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Faculty/Staff Updates
If you wanted stimulating conversations about race, immigration enforcement, and Latine community resilience this fall, The Chicanx/e & Latinx/e Program’s speaker series had you covered. It helped to arrive a little early, though, because students, faculty, staff, and community members filled Memorial Library’s first-floor seminar room for both the semester’s panels. As in previous years, the series featured brief presentations by noted experts in U.S. Latine studies, followed by extensive dialogue with audiences. The series’ theme for the 2025-2026 academic year is “Building Communities of Care and Resilience in Times of Crisis.”
The first panel took place on Tuesday, October 7th, with panelists exploring the theme “Race, Immigration and Mass Removals.” This event featured three outstanding speakers from the fields of History and Law to reflect upon both the history and contemporary iterations of policies of deportation and mass removal in the U.S. Professor Elliott Young from Lewis and Clark College kicked off the panel with the story of Mayra Machado from El Salvador, who was detained by ICE and separated from her children by deportation. Professor Young suggested that Machado’s detention and deportation fit into a long pattern of deportation and exclusion directed toward racialized others that, at times, relied on characterizations of undocumented immigrants as mentally ill or unhealthy—as was the case in the early 1900s.
Professor Marla Ramírez, a faculty member in CLS and History at UW-Madison spoke about the research she conducted for her just published book, Banished Citizens: A History of Mexican American Women Who Endured Repatriation. Ramírez analyzed the deportation of Mexican Americans who were U.S. citizens in the period between 1921-1944. During this period, a whopping 60% of those deported were U.S. citizens and were often Mexican American women married to Mexican men and their children. The U.S. government argued that deportation was necessary because the husbands were being deported that women and children were “likely to become a public charge” by asking for public assistance. For many, it took decades to reclaim their U.S. citizenship.
Professor Kevin Johnson from the UC-Davis Law School spoke about the centrality of race and racial profiling in past and present mass deportations. Focusing on the current moment, Professor Johnson suggested that the current administration’s invasion of Los Angeles with ICE and military force is aimed at a city that is fifty percent Latinx and one-third immigrant. Suggesting that this was not a coincidence, Professor Johnson detailed the toll this invasion had taken on Los Angeles, with ordinary working-class citizens facing repeated stops and questions from ICE officers.
On November 4, a second panel titled “Cultivating Latinx/e Resilience Amidst Challenging Conditions” highlighted the ways that U.S. Latine communities weather the various storms that they face. Literary scholar Amanda Ellis, an associate professor of Mexican American literature and culture at the University of Houston, who has written about curanderismo in Mexican American literature, reflected upon her grandmother’s teachings. Focusing on the home-centered spiritual practices she learned from her grandmother, Ellis explored the power of these in cultivating resilience within a flawed world.
Lorena Muñoz, a geographer and professor of Global Studies at California Lutheran University, offered a vivid description of precarious informal economies of street vending from Colombia to Los Angeles. More importantly, Muñoz analyzed successful organizing strategies of vendors to defend their livelihoods. Finally, Gustavo Arellano, a journalist with the Los Angeles Times, described the way U.S. Latine communities are responding to the current wave of racialized nativism. During his stay in Madison, Arellano also gave a separate lunchtime lecture sponsored by the CLS Program and the Center for Journalism Ethics about his career in California’s changing media landscape.
If you enjoyed the panels and want to continue the conversation, there is more to come in the Spring. On Thursday, February 19th, a panel titled “Migration, Resilience, and Community Building in Times of Crisis” will feature cultural anthropologists Gina Pérez (Oberlin College) and Gilberto Rosas (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), along with sociologist Stephanie Canizales (UC Berkeley). Then, on Thursday April 9th, anthropologist Patricia Zavella (UC Santa Cruz) will join media scholar María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) and Anna Ochoa O’Leary of the University of Arizona for a panel called “Gender, Care Networks, and Social Justice.” Both panels will take place in Memorial Library room 126 and will be accessible by Zoom videoconference. An archived video recording of the October 7th panel is available on the CLS Program’s YouTube Channel.