What is unique about doing Latinx Studies at this moment? Leaders from institutions across the country will discuss new Latinx Studies centers and initiatives, offering models for others seeking to grow Latinx Studies at their own universities. Featured panelists include Dr. Veronica Terriquez (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center), Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz (UC Berkeley Sociology), Arlene Dávila (The Latinx Project) and G. Cristina Mora (UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies). This conversation will be moderated by Simon Trujillo (NYU Native Studies Forum).
Registration is required. RSVP via Eventbrite.
If you are interested in this topic, we encourage you to engage with our 2021 symposium, Latinx at 50, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of Latinx Studies. Watch the virtual panels here.
Panelists
G. Cristina Mora is Associate Professor of Sociology and the Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses mainly on immigration, categorization, and racial and political attitudes in the United States. Her first book, Making Hispanics, was published by the University of Chicago Press and provides the first historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” category in the United States. Mora has received numerous awards for her scholarship from the American Sociological Association, and her research been the subject of various national media segments in venues like the Atlantic, the New Yorker, NPR, and Latino USA. In 2020, she helped to oversee the largest survey on Covid-19 and partisan politics in California and published some of the state’s first briefs and academic articles on the subject. She is currently working on her next book, California Color Lines, which examines inequality and racial and immigration attitudes in California. In 2021 and 2022, she received the UCB Graduate Mentoring Award, the Chancellors Award for Advancing Equity and Inclusion, and led UC Berkeley’s first social-science cluster hire on the issue of “Latinos and Democracy.” In 2023 Mora received the nation’s first “Latino Social Science Pipeline” award from the Department of Education to advance research opportunities in the area of Latino Social Science.
Dr. Veronica Terriquez is a sociologist who whose research focuses on social inequality, civic engagement, health, and youth transitions to adulthood among Latinx and other diverse populations. As CSRC director, Terriquez seeks to build on the center’s existing projects and develop new initiatives on Latinx communities that align with the University’s mission to serve the state and maintain a community presence. Terriquez is an associate professor of urban planning and Chicana/o and Central American studies at UCLA. She received a doctorate in sociology at UCLA, a master’s degree in education at UC Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Harvard University. During the 2020-21 academic year she was a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Advance Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Science & Medicine, Community Development, Education Policy, Gender & Society, and other peer-reviewed journals.
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is part of Berkeley’s Latinx and Democracy cluster. His research and teaching focuses on race and the politics of knowledge, primarily in Latinx communities and movements. His first book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines contemporary political struggles and meaning-making processes through which individuals and societies come to envision and sense demographic change. The book is an extension of his award-winning dissertation. It has been awarded the best book prize from the American Sociological Association’s Latino/a Sociology section and Cultural Sociology section and received an honorable mention from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section. His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Du Bois Review, American Behavioral Scientist, and Ethnography, among other outlets. He has also contributed chapters to several edited volumes, most recently The Oxford Handbook of W.E.B. Du Bois. He is currently engaged in collaborative research projects on demographic imaginaries and race and political trust, respectively. In addition, he is working on an oral history project on the afterlives of political repression against Puerto Rican anticolonial movements in Chicago. This project involves the creation of a Puerto Rican-focused community archive.
Simón Ventura Trujillo is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in the English Department at New York University. His book, Land Uprising: Native Story Power and the Insurgent Horizons of Latinx Indigeneity (University of Arizona Press, 2020), explores Indigenous land reclamation to rethink connections between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. It centers on the cultural production of the New Mexican land grant reclamation movement, La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. A formative organization of the Chicanx movement known for its armed raid of the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in 1967, La Alianza waged a dynamic and controversial campaign for the recovery of Mexican and Spanish land grants that had been lost in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. This book situates La Alianza’s writings alongside a heterogeneous archive of Indigenous and feminist borderland literature by Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, his work explores unexamined intersections between Indigenous, Chicanx, and Latinx cultural politics and contributes to critiques of colonial modernity and settler sovereignty in the Americas.