LatCrit Student Scholar Program (SSP)

The LatCrit Student Scholar Program 2008

Each year LatCrit, Inc. sponsors the LatCrit Student Scholar Program (SSP). This student paper competition is open to students in any discipline who are committed to social justice scholarship and praxis, and is especially welcoming of students who intend to pursue an academic career embracing the antisubordination, antiessentialist goals of LatCrit/critical race theory scholarship. Each year the SSP selection committee identifies three to five Student Scholars out of an international pool of submissions. Papers must be submitted in English.

This year, the SSP will bring the Student Scholars into the LatCrit intellectual and social community in four mutually reinforcing ways:

1. Each Student Scholar will receive a scholarship covering registration, up to three nights of lodging, and group meals, to attend the Thirteenth Annual LatCrit conference, to be held October 2-4, 2008, in Seattle, sponsored by Seattle University School of Law. LatCrit conferences are open, mid sized gatherings of about 75 135 attendees, and provide students with a rare opportunity to inspire and be inspired by faculty in law and other fields from all over the world who are doing cutting edge work in race and ethnicity.

2. Each Student Scholar's paper will be eligible for publication in a symposium issue devoted to the Thirteenth Annual LatCrit conference.

3. Each Student Scholar will be matched with one or more academic mentor(s) whose work lies in an area of the Scholar's interest, and who will work with the Scholar directly over the course of the spring and summer before the conference to help the Scholar advance his/her scholarly and activist agenda.

4. Each Student Scholar will receive a travel stipend of up to $750 USD to help subsidize travel expenses to and from the Thirteenth Annual LatCrit Conference. Any additional expenses remain the responsibility of each Student Scholar.

Eligibility Requirements for the Student Scholar Program

Applicants for the 2008 LatCrit Student Scholar Program must be students in good standing during the 2007-08 academic year in an accredited undergraduate, graduate, or professional degree program (including but not limited to J.D., L.L.M., J.S.D., Ph.D., and B.A./B.S. programs), whether in the United States, the Americas, or anywhere else in the world. Successful applicants must submit: (1) a completed application form; (2) a current resume; (3) a personal statement (no longer than one single-spaced page) explaining how the Student Scholar Program will further the student's intellectual and professional agenda; and (4) a previously unpublished paper, authored by the applicant alone, no more than 10,000 words, on any topic related to race, ethnicity, and the law. All application materials, including the paper, must be typed and submitted in English. Electronically submitted materials must be formatted in Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Text should be double-spaced with 1-inch margins on all sides of each page. Although papers may address any aspect of race, ethnicity, and the law, the following themes are of particular interest:

* Papers that focus on Latinas/os as a distinct but diverse and transnational social group, and on the group's relationship to law or current legal regimes/practices. The idea is to "center" Latinas/os as Latinas/os in legal discourse, but to do so in ways that recognize and account for the many axes of difference that help to define Latina/o heterogeneity, both domestically and internationally.

* Papers that speak to the overall theme of the Annual Conference. For this year's theme, please check the Conference Call for Papers on our website, www.latcrit.org.

* Papers that bring a regional focus to the Annual Conference, corresponding to the conference locale. This year, regional papers would focus on Latino/a issues in Seattle and the U.S. Pacific Northwest more generally.

* Papers that explore or elucidate cross group histories or experiences with law and power, such as those based on class, gender, race, sexuality and religion.

* Papers that connect LatCrit theory with, or contrast LatCrit theory to, other genres of scholarship, especially theoretical approaches that critique class, gender, race, sexuality and other categories of social legal identities and relations.

LatCrit Student Scholar Program 2007, Final Selections

1. Danielle Boaz, St. Thomas University School of Law, , "Religious Reparations from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Forming Demons and Cults and Zombies to Justify Black Enslavement." In this article, Boaz explores the history of the suppression of African and African-based religions, in particular Voodoo and Santeria, from the founding of the United States to the present. She argues that present-day discrimination against these religions is based on a racist discourse that can be traced directly back to Atlantic slavery, in which these religions are portrayed as "barbaric, primitive, and even evil." Drawing on international human rights law, Boaz argues that this history of suppression and discrimination requires reparation, and she explores several different forms reparation might take, including secular education about world religions in public schools. This strikingly original and thoughtful article draws on history, international and domestic U.S. law, and theories of reparations in creative and insightful ways. It calls attention to an aspect of contemporary discrimination that is seldom recognized. Boaz received her J.D. from the University of Toledo School of Law in 2006, and expects to receive her Master of Laws from St. Thomas University School of Law in May, 2007. In the fall of 2007, she intends to begin a Ph.D. program in African and Latin American history and a J.S.D. in Intercultural Human Rights. Her goal is to become a professor of law, with a focus on the intersection of law with history, religion, culture, and the protection of human rights.

2. Gina Cabarcas, University of Los Andes Law School (Colombia), , "Language and Domination: The Word ‘Indian' and Its Use in the First Years of the Republic in Colombia." Cabarcas notes that although Colombia embraced the principle of multiculturalism in its 1991 constitution, the term "Indian" remains an insult in popular speech, connoting lack of decency, ignorance, and ineptness. She investigates Colombia's colonial period for an explanation, and finds that by the nineteenth century, Colombian elites had linked national progress with "whitening." Whitening stood for the advent of a new generation of men who stood for the values of industriousness, civilization, and morality. The formal equality of Indians coexisted with a social understanding that they represented the backward past. This sophisticated investigation of law and cultural history shows the connections between republican political theory and theories of race. Cabarcas, drawing on the French Annales tradition, seeks to place legal ideas of equality and multiculturalism into their historical and social context, examining the "private" as well as the "public" spheres. Her work adds to the growing literature of law and humanities that examines legal discourse in its cultural context. Cabarcas received her law degree from the Universidad de los Andes in 2006, and is beginning a master's degree program in history at that institution. She was inspired by seeing the upside-down world logo of LatCrit and hopes to bring history to bear on understanding contemporary forms of subordination.

3. César Cuahtémoc García Hernández, Boston College Law School, , "Of Inferior Stock: The Two-Pronged Repression of Radical Immigrant Birth Control Advocates at the Turn of the Century." Inspired by Richard Delgado's Rodrigo stories, García has written a first-person narrative in which he chats with Malinali – a woman named after "La Chingada," the indigenous woman thought to have betrayed the Aztecs for the Spanish and whose mixed-race descendants stand for Mexico's mestizo culture. García and Malinali discuss García's paper in progress, which concerns the combined use of anti-obscenity criminal laws and immigration laws to quash birth control advocacy by both citizen and non-citizen radicals. Although the history of suppression of birth control advocacy through the anti-obscenity laws is well known, scholars have not recognized the contribution of immigration law to this crackdown through the deportation of anarchists and other political radicals. García deftly shows how moral panic and political panic came together to target figures like Emma Goldman, and how, as today, criminal law and immigration law authorities used their power to repress dangerous ideas. García expects to receive his law degree from Boston College Law School in May, 2007. He attended the 2006 LatCrit conference in Las Vegas, and describes that experience as filling him with "the joy of finding an innovative, inspiring intellectual community that I did not know existed." He hopes to become a law teacher and to use his formal education toward the pursuit of liberatory praxis.
 
 
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