As part of my Rural and Urban Social Movements class, you are invited to a presentation by Juan de Lara, Pitzer Alumnus, former Rhodes Scholar, and now Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, and Director of the Latinx and Latin American Studies Center at the University of Southern California, this Wednesday, April 28 at 3:15 PM. The zoom link is: https://pitzer.zoom.us/j/86987777594
Juan will speak on his journey to become a well-known scholar who works at the intersections of race, space, and power. He will speak on the growth of the logistics economy, particularly in the inland empire region, and how it transformed the regions geographies of race and class. At the same time, he will describe how these conditions created resistance movements among labor, community, and environmental groups. Juan will connect to his life history, how he ended up at Pitzer, his journey after Pitzer, and how his scholarly work came to be described by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California) as a “model of what militant scholarship should be: theoretically sound, analytically brave, and empirically robust.” He will draw from his recent book, Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California, which uses logistics and commodity chains in the Inland Empire to show how the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new racialized labor regimes that facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption.
Jose Zapata Calderon
Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies 1050 North Mills Avenue Claremont, CA 91711-6101 (909) 952-1640 Jose_Calderon@pitzer.edu Website: www.josezcalderon.com