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Dear CLALS Friends,

I would like to take a moment here between semesters to remind our colleagues, partners, students, alumni, and other friends what CLALS is all about, as well as share some exciting announcements.

At the core of the Center’s mission is to do work that creates positive change in the world. We carry out projects on politics and governance, the environment, democracy building and democratic threats across the Americas, migration paths, and immigrant integration into cities and towns, tackling the challenges our world faces and informing new approaches to solving them. We conduct applied research and often work with community partners. At the Immigration Lab, we work with colleagues and students to understand immigration from around the world, including El Salvador, Cuba, Ecuador, Afghanistan, and Ukraine.

To achieve this mission, we work with over 80 faculty affiliates from all schools and colleges across campus. We hire undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students as research assistants from all schools and majors, as well as host interns, fellows, Fulbright, and international visiting scholars from around the world. Much of our work is funded thanks to external sponsors and philanthropic investments, and increasingly, AU’s alumni and friends who understand that our work creates change.

Our main goal at the Center is to inform the public and policymakers about pressing issues and new developments, using a deep understanding of history and local context. I see my work partly as being a cultural broker or cultural translator acting as a bridge between different publics, with CLALS being a forum to hold these discussions. At the Immigration Lab, we translate research for non-academic audiences, hosting scholars who can explain contemporary immigration in its proper scale and proportion.

I often speak to the news media, bringing an expert understanding of issues around borders, immigration, asylum-seeking, and human mobility. Often, I contextualize U.S. political news for Spanish-speaking audiences in the U.S., Latin America, and Spain — and in other outlets across the world like France24, the Arabic version of Voice of America, the BBC, or Brazilian outlets. The Center and the Immigration Lab also have popular blogs where we analyze, in an accessible way, topics of the day and ongoing challenges. We publish working papers, open-access journal articles, and books like “Reunited,” our most recent work on the causes and effects of family separation due to immigration laws. We also help young researchers who work with us long-term to get their policy-relevant work published.

In this month’s newsletter, we are highlighting our recent graduates, announcing the newly-published E-Forum titled “Religion, Migration, and Worldmaking in the Borderlands” completed as part of the Henry Luce Foundation-funded project “Religion and Environmentally-Induced Displacement in Latin America and the Caribbean,” the promotions of several of our faculty affiliates, our new research fellows, recently-published and forthcoming books and blogs coming out of CLALS, international events and discussions, and in-house training for local partner organizations.

Thank you for your continued support, and we will see you in the fall.

Best wishes,

Ernesto Castañeda
Director, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies