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.

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.