KEYNOTE SPEAKER
MALAS 2025 KEYNOTE
Dr. Lilia Fernández
Latin America Migrants in the US Imagination and Its Economy: A Historical Perspective
Keynote Lecture
As the president of the United States has authorized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and even military deployments in major U.S. cities including Chicago, Latin American immigrants and US citizens have responded in varying ways. This talk examines both the imagined and real material contributions that Latin American migrants and their children have made to the nation—particularly to the Midwest—in the past and the present. From the earliest laborers who toiled on U.S-owned holdings in the southern hemisphere, to those who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border to work in mines, on railroads and in industry in the north, Latin Americans have had an enduring and essential impact on U.S. economic development. Their contradictory depiction as unwanted and uninvited outsiders to the nation erases very real and deep hemispheric links and the unacknowledged U.S. dependence on Latin American labor for over a century.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Lilia Fernández is Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). She is a three-time recipient of the prestigious Ford Foundation pre-doctoral, dissertation, and postdoctoral fellowships, in addition to numerous other awards. Her first book, Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2012) examines the migration, settlement, activism, and community formation of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the city’s central neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century. She has also authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and essays on the experiences of urban Latinos. Her current research explores the historic ethnic and class diversity of Latina/o Chicagoans with an emphasis on industrial workers, student activists, and coalitional politics and solidarities among the working class. Dr. Fernández is the founder and former director of the Latino New Jersey History Project, a student-led, community-based, public humanities research initiative at Rutgers University. She is developing the Chicago Latino History Project, a similar initiative to record oral histories and gather archival materials on the rich heritage of Latinas/os in Chicago.