Panel: "Latinas/os in New Jersey"

Editors Ulla Berg and Aldo Lauria Santiago join a panel discussion presenting "Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities and Cultures," their new collection of essays.

Since the 1890s, New Jersey has attracted hundreds of thousands of Caribbean and Latin American migrants. The state’s rich economic history, high-income suburbs, and strong public sector have all contributed to attracting, retaining, and setting the stage for Latin American and Caribbean immigrants and secondary-step migrants from New York City. Since the 1980s, however, Latinos have developed a more complex presence in the state’s political landscape and institutions. The emergence of Latino-majority towns and cities and coalition politics facilitated the election of Latino mayors, council persons, and many social and community leaders, as well as the election of statewide officers. This collection brings together innovative and empirically grounded scholarship from different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study and addresses topics including the demographic history of Latinos in the state, Latino migration from gateway cities to suburban towns, Latino urban enclaves, Latino economic and social mobility, Latino students and education, the New Jersey Dream Act and in-state tuition act organizing, Latinos and criminal justice reform, Latino electoral politics and leadership, and undocumented communities.

Panelists:

Ulla D. Berg is associate professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Anthropology and former Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her first book, "Mobile Selves: Race, Migration, and Belonging in Peru and the U.S.," examined how transnational communicative practices and forms of exchange produce new forms of kinship and sociality across multiple borders among racialized global labor migrants. She has also edited several edited volumes including "El Quinto Suyo: Transnacionalidad y Formaciones Diaspóricas en la Migración Peruana" (with Karsten Paerregaard). "Transnational Citizenship Across the Americas" (with Robyn Rodriguez) and "Migración" (with Irére Ceja and Soledad Alvarez Velasco).

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, professor of history in the Departments of Latino and Caribbean Studies and History and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, is a historian of Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and Latinos in the United States. He specializes in peasant and working class history, revolutions, and ethnicity and race. His first book, "An Agrarian Republic" (Pittsburgh UP 1999) traces the social, economic and political history of El Salvador during the nineteenth century from the perspective of its regions, municipalities and peasant communities. With Jeffrey Gould (Indiana University) he continued his work on El Salvador into the twentieth Century with "To Rise in Darkness" (Duke UP). This book is a history of the 1932 peasant/communist revolt of El Salvador and the traumatic memory of state-sponsored mass murder that followed it and has haunted the country since. He also co-edited two books on Caribbean and Central American studies ("Identity and Struggle" & "Landscapes of Struggle"). His work on Mexico focuses on the regional history of the coffee-producing peasantry in Western Mexico in the late nineteenth century. 

Kathleen López is associate professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She specializes in the historical intersections between Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. Her book "Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History" examines Chinese migrants in Cuba from the mid-nineteenth century to the present through archival and ethnographic research in Cuba, China, and the United States and received the 2014 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize of the Caribbean Studies Association. At Rutgers, she is involved with the SAS Global Asias Initiative, the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Latino Studies Research Initiative. She was a Faculty Fellow for the 2015-2016 Center for Cultural Analysis Archipelagoes Seminar. She is also an editor of two book series: Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, with Ignacio López-Calvo (Palgrave Macmillan) and Critical Caribbean Studies, with Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Carter Mathes (Rutgers University Press). 

Melanie Plasencia, assistant professor of Latinx Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, received her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines how older immigrants in the U.S. negotiate the challenges of aging in the context of extreme poverty, deteriorating health, and diminishing government support. Recently, she completed a multi-year fellowship as the César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College.Her research can be read in the Journals Social Problems and The Gerontologist and has been supported by the Center for Race and Gender and the Ford Foundation. Her public scholarship can be read in the American Society on Aging’s journal, Generations Today, and Inside Higher Ed. 

Presented in partnership with SPIA in NJ and Labyrinth Books and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Upcoming events