Ohio State's Office of Outreach and Engagement selected Assistant Professor Alfonso Cervera's research project "Transnational Folklórico Exchange: Community-Engaged Knowledge Sharing Between Ohio State and Ballet Folklórico Xochihua," for a seed $10,000 grant. "This year, 12 proposals were selected for funding through the Engaged Scholarship Seed Grant process," says the Office of Outreach and Engagment. "Grants were awarded to support community-engaged research or community-engaged projects, in collaboration with a community partner, that address a specific need or problem within the community."

Cervera (he/él/they/them/elle) holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside, and is a first-generation Queer Mexican American performer, educator, curator, and activist. His research and specialization as an independent artist, focuses on the conversation between Queerness, Ballet Folklorico, and Afro-Latine social dances in a contemporary auto-biographical embodied experience that he calls Poc-Chuc. Cervera is known for his emerging and inclusive technique Poc-Chuc, which has been described as a linking between "the sociality of the audience with the isolated frigidity of the concert stage...resulting in a world of untethered Mexican modernity." This inclusive dance technique weaves these cultural dances as a pedagogical, technical, and choreographic tool to acknowledge his lived experience, but to also re-imagine his own hybrid queered futurity. Cervera found Poc-Chuc Dance Collective in 2019 at Cornish College of the Arts and has since invited various practitioners and collaborators to co-create works from various localities.