Join this online panel with scholars Laura Gutierrez (Pacific), Ana Minian (Stanford), Ariana Valle (UC Davis), and Irvin Ibarguen (NYU) on Tuesday, February 25 at 6:00pm EST via Zoom. This panel will provide a historical perspective on US anti-immigration removal policies. In particular, it will ask when and why the so-called "nation of immigrants" repudiated that identity and gave itself over to the denigration and persecution of migrants.
Participants
Laura D. Gutiérrez is an Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA. She received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego, where she was also a Visiting Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies and participated in the Mexican Migration Field Research Program. She writes about the history of deportation to Mexico and the post-deportation experience of migrants, and is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled A Constant Threat: Deportation and Return Migration to Mexico in the Twentieth Century. Her work has been published in the Journal of American Ethnic History and the Pacific Historical Review. She also serves as an expert witness on behalf of migrants from Mexico and Central America who are seeking asylum in the United States.
Ana Raquel Minian is an Associate Professor in the Department of History. Minian received a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. At Stanford University, Minian offers classes on Latinx history, immigration, histories of incarceration and detention, and modern Mexican history.
Minian's first book, Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration (Harvard University Press, 2018) received the David Montgomery Award for the best book in labor and working-class history, given jointly by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association; the Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Theodore Saloutos Book Award for an early career scholar’s work in immigration and ethnic history; the Western Association of Women Historians’ Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize for best monograph in the field of history by a member; the Association for Humanist Sociology’s Betty and Alfred McClung Lee Book Award for best book in humanist sociology; and the Americo Paredes Book Award for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College. It was also a finalist for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the author of a first scholarly book dealing with some aspect of American history by the Organization of American Historians and received an honorable mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award given to an outstanding book on Latin America in the social sciences and humanities published in English.
Ariana Valle is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research intervenes in migration, race and ethnicity, Latino sociology and Latino politics. She uses qualitative methodologies to examine how members of distinct Latino groups experience migration, the structural conditions that shape their political, socioeconomic, and racialized incorporations into the U.S., and how Latinas/os/xs transform their local, state, and national contexts through individual and collective agency.
She is currently finalizing a book manuscript entitled Citizenship in Contexts: How Puerto Ricans are Transforming Race, Latinidad, & Politics in Florida. Drawing on 112 in-depth interviews with Puerto Ricans and Latinos in Orlando metro, the book examines contemporary Puerto Rican migration to Orlando metro, intra Puerto Rican and inter-Latino relations, and the making of Puerto Rican and Latino politics in Florida.
Ariana’s research is published in various outlets, including Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture.
Irvin Ibarguen (Moderator) is a historian of the Americas, with interests in migration, transnational phenomena, and government policies to regulate these. His book project—Faucet Politics: The Fight for Mexico’s Migratory Flows, 1940-1970—rescues the history of businesses, politicians, peasants and other people in Mexican society who opposed large-scale Mexican migration to the U.S. and sought to orchestrate the movement of Mexican people more fruitfully within Mexico. It reveals the decades-long process that played out across the U.S., Mexico, and Borderlands, as actors and institutions along that continuum engaged in what he terms “faucet politics,” the practice of using policy as a tap to open, close, or adjust migratory flows— indeed, coming into struggle as those Mexican elements seeking to corral their migratory compatriots within Mexico were forced to contend with American political and economic elites keen on perpetuating the movement of Mexican people to the U.S. His writing has received the support of the Mexican Government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. At New York University, he teaches courses on Latino/a history, the spatial turn, and modern American history.