“Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race.” Ana Ramos-Zayas, Anthropologist, Author, Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale

Ana Ramos-Zayas is the Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of Ethnicity, Race and Migration and Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research primarily examines systems of power and cultures of privilege at various scales in the Americas. Notably, her current ethnographic fieldwork highlights the affective lives and therapeutic cultures of Latin American dynastic families and socialization into wealth.

Ramos-Zayas is author of several books including Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Parenting empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America. In her books, Ramos-Zayas draws from over a decade worth of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey to explore the ways US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants interpret and analyze everyday racial encounters through a language of psychology and emotions.

As an alumna of Yale’s Latin American Studies program, Ramos-Zayas contributes significantly to the expansion of the scholarship and discourse around topics of race, class, and wealth in the contexts of Latin America. In the following Q&A, she reflects on her research and touches on the importance of interdisciplinary programs at Yale.

Could you tell us a little bit about your research and what drew you to your specific research interests in Brazil, Mexico and Puerto Rico?

For over a decade now, I have conducted ethnographic research among the upper classes of two elite neighborhoods: El Condado, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Ipanema, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. My main interest had to do with the impact of upper-class parenting modalities on neighborhood life, child socialization, and the transmission of intergenerational wealth. More broadly, I also consider how everyday affective practices among the wealthy dovetail with the interests of US hemispheric influence and nation-state austerity politics. My more current work considers the everyday lives of psychotherapists and therapeutic cultures as these shape how dynastic families understand their wealth and privilege in contexts of Latin American and Caribbean inequalities.

Who inspired you to study class, wealth, and power in Latin America in particular?

The US-born Puerto Rican and Brazilian immigrants whom I met during a previous field research in Newark, New Jersey, inspired this new focus on Latin American elites. Between 2000-2008, I conducted fieldwork in Newark, to better understand how the institution of neoliberal urban projects in the city hijacked inter-personal relations and racial learning among US-born and migrant Latinx populations. The resulting book, Street Therapists (2012), showed how gradations of class and racial privilege become codified in an embodied language of emotion. Capital investment in Newark, and the growing service industry tailored to bringing outsiders/tourists to a historically stigmatized city, was built upon rewarding what politicians and other elites considered “appropriate” affect and emotion expression. After concluding this project, I would always be asked about how these interpersonal urban relations would manifest in wealthy or whiter neighborhoods. That drew me to my research in Ipanema and El Condado.

As a Latin American Studies alumna, how would you describe the evolution of Latin American Studies at Yale since you were an undergraduate student?

There are so many more choices now. When I was an undergrad, Latin American studies was the closest one could get to my interest in social inequality in the Americas. Some of that probably endures in some Latin American studies courses at Yale, but I think there are other programs and departments that complement that mission. I’m thinking specifically about ERM, which tends to enable other comparative and global frameworks. I’m not sure if Latin American Studies included Latinx Studies back when I was a major, but I do remember many classmates who did Senior Essays on Latinx Studies topics through the Latin American Studies major.

Could you tell us about the importance of having an interdisciplinary major such like Ethnicity, Race and Migration (ER&M) at Yale?

I think interdisciplinarity, and ER&M as an example, has been a game changer in how we approach research questions. We are exposed to learning about topics that may not have been immediately in the tool kits we get from traditional disciplinary majors. Even at the level of scholarly work in the US, I think the most provocative, creative, and cutting-edge work is being done in interdisciplinary programs. These programs allow for one’s creativity to shape a question and pursue an empirical project, rather than feeling constraint, as it is sometimes the case in disciplinary contexts.

By Seina Cho