SPEAKING FOR THE FUTURE: Statistics, Electoral Demonstrations and Latino Sleeping Giants
November 20, 2013
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Presenter : Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, Brown University
As part of a broader dissertation project on national Latino civil rights and advocacy organizations, I document nonpartisan efforts to awaken and leverage the so-called Latino "sleeping giant" in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Specifically, I focus on the statistically mediated relationship between spokespersons and public demonstrations of "Latino power." As I trace empirically, demonstrations do not only refer to protests and marches; they also include censuses, elections, and other large scale events that seem to validate, at once and irrefutably, both the ontological existence "Latinos," as a collective and coherent entity, and a future in which this population has realized its full political potential. Drawing on the writings of Bourdieu, Latour, Beltran, and others, I reflect on the complexities, contingencies, and contradictions inherent in attempts to speak on behalf of the many and a tomorrow yet to be.
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Brown University. He received an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Illinois-Chicago. His research on Puerto Rican activism in Chicago’s immigrant rights movement appears in the volume, ¡Marcha!: Latino Chicago and the Immigrant Rights Movement (2010, University of Illinois Press). He is also a co-guest editor of a special issue of Qualitative Sociology on Actor-Network Theory. His research interests include knowledge and culture, Latino identity formation and ethno racial politics, coloniality, social and political theory, and ethnographic methodologies.
Date posted
Aug 13, 2018
Date updated
Aug 13, 2018