As part of the Latino Stud­ies Reunions Event on May 31, 2013 Pro­fes­sor Dou­glas Massey (Soci­ol­ogy) will speak about Lati­nos in con­tem­po­rary America. Massey details his topic below:

            In 1970 the Latino pop­u­la­tion of the United States stood at around 9.6 mil­lion peo­ple.  They com­prised just 4.7% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion and 71% were native born.  In terms of national ori­gins, 60% were Mex­i­can, 15% were Puerto Rican, 7% were Cuban, and 6% were Cen­tral or South Amer­i­can, with 13% rep­re­sent­ing “other” ori­gins.    Over the next four decades, how­ever, this small pop­u­la­tion was rad­i­cally trans­formed by mass immi­gra­tion to the point where in 2010 the num­ber of Lati­nos stood at 50.5 mil­lion peo­ple, who con­sti­tuted 16.3% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion.  Mean­while, the share of native born Lati­nos had dropped to around 61% and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of national ori­gins had shifted, with Puerto Ricans and Cubans declin­ing to just 9% and 3.5% of the total, respec­tively while Mex­i­cans, Cen­tral Amer­i­cans, and South Amer­i­cans rose to com­prise 63%, 7.9 and 5.5% of all Latinos. 

            At present, there­fore, more than three quar­ters of all Lati­nos trace their ori­gins to Mex­ico, Cen­tral Amer­ica, or South Amer­ica, com­pared with just 15.5% from the Caribbean.  More­over, whereas Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Domini­cans are over­whelm­ingly legal res­i­dents or cit­i­zens of the United States the bulk of Mex­i­cans, Cen­tral Amer­i­cans, and South Amer­i­cans are non-citizens and a sub­stan­tial share lacks doc­u­ments entirely.   The per­cent­age for­eign born among Mex­i­cans is 36%, com­pared with 63% among Sal­vado­rans, 69% of Guatemalans and Hon­durans and two-thirds of Nicaraguans and Colom­bians.  Accord­ing to the lat­est esti­mates from the U.S. Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, 58% of Mex­i­can immi­grants are present ille­gally, com­pared with 57% of Sal­vado­rans, 71% of Guatemalans, and 77% of Hondurans. 

            In other words undoc­u­mented migrants are no longer a small share of the Latino pop­u­la­tion.  Among Mex­i­can and Cen­tral Amer­i­cans they con­sti­tute a major­ity of all those born abroad; and even when one con­sid­ers national ori­gins as a whole, the undoc­u­mented con­sti­tute 21% of all per­sons of Mex­i­can ori­gin, 38% of those of Sal­vado­ran ori­gin, 50% of those of Guatemalan ori­gin, and 52% of those of Hon­duran ori­gin.   Never before have so many peo­ple been out­side the law and never before have the undoc­u­mented been so con­cen­trated in such a small num­ber of national ori­gins.  As a result, work­ing class Lati­nos are now the most vul­ner­a­ble of all of America’s dis­ad­van­taged populations.

            The ris­ing tide of ille­gal­ity within the Latino pop­u­la­tion is crit­i­cal to under­stand­ing the nature of dis­crim­i­na­tion and exclu­sion in con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can soci­ety, for whereas Lati­nos may be a pro­tected cat­e­gory U.S. under civil rights leg­is­la­tion, undoc­u­mented migrants are not.  Indeed, U.S. immi­gra­tion law encour­ages and often com­pels employ­ers, land­lords, and ser­vice providers to dis­crim­i­nate against the undoc­u­mented even as civil rights law requires them to remain neu­tral with respect to His­pan­ics.  In recent years, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has also stripped away legal pro­tec­tions from all non-citizens, not just the unau­tho­rized but legal per­ma­nent res­i­dents as well.  Leg­is­la­tion passed since 1996 has cur­tailed access to fed­er­ally funded enti­tle­ments, stripped away rights to due process, and crim­i­nal­ized infrac­tions that had for­merly been civil vio­la­tions, retroac­tively declared crim­i­nal con­vic­tions to con­sti­tute grounds from imme­di­ate depor­ta­tion, and given the exec­u­tive branch the right to declare any­one deportable on national secu­rity grounds with­out trial. 

            Mean­while it has steadily expanded the immi­grant enforce­ment appa­ra­tus not only at the bor­der but inter­nally.  Since 1990 depor­ta­tions from the United States have risen expo­nen­tially, ris­ing from just 30,000 in that year to nearly 400,000 in 2010.  Along the bor­der, the num­ber of Bor­der Patrol Agents has risen from 3,700 to more than 20,000.  The United States has built a mas­sive bureau­cracy to enact the 1930s depor­ta­tion cam­paigns and the 1953 bor­der mil­i­ta­riza­tion known as Oper­a­tion Wet­back on a per­ma­nent, ongo­ing basis.

            Accom­pa­ny­ing the ris­ing share of undoc­u­mented migrants in the United States has been a sharp increase in the num­ber of tem­po­rary legal work­ers admit­ted into the U.S. labor force.  Entries to the United States by H-visa hold­ers from Mex­ico alone rose from 17,000 in 1990 to 517,000 in 2010, a record num­ber that exceeds the num­ber of guest work­ers imported at the height of the Bracero Pro­gram in the late 1950s.  Between the ris­ing share of undoc­u­mented migrants and the increas­ing inflow of tem­po­rary work­ers, the num­ber of peo­ple lack­ing labor rights in U.S. mar­kets has increased dra­mat­i­cally, espe­cially in new and old des­ti­na­tion areas where Latin Amer­i­can immi­grants have concentrated. 

            The ris­ing share of exploitable work­ers lack­ing both civil lib­er­ties and eco­nomic rights, when com­bined with ris­ing enforce­ment and steadily more oner­ous sanc­tions against undoc­u­mented work­ers, has caused a remark­able decline in the real value of the wages of Latino work­ers, espe­cially among Mex­i­cans.  Accom­pa­ny­ing the drop in wages has been a decline in incomes and a rise in poverty rates, to the point where Lati­nos have fallen from their his­tor­i­cal posi­tion in the mid­dle of the socioe­co­nomic hier­ar­chy between whites and blacks, to a new posi­tion at or below the posi­tion of African Amer­i­cans.   Accom­pa­ny­ing this decline, other indi­ca­tors of social well-being—notably health and education—have also fallen.

            The remark­able rise in ille­gal­ity among Lati­nos has impli­ca­tions that extend far beyond the undoc­u­mented them­selves.  In addi­tion to the 1.5 mil­lion undoc­u­mented chil­dren liv­ing in fam­i­lies con­tain­ing an unau­tho­rized par­ent are four mil­lion U.S.-born cit­i­zen chil­dren, whose progress in soci­ety is held back by the very real fears and trep­i­da­tions of their undoc­u­mented par­ents and sib­lings; and these num­bers do not take into account the mil­lions of other older chil­dren of undoc­u­mented migrants and more dis­tant rel­a­tives.   In 2008 the Pew His­panic Cen­ter found that 72% of Latino immi­grants said they wor­ried about depor­ta­tion some or a lot, as one might expect; but the fig­ure was still quite high at 35% among native born Lati­nos, who were pre­sum­ably not vul­ner­a­ble to depor­ta­tion them­selves but wor­ried about the depor­ta­tion of friends or rel­a­tives.  Indeed, 53% of native born Lati­nos said that the immi­gra­tion debate had made life dif­fi­cult for them.   

            Thus the ille­gal­ity among Lati­nos that has been man­u­fac­tured by U.S. poli­cies over the past decades con­sti­tutes the sin­gle largest and most potent bar­rier to His­panic socioe­co­nomic mobil­ity and inte­gra­tion in the United States.  With huge frac­tions of Lati­nos lying out­side the pro­tec­tions of the law and even larger shares related to peo­ple who lack legal pro­tec­tions, and with most rights stripped away from all non-citizen for­eign­ers, the His­panic pop­u­la­tion has never been more vul­ner­a­ble and its posi­tion in Amer­ica more pre­car­i­ous.  Until the bur­den of ille­gal­ity is lifted from the shoul­ders of Lati­nos in the United States, lit­tle other progress—economic, social, or political—will be possible.

As part of the Latino Stud­ies Reunions Event on May 31, 2013 Pro­fes­sor Ali Valen­zuela (Pol­i­tics) will speak about the “Latino vote” in the 2012 elec­tion and its sig­nif­i­cance for the grow­ing polit­i­cal power of Hispanics. More details about Valenzuela’s topic follows:

“Sci­en­tific Polling y el Voto Latino” — by
Ali A. Valen­zuela  (Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Politics)

Dur­ing the 2012 elec­tion, sci­en­tific polling and polling aggre­ga­tors such as Nate Sil­ver at The New York Times, Simon Jack­man  at The Huff­in­g­ton Post, and our own Sam Wang at the Prince­ton Elec­tion Con­sor­tium entered the national con­scious­ness like never before. Polling aggre­ga­tors’ rise to promi­nence was due in part to the avail­abil­ity of mas­sive amounts of state and national polling data, which the aggre­ga­tors com­bined into sophis­ti­cated sta­tis­ti­cal mod­els used to pre­dict elec­tion out­comes in indi­vid­ual states as well as nation­ally. Sev­eral of the pre­dic­tive mod­els turned out to be highly accu­rate and imme­di­ately debunked claims of unfairly skewed polls favor­ing the Democ­rats that had been cir­cu­lat­ing in the weeks before Elec­tion Day. The polls did favor the Democ­rats, but that was because the Democ­rats were ahead in the pres­i­den­tial contest.

There are two impor­tant points in this con­clu­sion. First, party iden­ti­fi­ca­tion – the level of sup­port for the Demo­c­ra­tic or Repub­li­can Party among the Amer­i­can pub­lic – changes from election-to-election, year-to-year and some­times from poll-to-poll. Enthu­si­asm for the can­di­dates, the state of the econ­omy, and can­di­date posi­tions on major pol­icy issues like health­care or U.S. mil­i­tary action abroad can all affect the pro­por­tion of Amer­i­cans that iden­tify as Democ­rats or as Repub­li­cans in a given poll. Just because a poll shows more Democ­rats or more Repub­li­cans than in the pre­vi­ous elec­tion does not mean that the poll is inac­cu­rate. Sec­ond, sci­en­tific polling, and espe­cially the com­bined aver­age of many sci­en­tific polls, pro­vides a very accu­rate snap­shot of the level of sup­port for a can­di­date in a national elec­tion. Sci­en­tific polling within states, and espe­cially the aver­age of many sci­en­tific polls within a state, pro­vides a very accu­rate snap­shot of state-levels of sup­port for a candidate.

How­ever, when it comes to polling Latino vot­ers, many com­mer­cial firms do a poor job because of chal­lenges and costs asso­ci­ated with inter­view­ing vot­ers in Span­ish. For exam­ple, most polling firms employ a call back method in which, when they encounter a Spanish-speaker, they hang up and sched­ule a call-back with some­one who can carry out the inter­view in Span­ish. This has the effect of reduc­ing response rates and the num­ber of Spanish-only inter­views that are suc­cess­fully com­pleted. Uti­liz­ing fully bilin­gual callers for Latino polling is expen­sive but nec­es­sary when upwards of 45% of the Latino elec­torate con­sis­tently prefers to inter­view in Span­ish. This fig­ure is among reg­is­tered Latino vot­ers who are all Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, to say noth­ing of the over­all Latino pop­u­la­tion.

More crit­i­cally, many polling firms, includ­ing the National Exit Poll, which inter­views vot­ers as they leave their vot­ing places, do not inter­view in Span­ish at all (more infor­ma­tion). Exit Poll results are widely reported by the media, yet the effect of English-only inter­view­ing is to bias results for Lati­nos towards those who are more accul­tur­ated: those who speak bet­ter Eng­lish and live in wealth­ier parts of the coun­try. Research con­sis­tently shows that more accul­tur­ated Lati­nos tend to hold more con­ser­v­a­tive pol­icy atti­tudes and vote pref­er­ences more favor­able to the Repub­li­can Party than among less accul­tur­ated Lati­nos. So polls that do not inter­view in Span­ish, or that inter­view a lower-than-average pro­por­tion of Lati­nos who speak only Span­ish, pro­duce results that do not accu­rately reflect the Latino vote nation­ally or in states with a siz­able Latino population.

The con­ser­v­a­tive bias of English-only Latino polling tends to pro­duce results show­ing Repub­li­can can­di­dates with more Latino sup­port than in real­ity. In 2010, inac­cu­rate Latino polling cre­ated a sit­u­a­tion where Sen­a­tor Harry Reid (D-NV) was pre­dicted to lose his reelec­tion bid for the U.S. Sen­ate by a slight mar­gin, but he instead won by 5.6 per­cent­age points over his anti-immigrant chal­lenger, Shar­ron Angle. Sen­a­tor Reid won in large part because of the Latino vote, which sup­ported his can­di­dacy by a 90–8 mar­gin, a huge gulf in Latino sup­port between the two statewide can­di­dates (more infor­ma­tion). With Lati­nos rep­re­sent­ing about 12% of the Nevada elec­torate in 2010, their 82-point mar­gin in favor of Reid trans­lates into almost 10 addi­tional per­cent­age points for the Demo­c­ra­tic win col­umn, a fig­ure greater than Reid’s mar­gin of vic­tory. Latino vot­ers were piv­otal to Harry Reid’s reelec­tion and his return to the U.S. Sen­ate as Major­ity Leader.

Fast-forward to 2012 and the cru­cial nature of the Latino vote repeated itself in at least four states: Col­orado, Florida, Nevada and New Mex­ico. In these states, three of which were highly con­tested “swing” states (CO, FL and NV), Lati­nos’ level of sup­port for Pres­i­dent Obama was so much greater than their sup­port for Gov­er­nor Rom­ney that they made the cru­cial dif­fer­ence in win­ning these states for the Pres­i­dent. This out­come depended on two key fac­tors: one, which I have already noted, is the large gap in Latino sup­port between the Demo­c­ra­tic and Repub­li­can can­di­dates, an aver­age dif­fer­ence of 54 percentage-points in these four states. Two, the Latino elec­torate in these four states—that part of the Latino pop­u­la­tion that was eli­gi­ble and turned out to vote—was large enough to trans­late the gap in sup­port between the two can­di­dates into a sub­stan­tial and piv­otal vote con­tri­bu­tion for a Demo­c­ra­tic win. With­out the Latino vote, and with­out such a wide mar­gin of sup­port for the Democ­rats among Lati­nos, it is unclear whether Pres­i­dent Obama would have car­ried the day on Novem­ber 6, 2012.

 How did we get to such over­whelm­ing Demo­c­ra­tic sup­port among the Latino elec­torate? As recently as 2004 approx­i­mately 40% of Latino vot­ers sup­ported George W. Bush, a vote mar­gin with then-Senator Kerry of only 20 per­cent­age points (more infor­ma­tion).  In my pre­sen­ta­tion, I will report more detailed Latino polling results from 2012 and dis­cuss how we might under­stand such high lev­els of Demo­c­ra­tic sup­port among Lati­nos today.

On Fri­day, May 31, 2013 the Pro­gram in Latino Stud­ies will host a Reunions Event for return­ing alumni from 3–4:30pm.  This event, “¡Ade­lante! Lati­nos Reshap­ing Amer­ica”, will fea­ture Ali Valen­zuela (Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Pol­i­tics), Dou­glas Massey (Henry G. Bryant Pro­fes­sor of Soci­ol­ogy), and Patri­cia Fernández-Kelly (Senior Lec­turer in Soci­ol­ogy).  Marta Tienda (Direc­tor, LAO) will mod­er­ate, with open­ing remarks by Ger­mán Lara (Pres­i­dent of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Latino Prince­ton Alumni).  This event is co-sponsored by ALPA.

On Decem­ber 13, 2012, Prince­ton hosted the con­fer­ence “Diver­sity on Cam­pus: Prac­tices, Poli­cies and Cul­ture.” The pur­pose of the con­fer­ence was to assem­ble lead­ing schol­ars and aca­d­e­mic admin­is­tra­tors to exchange views about suc­cess­ful strate­gies for achiev­ing diver­sity goals in higher education.  Princeton Pres­i­dent Shirley M. Tilgh­man and Provost Christo­pher Eis­gru­ber each mod­er­ated pan­els.  Among the ques­tions con­sid­ered were: 

How can insti­tu­tions max­i­mize the edu­ca­tional ben­e­fits of diver­sity? How can insti­tu­tions fos­ter envi­ron­ments in which diverse populations–faculty, stu­dents, and staff–can flour­ish and how can insti­tu­tional lead­er­ship facil­i­tate these goals?

Pro­fes­sor Tienda par­tic­i­pated in ses­sion 2; a panel dis­cu­sion about cre­at­ing a diverse cam­pus. Videos of the pan­els can be seen here.

For a full descrip­tion of the event, please visit the arti­cle in the Prince­ton Weekly Bulletin.

Fer­nando Acosta-Rodríguez

Fer­nando Acosta-Rodríguez has been the Librar­ian for Latin Amer­i­can, Iber­ian and Latino Stud­ies at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Library since 2003.  In addi­tion to being respon­si­ble for the devel­op­ment of Princeton’s world class library col­lec­tions from Latin Amer­ica, Por­tu­gal and Spain, he over­sees all col­lec­tions and resources related to Latino Stud­ies in Fire­stone Library.  A fun­da­men­tal part of that respon­si­bil­ity is to assist Princeton’s stu­dents and fac­ulty in the dis­cov­ery and use of its vast library resources.  As such, Fer­nando wel­comes all stu­dents in the Latino Stud­ies Pro­gram to   or meet with him in person in Firestone.  He also invites all program affiliates to start exploring the Library’s vast resources through the online Latino Studies research guide that he created.

Fer­nando came to Prince­ton from The New York Pub­lic Library where he served as its Latin Amer­i­can Bib­li­og­ra­pher start­ing in 1997.  He earned both his M.L.I.S. and his M.S. in Pol­i­tics at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin.  In 2009–2010, he served as Pres­i­dent of the Sem­i­nar on the Acqui­si­tion of Latin Amer­i­can Library Mate­ri­als (SALALM), the inter­na­tional pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion that groups librar­i­ans, book ven­dors, and other infor­ma­tion pro­fes­sion­als spe­cial­iz­ing in that part of the world.  He was the edi­tor of the Papers of the 55^th Annual Meet­ing of SALALM, a vol­ume pub­lished in 2012 titled The Future of Latin Amer­i­can Library Col­lec­tions and Research:  con­tribut­ing and adapt­ing to new trends in research libraries.

Latino Her­itage Month (LHM) orig­i­nated in 1968 in the form of National His­panic Her­itage Week. In 1988, Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan expanded the week­long cel­e­bra­tion to its cur­rent monthly length, begin­ning on Sep­tem­ber 15th and end­ing in Octo­ber 15th. The month has the inten­tion of rec­og­niz­ing and cel­e­brat­ing the pres­ence and her­itage of His­panic and Latino Amer­i­cans in the United States, as well as their con­tri­bu­tions to the soci­ety and cul­ture of the U.S. In line with this mis­sion, sev­eral Latino groups on cam­pus have made it their goal to share this cel­e­bra­tion with the whole of the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion of Prince­ton University.

This year, the events that Acción Latina and Chi­cano Cau­cus –the two Latino groups par­tic­i­pat­ing in this year’s Latino Her­itage Month Com­mit­tee– orga­nized were designed to max­i­mize impact on the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion of uni­ver­sity stu­dents, par­tic­u­larly those not cog­nizant or fre­quently engaged with the cul­tures in ques­tion. The cel­e­bra­tion started on Octo­ber 4th with the Latino Her­itage Month Kick­off Event, at Cam­pus Club. Senior Gre­cia Rivas (’13) opened the evening by remind­ing us of the impor­tance of our Latin Amer­i­can her­itage, and was fol­lowed by Ms. Ten­nille Haynes, the Direc­tor of the Carl A. Fields Cen­ter, who gave an inspir­ing speech about mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. We closed the night by danc­ing to the rhythm of Latin Amer­i­can music. 

For the first LHM week, we had a very engag­ing lunch dis­cus­sion about the Latino and Latin Amer­i­can iden­tity with Prof. Pedro Meira Mon­teiro (Oct 8th), and the stu­dent panel “Inter­sec­tions of Race and Sex­u­al­ity” (Oct 9th), an event where stu­dent lead­ers shared their per­sonal expe­ri­ences with this inter­sec­tion, draw­ing dis­tinc­tions and acknowl­edg­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties amongst dif­fer­ent racial and eth­nic groups. We also cel­e­brated our Latino her­itage at the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Art Museum; “Lati­nos at the Museum” (Oct 11th) included Mex­i­can food and bev­er­ages, a spe­cial guest per­for­mance by Bal­let Folk­lórico de Prince­ton, and a short themed tour of the Art of the Ancient Amer­i­cas gallery. To close that week, we had a film screen­ing of “Gun Hill Road”, fol­lowed by a talk­back with Direc­tor Rashaad Ernesto Green (Oct 12th). 

 We started the fol­low­ing week’s cel­e­bra­tions with a Mex­ico vs El Sal­vador soc­cer match screen­ing (Oct 16th), orga­nized a “Latino Trivia Night!” (Oct 18th) in order to test our knowl­edge of Latino and Latin Amer­i­can geog­ra­phy, pol­i­tics, music, arts and lit­er­a­ture, and ended the week with an “Indoors Pickup Soc­cer” tour­na­ment at Dil­lon Gym (Oct 20th). Before fall break, we also encour­aged every­one to go to the dis­cus­sion orga­nized “Lati­nos in the 2012 Elec­tions: An Expert Dis­cus­sion on Research and Politics.”

Finally, we closed the cel­e­bra­tions with a “LHM Vari­ety Show” (Nov 9th), an event where per­form­ers from the Prince­ton Com­mu­nity gath­ered together to cel­e­brate the Latino cul­ture, dances and music; and a Clos­ing Gala (Nov 10th), our final LHM event con­sist­ing of a Latin-American themed din­ner catered by Taste of Mex­ico, fol­lowed by a dance party with the band Rumba con Son.

Rosina Lozano is a National Acad­emy of Education/Spencer Post­doc­toral Fel­low dur­ing the 2012–2013 aca­d­e­mic year.  She com­pleted her PhD in 2011 from the Uni­ver­sity of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia and cur­rently remains in Cal­i­for­nia as a vis­it­ing scholar at Stan­ford University’s Cen­ter for Com­par­a­tive Study in Race and Ethnicity.  

Lozano is com­plet­ing an arti­cle for the West­ern His­tor­i­cal Quar­terly that com­pares New Mex­ico and Puerto Rico Span­ish lan­guage teach­ing by look­ing at the ways that regional dif­fer­ences affect lan­guage iden­tity.  She is focus­ing in par­tic­u­lar on two major lan­guage learn­ing debates that occurred in each region in the early 1940s and is using New Mex­ico Sen­a­tor Den­nis Chávez to con­nect the two.

By the end of the year, Pro­fes­sor Lozano will com­plete a book pro­posal and sev­eral chap­ter revi­sions based on her dis­ser­ta­tion that exam­ines the pol­i­tics of the Span­ish lan­guage in New Mex­ico and Cal­i­for­nia over the cen­tury fol­low­ing the Mex­i­can Amer­i­can War.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made many Span­ish speak­ers US cit­i­zens despite a lack of Eng­lish lan­guage skills.  These new cit­i­zens and the Span­ish speak­ing immi­grants that fol­lowed nego­ti­ated lan­guage pol­i­tics at a per­sonal, com­mu­nity, state, and national level.  The book looks at the ways in which Span­ish lan­guage usage affected iden­tity, cit­i­zen­ship, and race.

Although away for the 2012–2013 aca­d­e­mic year, Rosina Lozano looks for­ward to join­ing the fac­ulty at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity as an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the his­tory depart­ment begin­ning in the 2013–2014 aca­d­e­mic year.

Excit­ing new Spring 2013 course THR 331/LAO 331 “Spe­cial Top­ics in Per­for­mance His­tory and The­ory: Play­ing Latino” taught by Brian Herrera.

Jes­sica Del­gado is Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Reli­gion at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity, since 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in Latin Amer­i­can His­tory at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley and was Stew­art Fel­low in Reli­gion at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity from 2009–2012.

Her field is the his­tory of reli­gion in Latin Amer­ica with a focus on Mex­ico in the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies. Her research inter­ests include women, gen­der, and sex­u­al­ity, the Catholic Church in colo­nial soci­ety, race, caste, and reli­gion, and the inter­sec­tion between social and spir­i­tual sta­tus in the early mod­ern world. Her work on laywomen’s use of eccle­si­as­ti­cal courts to resolve domes­tic and mar­i­tal dis­putes has appeared in Colo­nial Latin Amer­i­can Review, and she is cur­rently com­plet­ing a book man­u­script enti­tled Trou­bling Devo­tion: Lay­women and the Church in Colo­nial Mex­ico.

She is cur­rently teach­ing an under­grad­u­ate sem­i­nar called, “Reli­gion, Gen­der, and Sex­u­al­ity in Early Latin Amer­ica,” and a grad­u­ate sem­i­nar called “Reli­gion and Church in Mex­i­can His­tory.” In the spring, she will be teach­ing a lec­ture course called, “His­to­ries and Themes in Mex­i­can Reli­gion.” Jes­sica Del­gado is also affil­i­ated with the Cen­ter for the Study of Reli­gion and runs the Reli­gion and Cul­ture work­shop for CSR fellows.

Brian Euge­nio Her­rera is an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of the­ater in the Lewis Cen­ter for the Arts whose work exam­in­ing the for­ma­tion of gender, sexual and racial iden­ti­ties in and through U.S. pop­u­lar per­for­mance has been pub­lished in many jour­nals, includ­ing The­atre Jour­nal, Mod­ern Drama, and The Jour­nal of Dra­matic The­ory and Crit­i­cism. Also a per­former, his auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal solo show, I Was the Voice of Democ­racy (http://iwasvod.org/) has been seen scores of times and in more than a dozen states since 2010.  It is next slated to be pre­sented at the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity of Beirut in early 2013. Pro­fes­sor Her­rera is cur­rently at work on two book projects, Latin Explo­sion: Lati­nos, Racial For­ma­tion and Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury U.S. Pop­u­lar Per­for­mance and Cast­ing: A His­tory.

At the end of Octo­ber, Her­rera will be deliv­er­ing the keynote address in Albu­querque, New Mex­ico at the National His­panic Cul­tural Cen­ter as part of “Rec­og­niz­ing New Mexico’s The­atri­cal Past, Present and Future: An Inter­ac­tive Sym­po­sium.”  This sym­po­sium is a tour of how the­atri­cal per­for­mances have been a part of the lives of New Mex­i­cans for over 400 years.  Herrera’s keynote, “400 Years of New Mex­ico The­atre His­tory,” charts the broad con­tours of four cen­turies of New Mexico’s per­for­mance his­tory, begin­ning with the col­li­sion of Span­ish litur­gi­cal drama and indige­nous rit­ual prac­tice in the six­teenth cen­tury and con­tin­u­ing all the way through to the rise of “Tamale­wood” in the early twenty-first century.

This semes­ter Pro­fes­sor Her­rera is teach­ing THR 330 Spe­cial top­ics in Per­for­mance Practice–Casting: His­tory, The­ory and Prac­tices.  This one of a kind course is related to his book project on cast­ing.  Dur­ing Spring 2012–2013, Pro­fes­sor Her­rera will teach THR 331/LAO 331 Spe­cial Top­ics in Per­for­mance His­tory and The­ory: Play­ing Latino.  This course will exam­ine how the pan-ethnic con­struc­tion of Latina/o cul­tural iden­tity was rehearsed in twen­ti­eth cen­tury U.S. pop­u­lar per­for­mance. Stu­dents will con­sider a wide array of pop­u­lar per­for­mances and assess the ways such per­for­mances have staged shift­ing per­cep­tions and pre­sump­tions about Latinas/os in the United States and how those per­for­mances have con­tributed to broader dis­courses of race, iden­tity, cul­ture and nation. Top­ics will include: her­itage per­for­mance, litur­gi­cal drama, stand-up com­edy, tele­vi­sion, and visual art, as well as lit­er­ary drama, per­for­mance art, and activist teatro.