Spring 2010 EVENTS:

Tuesday, 02/09 7 PM
James Room
4th Floor Barnard Hall

Silvia Pedraza and Lara Sung Back, University of Michigan

Pedraza and Back use the National Latino Survey data collected in 2006 to assess the extent to which Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and South American immigrants have assimilated or engaged in transnational practices as well as which social characteristics predict these behaviors. They compare various immigrant cohorts: those who arrived in the US between 1958-1973, 1974-1989, and 1990-2005. The results show that the type of migration--as labor migrants, professional migrants, or refugees--makes a difference for these outcomes.

Silvia Pedraza is Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her publications include Political and Economic Migrants in America: Cubans and Mexicans and Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America, co-edited with Ruben G. Rumbaut, and Political Disaffection in Cuba’s Revolution and Exodus.

Lara Sung Back graduated from the University of Michigan with Honors, May 2009

Thursday, 02/25 7 PM
Sulzberger Parlor
Barnard Hall

Lois Ann Lorentzen, University of San Francisco

Lorentzen was lead investigator for a team of scholars and activists who undertook a four-year ethnographic project that studied religion among migrants around the San Francisco Bay Area. Here she examines the multiple roles that religion plays for new migrant communities in the United States with a focus on Salvadoran Pentecostals, Vietnamese Theravada Buddhists, Yucatecan Maya, and Chinese Presbyterians. Exploring the theoretical connections among transnationalism, spiritual journeys, gender crossings, and acculturation, Lorentzen will also offer some reflections on how "religion" itself is transformed by the migrant experience.

Lois Ann Lorentzen is Director of the Center for Latino Studies in the Americas and Chair of the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. She is the co-editor and/or author of Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: Politics, Identity and Faith in New Migrant Communities; Ecofeminism and Globalization:  Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion; Religion/Globalization: Theories and Cases; Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas; and The Gendered New World Order: Militarism, the Environment and Development, among others. Professor Lorentzen has worked in refugee resettlement with the state of Minnesota, Catholic Charities, and organizations in Mexico and El Salvador.

Monday, 3/29, 7 PM
Sulzberger Parlor
3rd Floor Barnard Hall

Allen Wells, Bowdoin College

The U.S. government was initially supportive of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s offer to accept 100,000 Central European Jews at the Evian Conference in July 1938. But even as the first settlers arrived on the north coast of the island in May 1940, the Dominican and U.S. governments backed away from their endorsements of the farming settlement at Sosúa. The succession of German victories throughout Western Europe during the spring of 1940 fed State Department fears of Nazi infiltration into the Americas. FDR’s refusal to take any Jewish refugees from German-occupied territory and his insistence on vetting would-be colonists placed the settlement in jeopardy from the outset and ensured that the offer of 100,000 refugees would never be realized.

Allen Wells is the Roger Howell Jr. Professor of History at Bowdoin College. He has recently published Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR and the Jews of Sosúa (2009). He is the author of Yucatán’s Gilded Age: Haciendas, Henequen, and International Harvester, 1860–1915; a co-author of Summer of Discontent, Seasons of Upheaval: Elite Politics and Rural Rebellion in Yucatán, 1876–1915; and a co-editor of The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930.

Thursday, 04/08 6 PM
James Room
4th Floor Barnard Hall

Immigration stirs some of the most heated, and at times acerbic, public debates in the U.S. Newcomers are often seen as taking away jobs from natives, particularly poorer ones, lowering wages, increasing crime, burdening social services, and undermining national unity by their unwillingness to assimilate. Others dismiss these complains as xenophobic, racist, and political demagoguery. Professors Mae Ngai of Columbia University, Joaquin Arango of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and Jose Moya of Barnard College explore these debates by placing them in historical perspective and comparing them to those going on in other countries of immigration in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University will moderate.

Co-sponsored with Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race

Thursday, 4/15, 4 PM
365 Fifth Ave., NY
Bildner Center, Graduate Center, CUNY

Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain

More Spaniards arrived in Cuba after the island became independent from Spain in 1898 than during four centuries of Spanish colonial rule. This presentation examines the continuing dominant role of Spaniards in Cuba’s economy, how this was accomplished, and the impact of the arrivals on the culture and national identity of their host country.

Consuelo Naranjo Orovio is a professor at the CSIC in Spain, the director of Revista de Indias, and the author or editor numerous books, among them: La nación soñada: Cuba, Puerto Rico y Filipinas ante el 98; Racismo e immigración en Cuba en el siglo XX; Del campo a la bodega: recuerdos de gallegos en Cuba, siglo XX; and Cuba vista por el emigrante español a la isla, 1900-1959: un ensayo de historia oral.

Reservation required: 212 817-2096, jslater@gc.cuny.edu

Monday, 4/26, 7 PM
Sulzberger Parlor
3rd Floor Barnard Hall

David Fitzgerald, UCSD

Against the claims of many scholars of globalization and transnationalism, Fitzgerald argues that the Westphalian principle of territorial sovereignty is strengthening in ways that has encouraged the Mexican government to renegotiate the terms of the social contract between emigrants and the Mexican state. This new social contract emphasizes voluntaristic ties, a menu of options for expressing membership, an emphasis on rights over obligations, and the legitimacy of plural legal and affective national affiliations.

David Scott Fitzgerald is Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author, most recently, of A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages its Migration (University of California Press, 2009). His major current project examines relationships between liberalism and racism in the immigration and nationality laws of 22 countries in the Americas from 1850 to 2000.