Cerro y Ciudad: Urbanization and Multi-Racial Environmentalisms in Post-Revolutionary Orizaba, Veracruz

In recent years, Afro-Indigenous activists in Veracruz have amplified their concerns regarding state and local official’s acknowledgment of racial inequities and continued forms of settler-colonial violence against Indigenous communities. In the Orizaba-Córdoba region of Veracruz, these activists have mobilized to provide aid for victims of recurring forest fires and critique inequitable resource allocations between the region’s urban centers and the Sierra de Zongolica, which is home to several Indigenous Orizaba-Nahuatl pueblos. Local activists understand that the fight for racial justice is entangled in the protection of Afro-Indigenous ecologies. With contemporary activism in mind, this research project interrogates the role of race and racialization in Cordoba-Orizaba Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous struggles against land dispossession throughout the twentieth century. I am particularly interested in how activists have articulated their relationship to land and place through critiques of settler colonialism and racialized violence. This project considers the role of agrarian reforms, urbanization, and migration in Post-Revolutionary Mexico and the effects of mestizaje as a pervasive settler-colonial ideology that takes form in the everyday practices and relationships between Black and Indigenous people and settler institutions. By historicizing how environmental and racial justice activists have mobilized in the region over time, I intend for this project to provide contemporary activists with insight into how to continue the fight against settler colonial violence, erasure, and dispossession.

Cultivating Kalo and Kanaka on the Continent

Following the cultivation of kalo (taro), a canoe crop significant to Kanaka 'Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) ways of knowing and being, this project aims to understand kalo’s role in the diasporic efforts for Hawaiian food sovereignty, as an emblem of Hawaiian resistance, and its implications for coalition building among Oceanic peoples and greater movements of anti-imperial struggle. Through a Kanaka 'Ōiwi lens, this research draws on the ethics and methodologies of mo'olelo (storied histories), aloha 'āina (love for the land which feeds), and mo'okū'auhau (genealogies) to trace the movement, cultivation, preparation, consumption, discourse, and art of kalo as it manifests in Indigenous resistance to settler colonial violence and militarization. Where do we find kalo roots? Where and why do we find them outside of Hawai’i? How do legacies of imperial violence and indigenous resistance fertilize these roots for decolonial praxis?

Latinx Media and the Pursuit of Social Justice: A Transmedial Approach

A central tenet of my book project is that social justice can be achieved as much in the process of producing and engaging with media as in the treatment of social justice themes in a variety of media texts. At its core, the book focuses on the shaping of the producer-participant subject relationship in the crafting of media coverage.  Social justice in media, I argue, can be defined as recognition and a pathway to agency for participant subject and viewer. This year, I will be conducting field research for Chapters 3 and 4, which analyze the coverage by Spanish-language media of social justice issues affecting Latinxs in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, such as immigration rights and experiences, housing and labor rights, educational access, indigenous rights and gender equality. For chapter 3, I will be looking at the work of two low-power multilingual radio stations, Radio Indígena-Mixteco in Oxnard and Radio Santa Ana in Santa Ana.  For chapter 4, I will be researching the working relationship between community organizations and Spanish-language television and print media outlets. What are the possibilities for media enfranchisement through specific SL media?  What do community organizations have to say about the ability of these media to deliver news that is relevant and empowering to the community?  To what extent are reporters and anchors at local SL outlets able to exercise their agency in the direction(s) taken by news stories? What should the role of the Latinx journalist be?  I will be assisted in this mixed method research by Dream Project Fellow, Dariela Espinoza López, who will also be collaborating on a website to share research results with project participants.

Alienated Activism: The Process and Promise of Black Social Movements

Each generation of Black young adults experiences some event that confirms their exclusion, their otherness, their alienation from the American system. This could be the murder of Emmet Till, the beating of Rodney King, the murder of Trayvon Martin, or the murder of George Floyd. These are just some of the names in the “tragic parade of unarmed Black dead” lost to violence (Hooker 2016). These violent and jarring events spark new fights (both organized and unorganized) against anti-Blackness– from the Civil Rights Movement, to Black Power, to urban uprisings, to Black Lives Matter. Young Black people, so alienated from the political system, were organizing for the BLM mass movement, one of the most consequential social movements of our time. After the 2020 uprisings, the New York Times named BLM the largest mass mobilization in American history (Buchanan et al. 2020). In my book, I examine the BLM mass movement in Chicago, discussing the specific experiences of Black alienation, the processes of Black organizing and political education, and the organizations and actions that exemplify movement values in the city. Through archival analysis, observation, and 75 interviews with activists across racial justice and progressive organizations, I reconstruct the history of the movement through the lens of individual experiences and organizational histories. In this way, my work connects the ways personal experiences lead people to seek out new modes of politics in social movements and how social movement organizing can change a city. Ultimately, the movement in Chicago reverberated across the nation influencing direct action, political education, and policy associated with the movement.

Demanding Restorative Justice: The Case for Media Reparations

While “diversity” and “inclusion” are popular buzzwords in the contemporary landscape of U.S. media industries, people of color (POC) remain marginalized in media. UCLA’s annual Hollywood Diversity Report, the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s studies, public broadcasting statistics, and FCC data reveal that communities of color are systematically disenfranchised in terms of media representation, employment, and ownership. For over a century, POC have been subjected to discrimination and marginalization in media with little to no structural change. Inspired by the Free Press’ Media 2070 initiative, this project lays out the evidence for why media reparations are necessary to redress U.S. media’s historical systemic racism against POC. To do so, I will demonstrate how mainland U.S. broadcasting has historically operated as a white racial project that has systemically privileged whiteness and excluded, segregated, and disenfranchised POC. Broadcasting’s white racial project has determined who gets to broadcast and for whom, who has control over programming and employment, and who has the power to shape representation. Given these practices and history, I make the case for broadcast media reparations to redress U.S. radio and television segregationist practices and legacies of institutional racism. I conclude by imagining what media reparations might look like for Latinx communities, and the impacts of what deploying a more egalitarian, expansive notion of Latinidad can enable.

Navigating Pathways to Adulthood in an Era of Precarity: Latino Young Adults on the Community College Pathway

The transition to adulthood in the United States is a precarious time when young people strive for stability in a vastly unequal society. Today, many young adults look to higher education to find this stability. However, prevailing research on this transition and its relationship to higher education predominantly focuses on the experiences of White working-class and middle-class young adults enrolled at four-year colleges, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of the unique pathways and challenges faced by racialized minorities who are far more likely to attend community colleges. In this study, I turn attention to the understudied group of Latino young adults who look to California Community Colleges to support their pathway to a stable adulthood. Drawing on 140 semi-structured life history interviews with Latino young adults who attend or have previously attended a community college in Southern California, I investigate how race, class, and gender shape the educational pathways of these young adults as well as their understandings of the relationship between the higher education and the transition to adulthood. I closely examine participants’ life histories to trace how Latino educational experiences and pathways through community college are dynamically shaped by family-fostered cultural values that emphasize the importance of college graduation for social mobility, the class-based and gendered constraints of Latino families, and the institutional support available at community colleges.

The Food We Eat and the People Who Feed Us

This project focuses on problems related to coerced labor in the U.S. food supply chain. The goal of this project is to move past anti-exploitation strategies that rely on “consumer empowerment” modes of governance, which rely on market-based levers for social change through which the disclosure and dissemination of information allows consumers to “vote with their dollars.” In this project, I argue that consumer-worker alliances overstate the ability of markets—of any market—to address problems within domains that fall uniquely within the control of state and government actors. This is especially true in an industry filled with noncitizen workers whose legal vulnerability can be corrected only by governmental entities. Against this backdrop, this project aims to build two datasets. One is a compilation of anti-immigrant laws within the American South thereby clarifying the relationship between industrial reorganization efforts by meat processors and the emergence of local immigration policies. A second dataset would focus on qualitative data obtained through interviews with stakeholders in these communities. Here, the goal would be to identify clusters of stakeholders who participate in local politics.

Mapping the City: Gentrification and Racial Disparities in Food Access and the Built Environment for Lower-Income Latiné in Costa Mesa, CA

This project focuses on understanding gentrification and food access from a community perspective. Gentrification is increasingly amassing attention as an important public health issue due to potential health and health equity impacts associated with neighborhood change. Literature examining the relationship between gentrification and food access has identified neighborhood change from gentrification increases the availability of healthy food. In turn, these neighborhoods transform from food deserts to places with more healthy food options. However, it is questionable as to whether these new foods are accessible or affordable for all residents, and the food environment changes may be a “food mirage”, where healthy food is available, but only for those with higher incomes.  This study will help to uncover how “food mirages” might contribute to food insecurity in gentrified or gentrifying Latiné communities in Costa Mesa, California, who already experience higher food insecurity rates and diet related disease burden. Using a community-based participatory research approach, I will partner with Resilience Orange County (ROC) and their advocacy groups to conduct participatory mapping sessions where community members will map their food access places, routes to these places, and features of the built environment that are challenges and assets to this access. From this work, I will co-produce a research brief with the community partner highlighting the findings and preparing this brief to be disseminated to local city council leaders.

Racialized Youth and Violence in South Central Los Angeles

South-Central Los Angeles is home to many working-class communities of color. It is a place where Black youth and Latinx youth come of age together: they are neighbors, grow up attending the same schools, and develop place-based identities. Historically, however, South Central has been stigmatized as a section of Los Angeles with high poverty rates, crime, gangs, and racial tensions. South Central has also been documented as a site of repression, policing, surveillance, and criminalization. These accounts largely ignore the experiences of Black and Latinx youth and their place in South Central. Using semi-structured and informal interviews and participant observations within various settings and institutions in South Central, I examine how Black and Latinx youth experience, respond to and navigate violence on a day-to-day. Theoretically, I draw on the perspectives and subjectivities of racialized youth to broaden current conceptualizations of violence. My research agenda and perspective are textured by my experiences and identity. I was born to working-class Mexican immigrants and raised in a Black and Latinx community within South Central. After completing a BA and MA, I taught at high schools in South Central and spent years volunteering in prisons (men and women facilities) and youth residential centers.