"Latino Studies," with Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof

I spoke with Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, professor of history at Harvard University and part of Harvard’s working group in ethnic studies.

We talked about his book Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean, in addition to latinidad and the interdisciplinary field of Latino Studies.

Racial Migrations is one of my favorites from the past few years. It’s a book about the period before, during, and after the war for Cuban independence from Spain. It focuses on the intertwined lives and careers of writers, political thinkers, and civil rights activists Rafael Serra, Jose Marti, Sotero Figueroa, Gertrudis Heredia de Serra, and many others. The central themes are migration and how race gets translated between New York and the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

We open up the book to talk about what figures like Serra, Marti, Figueroa, and Heredia teach us about latinidad in general, and the issues I’ve been consumed with here and elsewhere: latinidad as a domestic and/or transnational phenomenon, and Latino racial identity and politics. Oh, and what it meant for Jesse to be writing about these subjects over the period that bridged Obama’s and Trump’s presidencies.

We also discuss the important work of other scholars including Alejandro de la Fuente, Ada Ferrer, Lori Flores, Lorgia Garcia-Peña, Lillian Guerra, Lara Putnam, Dixa Ramirez. I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting.

Anyway, here it is! Enjoy!

And patient, kind, generous listener: in this podcast, you will hear a laptop notification, maybe a cough (I’m getting over a cold), a ten-second pause when Jesse’s internet goes out. I never claimed that this would be Fresh Air or some other highly-produced podcast, although it will get better. I’m hiring a producer for this and other projects! But if it’s good content you’re looking for, I hope we at least deliver that.

Jesse’s other books:

Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870-1960, co-edited with Paulina Laura Alberto and George Reid Andrews (Cambridge University Press)

A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton University Press)