Graduate Student Spotlight: Ellie Estrada on Chisme, the Westside, and Jotería Communication Scholarship
The Department of Communication is excited to highlight the work of PhD candidate Ellie Estrada, whose scholarship explores how communities build connection, make meaning, and share stories. Ellie’s research centers on chisme, Spanish for “gossip” but more accurately understood as a form of everyday storytelling and relationship-building alongside the lived experiences of Salt Lake City’s Westside residents. She also draws on Jotería studies, a field that uplifts the voices and cultural knowledge of queer Latiné, Chicana/o, and Indigenous communities. Through this work, Ellie helps illuminate how communication shapes community life, memory, and belonging.
Ellie’s research consistently centers the values and principles of Community-Based Research—an approach grounded in shared curiosity, community expertise, and research questions shaped by the people most affected by them. Ellie’s work embodies this philosophy, foregrounding locally meaningful questions and building research collaboratively with community partners.
Her recent scholarship is organized around three core interventions: theorizing chisme as method, forwarding the Westside as a significant rhetorical site for community knowledge and capacity building, and expanding Jotería communication scholarship through archives, storytelling, and lived experience. At the heart of this work is chisme, which Ellie develops not as rumor but as a culturally grounded practice of dialogue, storytelling, relational accountability, and collective meaning-making. Her operationalization of the “chisme session” as a qualitative method offers new ways to understand survival, pleasure, and culture across Latiné and queer communities.
Recent Scholarly Projects
Across her recent projects, Ellie uses chisme to build research in partnership with communities rather than about them. Her AJAAS panel proposal, “Local Voices in Bloom: Locating a Queer and Latiné Praxis in the Salt Lake Valley and Westside,” brings together thirteen organizations and organizers whose work shapes queer and Latiné life in the Valley. Her WSCA 2026 paper, “Peer Review is Resistance: The (Westside) Community Review Board as Methodological and Ethical Intervention in Rhetorical Fieldwork,” received a Top Paper Award by the Rhetoric, Culture, and Advocacy interest group, similarly advances community-centered ethics by highlighting the importance of localized review processes and the labor of groups such as the West Side Community Review Board, where Dr. Miguel Trujillo from the Department of Education, Culture, and Society has played an important role.
Ellie’s Jotería scholarship follows this same orientation toward community-driven inquiry. Her article “Be:coming my Mother’s Daughter: Trans and Chicana Poetics of Postmemory,” now moving into second-round review at Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) after receiving a Top Paper Award by the Performance Studies interest group at WSCA 2024, approaches memory and identity through relational and intergenerational storytelling.
NCA 2025 Chisme Panel Participants
Left to Right: Ellie Estrada, Kristina V. Rietveld, Dustin Martinez, Max Wiessner, Stephy Hidalgo, Gabby Garza, Dr. Robert Guiterrez-Perez, and Dr. Leandra Hernandez
Virtually: Stephanie Colins and Charissa Stone
Her NCA 2025 paper, “Elevating Trans Chicanisma: The Tropological Imagination within and beyond Emilia Pérez (2024),” has been approved as a book chapter for a forthcoming Routledge Focus volume titled Emilia Pérez: Confronting the Impossibility of Authenticity. Her NCA 2025 panel, “Elevating Chisme as a Jotería Praxis Across Geography and Generation” (soon to be a forum issue for TPQ), her AJAAS 2026 panel, “Jotería Archismes: Memory, Desire, and Relationality Rooted in Chisme,” and co-authored chapter to the forthcoming collection “This is an Emergency (Archive): Recording, Remembering, Resisting, Refusing Under Catastrophe,” each gather scholars whose work uses culturally responsive theories of chisme and “whisper networks” to create intellectual spaces grounded in kinship, strategy, and community memory.
Dissertation in Progress
Ellie’s dissertation, “¡Este Barrio No Se Vende! Westside Chismes and the Rhetorics of Gentrification in Rose Park, UT,” examines gentrification and community resistance through the practice of chisme. Her work traces how “secret” discourse maps relationships among residents, activists, and business owners in the context of plans to expand the I-15 freeway—an expansion that would displace multiple residents. Her project involves several months of fieldwork, including participant observation at community events (such as the closure of Mestizo Coffeehouse on Sept. 27, 2025), attendance at UDOT town halls, and interviews with residents, organizers, and business owners. She also has plans to host a community-based “chisme session,” in part modeled by the Normal Gossip Podcast. This work is all complemented by archival research on the racial-infrastructural history shaping Salt Lake’s East-West divide.
Across this dissertation work, Ellie draws directly on Community-Based Research by allowing residents, organizers, and local histories to determine the questions, priorities, and frameworks that shape her project. Her aim is not only to study gentrification, but to participate in community efforts to document, preserve, and advocate for Westside forms of life.
Community Engagement + Service
Ellie is deeply involved with the University Neighborhood Partners (UNP), where she works with the New American Academic Network (NAAN). In this role, she serves as a case manager helping new Americans secure grants, navigate college admissions, and verify previous degrees. Her scholarship directly supports UNP’s commitment to reciprocal learning and capacity building with Westside communities. Ellie also serves on the AJAAS 2026 Community Engagement Site Subcommittee, connecting organizations and community members who wish to participate in the conference.
Her service reflects the same commitments driving her research: collaboration, shared authorship, relationship-building, and attention to the needs identified by the communities she works within. As the University places more emphasis on Community-Based Research, it is inspiring to see one of our own engaging so deeply through her research, service, and advocacy.