Oct 18, 2023 - In Conversation with Dr. Marisol LeBrón (UC Santa Cruz)

Conversations on Race and Policing - California State University San Bernardino (CSUSB)

a conversation with Dr. Marisol LeBrón (UC Santa Cruz).

Wednesday, October 18 2023 at 1:00 PM PDT

Recording is at this link

Thank you to the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for supporting this event along with Pfau Library. This webinar event is open to the public.

Marisol LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on race, social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. Prior to arriving at UCSC, she held appointments at the University of Texas at Austin, Dickinson College, and Duke University. She received her PhD in American Studies from New York University and her bachelor's degree in Comparative American Studies and Latin American Studies from Oberlin College.

She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). Along with Yarimar Bonilla, she is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). She has published her research in a variety of venues including Signs, Society and Space, Modern American History, Radical History Review, Journal of Urban History, Souls, Women & Performance, and NACLA Report on the Americas.

She is currently at work on a new book project, Up Against the Wall: Policing and the Making of Latinxs, which is under contract with University of California Press’ American Studies Now series. Up Against the Wall aims to uncover the centrality of policing to the emergence and consolidation of Latinx identity in the United States. The book demonstrates that policing has played an essential, although chronically underexamined, role in shaping how we understand Latinxs and their place within American society. When and how diverse Latinx communities have come into contact with the United States’ law enforcement apparatus tell us a great deal about how Latinx groups are positioned within hierarchies of belonging related to race, citizenship, class, and spatial location in ways that continue to have deadly reverberations. In particular, Up Against the Wall traces how policing functions as a structuring component of everyday life for Latinxs that both facilitates and manages the effects of (settler) colonial dispossession, imperialist expansion, economic exploitation, and racial differentiation.

An active contributor to popular conversations about policing as well as Puerto Rico and its diaspora, she has published op-eds in The Washington Post, The Guardian and Truthout in addition to being interviewed by a number of news outlets. She is one of the co-creators and project leaders for the Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRsyllabus), a digital resource for understanding the Puerto Rican debt crisis. She is also one of the editors for The Abusable Past, a digital project that features unique and original content related to the praxis of radical history in this social and political moment. She is currently the Vice President/President Elect of the Puerto Rican Studies Association and a member of the Executive Committee of the American Studies Association.

Series organizers: Dr. Mary Texeira (Sociology), Robie Madrigal (Pfau Library), Stan Futch (President, Westside Action Group), Dr. Jeremy Murray (History), Cecelia Smith (CSUSB, BA/MA Graduate), Matt Patino (CSUSB MA Candidate). Click here to view previous panels in the Conversations on Race and Policing series (link).