Category: Department Updates
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Balloffet publishes article on environment, tropical disease and scientific networks in Argentina
Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies Lily Balloffet published an article titled “Environment, Tropical Disease, and Scientific Networks in Argentina: Folclore and Multiscalar Mobilities” in the Journal of the History Biology. She was also recently chosen as the winner of the 2026 Everett Mendelsohn Prize, which is awarded to the best research article…
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Pinho co-publishes book on whiteness in Latin America
Professor Patricia Pinho co-published “Branquitudes/Blanquitudes: Diálogos latinoamericanos sobre convivialidad y desigualdad (Whitenesses: Latin American Dialogues on Conviviality and Inequality)” with co-authors Mário Augusto Medeiros da Silva, Roosbelinda Cárdenas, and Hugo Cerón-Anaya. This interdisciplinary book addresses the historically overlooked question: What does it mean to be white in Latin America? The book invites us to think…
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Taft publishes chapter in a new Handbook of Youth Activism
Professor Jessica Taft published a chapter in a new Handbook of Youth Activism, exploring four approaches to political learning and political education within youth-led social movements and how these approaches vary by context across the Americas. The chapter highlights how political cultures, organizational forms, and activist infrastructures shape and enable different kinds of learning processes.
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Honoring our 2025 Wally Goldfrank Award winners
The Department of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) is proud to announce the Fall 2025 recipients of the Wally Goldfrank Outstanding Paper Award, honoring exceptional undergraduate scholarship and writing in the department. This award celebrates students whose written work demonstrates intellectual rigor, originality, and a deep engagement with the interdisciplinary questions that define Latin…
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Ramírez co-authors article on non/belonging in Germany and United States
Professor Catherine Ramírez co-authored “Producing Integration: The Translation of Non/belonging in Germany and the United States” with German migration scholar Christoph Rass for History and Theory. The researchers compare integration in Germany and the United States by looking at the former country’s Duldung (deferral/toleration) system and the latter’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
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Graduate student interviewed for her research on evangelical women in Costa Rica
The University of Costa Rica recently interviewed LALS Ph.D. student Adriana Maroto Vargas about her groundbreaking research. Listen to the full interview in Spanish in under 30 minutes! Her work offers a feminist analysis of the neoconservative project in Latin America, centering the voices and experiences of women in neo-Pentecostal churches in Costa Rica. Adriana explores why women…
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Ramírez weighs in on Real ID rules, talks assimilation on Scientific Sense podcast
Professor & Chair Catherine Ramírez provides commentary in Zócalo Public Square about how Real ID excludes real Americans, which has been republished in CalMatters, The San Francisco Chronicle, and several other periodicals across the state. Her conversation at Bookshop Santa Cruz with acclaimed anthropologist Jason De León about his award-winning book, Soldiers and Kings: Survival…
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LALS Alum Nik Altenberg on lawsuit that forces ICE to release policy documents
Nik Altenberg (LALS ’23) writes for KQED News: “Federal immigration authorities will soon be required to release a trove of documents that have until now been shielded from public view.”
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Professor Ramírez co-edits “The Border is the Crisis: Reflections on the Centenary of the Immigration Act of 1924”
In this series commissioned by Catherine S. Ramírez and A. Naomi Paik, contributors examine the legacy of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the simultaneous launching of the Border Patrol, which, together, inaugurated the most restrictive era of US immigration history until our own.
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LALS presence at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Conference in Bogota, Colombia, June 12-15, 2024
Faculty and doctoral students from the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) attended the LASA Conference themed “Reaction and Resistance: Imagining Possible Futures in the Americas.