CSRC Research Grants, 2023-24

Racial Inequality in Puerto Rico

Cesar Ayala, Professor, Sociology

Professor Ayala seeks to conduct research on racial inequality in Puerto Rico throughout the 20th century in comparison with that in the United States and countries of Latin America for which data is available. Ayala’s measures will include unemployment rates, educational attainment, homeownership rates, and income.  For the grant year, Ayala’s research will involve collecting data to primarily to show comparisons between Puerto Rico and Louisiana in the first half of the twentieth century. Like Puerto Rico, Louisiana was a sugar-cane growing state with relatively high illiteracy among existing “Black,” “mulatto,” and “white” populations.  He will conduct research at the Library of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and possibly at the New York Public Library, specifically the branch named after a Puerto Rican and Black bibliographer, Arturo Schomburg, which is located in Harlem. Travel will be in the summer or fall of 2023. He is also interested in hiring a GSR to assist with compiling the information he gathers. Ayala intends to publish articles based on his research.

Mobile Indigenous Community Archives: Rematriating Knowledges for Community Access and Control

Maylei Blackwell, Professor, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

As Professor Blackwell describes, “Mobile Indigenous Community Archive (MICA - archivo móvil de las comunidades indígenas) is an Indigenous memory project that seeks to build a digital archive or seed bank of the rich histories of Indigenous organizing in Mexico and the Latin American Indigenous diaspora, with a special focus on women who are often left out of the documenting and archiving process, guided by community designed protocols, and a commitment to rematriate knowledges that are gathered.”

With IAC grant support, Blackwell will hire a GSR and work-study students to build and pilot a website that will house and serve as the portal to the digital archive already being developed by students. In the fall, the team plans to build the website and engage in iterative design with community partners while entering the remaining assets into the content management/digital archive system. In winter, they will finish digitizing the archives and creating exhibitions with the archival materials. In spring, they plan to launch the archive with community partners.

Increasing Access to Bystander CPR Training in Latino Communities

Rosemarie Diaz, Professor, Emergency Medicine

Professor Diaz’s project stems from the data that shows Latinos in Los Angeles receive bystander CPR at approximately half the rate of Whites. While it is known that performing CPR on patients who suffer from cardiac arrest is critical to survival, multiple studies have shown that Latino patients are less likely to receive bystander CPR. Lower rates of bystander CPR can be attributed to several factors including the high cost of CPR training, limited access to CPR training in Spanish, fear held by Latino bystanders about liability, and a paucity of bilingual 911 dispatchers who can guide telecommunicator-assisted CPR.

Diaz will conduct a community education program that teaches bystander CPR to local Latino Los Angeles residents as instructed by UCLA undergraduate students, medical students and resident physicians. These Bruins will train local residents to perform bystander CPR, providing training at parks, recreation centers, and sports venues frequented by Latino residents. This program will benefit participating Latino community members by providing an important life-saving skill and benefit the UCLA students and medical trainees who will have the opportunity to directly address health disparities and give back to local communities. Each training event would also serve as an opportunity for undergraduate students to interact with medical students and health professionals who can serve as STEM mentors. These events would be publicized on social media to showcase UCLA’s commitment to community engagement and reducing health disparities. Diaz also plans to publish an article based on this research.

UCLA HSI Curriculum Research and Training

Celia Lacayo, Professor, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Professor Lacayo and co-PI Elizabeth Gonzalez, Inaugural Director of UCLA Hispanic Serving Institution, received funding for a two-day training session at UCLA in Summer 2023 to advance the university’s initiative to achieve Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) designation by 2025. This training session for thirty HSI “fellows” will be based on a curriculum Lacayo and Gonzalez are in the process of designing based on reports, data and publications pertaining to current HSIs. This grant will assist the research phase for creating the curriculum focused on three key areas: access strategies, retention and belonging, and graduate and career pathways. Lacayo and Gonzalez will then use the majority of the funding to hold a two-date event in which participants will become clear on the vision for HSI at UCLA and can serve as HSI advocates.

The event will be designed to actively engage UCLA faculty, staff and students through a project-based leadership program to broaden the impact and depth of UCLA’s HSI efforts. This community-building and leadership opportunity will be available to faculty, administrators, directors, and staff members with the experiences, cultural and social strengths, and influence to develop and implement campus-wide institutional transformation. Individuals who demonstrate their promise to advance HSI efforts at UCLA will be invited to apply. The HSI Chairs and HSI Director will make the selection of these thirty HSI Fellows.

A long-term goal of the project is to develop a premier professional development training for other HSI research-intensive campuses, including other UC campus. This pilot training will provide the framework to be the pioneer and will build out HSI capacity at UCLA and the UC system.

Latinx Communities and Space in Las Vegas, Nevada

Briceida Hernandez-Toledo, PhD Candidate, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Hernandez-Toledo’s dissertation examines the lived experiences of Latinx people in Las Vegas and how they “make the space of Las Vegas their own.” Specifically, she is interested in how race, class, and gender impact how Latinx locals conceptualize “the geographies” of Las Vegas. Hernandez-Toledo will use this grant to travel and conduct qualitative, in-depth semi-structured interviews with fifty people who self-identify as Latinx/a/o/e and/or Hispanic and have lived in Las Vegas for twenty years or more. This range of years will capture the experiences of people who grew up and/or who moved to Las Vegas during the Latinx population boom of the 1990s and 2000s. This time range also spans key time-periods shaping the experiences of Latinx people locally and more broadly in the U.S., including the immigrant rights marches of 2006, the 2008 Great Recession, and the Trump presidency. In addition, longtime Las Vegas have experienced the physical changes and growth the Las Vegas Valley has undergone in the last few decades.

Central American Migrant Seamstresses in Los Angeles

Iris Ramirez, PhD Candidate, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Ramirez’s dissertation focuses on the work experiences of female Central American garment workers in Los Angeles and the consequences of these experiences on various aspects of these workers’ lives. Through an empirical approach consisting of one-on-one interviews with immigrant garment workers who have worked in the industry at any time between the 1980s to the present, Ramirez seeks to create a history that reveals social, cultural, and policy changes within the local industry over the past forty years. Some study participants may no longer work in garment industries, having since left the industry (for an array of reasons including illness, poverty, and burn out), while others may be still be active in it. Participants will be identified through Ramirez’s personal and familial networks (her mother was a seamstress), as well as through Garment Workers Centers’ networks. In the interviews, Ramirez will ask workers to share their experiences regarding seamstress work in their countries of origin, their arrival to the Los Angeles sweatshops, and how they navigate everyday life as garment workers – then, and now (if they are still in the industry). She will use gift cards to compensate interview subjects with a goal of collecting twenty interviews during the grant year.