College of Letters & Science
Is there such a thing as “the Latinx Vote?” In the wake of the 2024 election, pundits have been focusing on an apparent shift from Democrats to Republicans by voters of Latin American descent. Former CLS Director Armando Ibarra thinks that abstractions like “The Latinx Vote” may keep us from understanding what’s really going on …
When the New York Times’s Jazmine Ulloa needed background for a story on the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), she turned to UW-Madison’s Benjamin Márquez. The Times noted that LULAC, the country’s oldest Latina/o civil rights organization, had never made an endorsement in a Presidential election until 2024, when it endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris. …
A joke about Puerto Rico at a Trump campaign rally this past Sunday has left many Puerto Ricans feeling insulted and has focused national attention on the archipelago and its diaspora. To help sort the implications of the incident and place it in context, WPR’s Wisconsin Today turned to Aurora Santiago Ortiz, assistant professor of …
CLS faculty member Armando Ibarra shared his thoughts on migration and the upcoming US election with reporters Alfredo Corchado and Dudley Althaus of the online news outlet Palabra for a recent story about the politics of migration. Centered on profiles of recent immigrants from Nicaragua working in Milwaukee, the story sought to give context for ongoing debates …
As the 2024 Presidential election enters its final stretch and debates on immigration become increasingly heated, CLS faculty like Benjamin Márquez are helping journalists and the public understand the situation. In an interview with PBS Wisconsin that airs tonight (October 4, 2024) on the program Here and Now, helps distinguish fact from fiction and explains the …
When NPR’s Franco Ordoñez needed context for a story on the Latine vote in Wisconsin and a later follow-up, he turned to CLS affiliate faculty member and former Director Benjamin Márquez (Political Science). Prof. Márquez explained that while voters of Latin American descent tend to vote Democratic, they are not “committed Democratic ideologues.” He noted …
The undersigned faculty and staff of the Chican@ & Latin@ Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hail the Minnesota jury’s guilty verdict on the charges in the death of George Floyd. This verdict is an important step and signals that change toward a more just society is possible in the United States. We also acknowledge …
As details emerge about the murderous attacks on businesses in Georgia, one thing should be clear. Nearly two centuries of open structural racism and sexual imperialism against people of Asian descent cannot be reduced to one non-Hispanic White man’s “bad day.” In this context, we the undersigned the faculty and staff of the Chican@ & …
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the mainstream press has struggled to understand the voting behavior of U.S. communities of Latin American descent. In a recent op-ed for The Progressive, CLS Director Armando Ibarra argues that class differences, occupational niches, and different Cold War histories are central to understanding Latinx voters’. Ibarra argues that …
Erin Barbato, a CLS affiliate faculty member in the UW School of Law and the director of the University’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, has published a forceful editorial in the Capital Times calling for an end to immigration detention in the United States. She notes that recent reports of forced sterilizations in immigration detention facilities have …