the island environment that enabled diversification but rather a functional innovation: adhesive toe pads that allowed the lizards to spread to new niche environments. 

Currently, Muñoz and her lab are working to better understand the role of behavior in evolutionary diversification using dozens of closely related species of plethodontid salamanders, which are lungless amphibians that breathe through their skin living in niche microhabitats in the Appalachian Mountains. 

Muñoz is reshaping our understanding of evolutionary determinants and providing critical insights into how changing environments and the day-to-day behavior of organisms will impact long-term patterns of evolution.