CSRC Research Grants, 2012-2013

 

This IAC grant provided supported for the creation of a curated digital archive of the Carlos Velez-Ibañez Sterilization Papers housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center archives.  This collection is the only one existing focused on the 1970’s sterilization of Mexican women at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center and the subsequent lawsuit, Madrigal Vs. Quilligan.  This work promises to create a model for other digital repositories holding ethnic studies collections.

 

 

This IAC funding provided support to examine the interaction between the United States federal legal structures in relation to racial discrimination imposed on Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican racial culture.  A key goal of this project is the gathering of data pertaining to legal cases to illuminate the relative absence of racial discrimination litigation in Puerto Rico.  The larger, long term aim of this project is to combine applicants’ expertise (Cesar Ayala’s and Mark Sawyer’s) in Political Science, Sociology, and Law to generate a complex analysis of the interaction of U.S. legal structures and Latin American racial systems. 

 

 

This grant provided support to develop a data base of Latino cities to be used in future research projects.  This project highlighted the fact that among sixty-three, 100,000 plus cities in California, ten have Latino majorities.  In this demographic context, this project had as goal to develop a data base of these Latino-majority cities, collecting in the process the following information: governance systems, election systems, number of local elected city council members, number of appointed commissioners, budges, population since 1970, and basic information (including that pertaining to vulnerable populations).

 

 

IAC funds provided support for data cleaning, re-coding, and analysis for a book by the PI dealing with return migration to Mexico, transfer of skills as well as social mobility in the context of the U.S.-Mexico migration system.  In 2010, the PI and his collaborators conducted 200 interviews (out of or random sample) of non-migrants and return migrants in the large Mexican city of Leon, Guanajuato.  They also conducted two case studies and 20 additional interviews with 20 returned migrants in the town of San Miguel de Allende.  On the basis of some preliminary findings, this project advanced the concept of total human capital, including formal skills (e.g., education and language capital), combined with on-the-job work experience and non-technical, social, and interpersonal skills and qualities acquired over different stages of the migratory cycle. 

 

 

IAC funds supported the mapping of the untold history of how Los Angeles became the world capital of incarceration, beginning in the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848).  This aim of this project was to explore how the intersectionality between genocide, conquest, urbanization, immigration control, and the Jim Crow legacy turned black and brown men into the main subjects of mass incarceration in the West during the late-twentieth century.  This research looked at the city of Los Angeles’ investment in mass incarceration as an illustration of the history of race, migration, labor and citizenship in the West between the U.S.-Mexico War in 1848 and the War on Drugs in the 1980’s.

 

 

IAC funding of this project supported the applicant’s dissertation efforts.  Prior to her application for IAC funding, the applicant had already collected over 500 single-spaced pages of field notes and 40 interviews conducted with a group of low-income Mexican Americans, and African Americans organized against mass incarceration in South Central Los Angeles.  Applicant had already conducted participant observation and 40 in-depth interviews.  Funding was to support the applicant to conduct 10 additional  interviews with prisoners associated with the above mentioned organization.

 

 

The applicant, via a case study approach, intended to show the effects of racial/gender micro aggressions associated to race-based trauma in the context of higher education.  The applicant used Testimonios as a methodology to facilitate the study’s participants to name institutional, social political discursive assaults on their paths towards academic careers. Funded by the Tamar Diana Wilson Fund.

 

 

This project employed self-report measures and behavioral tasks to clarify the mechanisms underlying the immigrant paradox and its effects on substance use initiation and patterns of use among Latino youth.  That objective was accomplished by examining neurocognitive dimensions of impulsivity and outcome expectancies, and contextual explanations such as parental monitoring and family values. Funded by the Tamar Diana Wilson Fund.