Dr. Weise in the heart of Mexico City.
I/ST 200 (Introduction to International Studies), I/ST 320I (Migration and Modernity), I/ST 490 (Senior Research Seminar).
I received my Ph.D. in History (U.S. and Latin American) at Yale University in May 2009, a few months after I came to CSULB as an Assistant Professor. I am interested in identity, citizenship, migration, race, and nations -- and the way they interact on the ground in real life. My current book project, Corazon de Dixie: Migration and the Struggle for Rights in the U.S. South and Mexico, 1910-2010, uses a series of case studies to examine the arrival of Mexicans and Mexican Americans into landscapes commonly defined as black and white: Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina. I focus on the communities and politics of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and those who encountered them in the South's rural, urban, suburban, and exurban areas. Additionally, I show how the Mexican government and its consular representatives in the South responded to and influenced politics there, given the "official" national ideology of race-mixing in post revolutionary Mexico.
I recently published my research in an article, "Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. South, 1908-1939," in the September 2008 issue of the journal American Quarterly. I have received awards and fellowships for my work, including the Yale Graduate School's George Washington Egleston Historical Prize and more recently, a Faculty Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In addition to scholarly publication, I enjoy jumping into the public debate via occasional public presentations, media interviews and Op/ed pieces.
The volatile immigration politics of California in the 1990s first sparked my interest in immigration and identity. My primary and secondary educations had offered me little or no insight into the root causes of Latin American immigration, the histories of Latinos in my hometown of Los Angeles, or the dynamics of anti-immigrant politics. I started reading up, and in college I learned that I could make a career out of doing so. I received my B.A. in Anthropology and Ethnicity, Race and Migration from Yale in 2000, and focused my studies on Latin American migration.
After graduation, I spent two years in Mexico City, where I worked as a speechwriter and researcher for the Mexican government's Office of the President for Mexicans Living Abroad. I then did immigration-related policy work in Los Angeles before beginning graduate school.
Since coming to CSULB, I have relished the intellectual stretching that International Studies requires, in my case exploring familiar issues on less familiar continents. I enjoy developing my new global and comparative course, I/ST 320I (Migration and Modernity), and participating in the campus Collaborative for Global Migration Studies.
