Beyond El Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America

Acknowledgments

| ix Acknowledgments Beyond El Barrio is a product of more than a decade’s worth of conversations among the co-editors, anthology contributors, as well as countless other colleagues and friends. The idea for the project emerged from discussions among the co-editors as we finished our dissertations in the early 2000s and were fortunate enough to receive fellowships and tenure track positions that allowed us the time, space, and financial and intellectual support to advance new scholarly interests. As a Research Associate at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York (Pérez), a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture (Guridy), and an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois (Burgos ), we benefited from critical institutional support and the generosity and guidance of colleagues, mentors, and students. We are deeply grateful to all of our colleagues at the Centro, the Schomburg, and Illinois for nurturing and guiding us during those critical years as we transitioned from graduate school to our professional careers. We are particularly grateful to all the anthology contributors. We thank them for the intellectual excitement they brought to this project, as well as their extraordinary patience and flexibility over the years. We have been particularly fortunate to have presented our work—both as a collective and individually —in a variety of ways, and this anthology is certainly stronger as a result of the feedback generated from these presentations. We offer special thanks to Alex Vasquez and the Office of the Provost at Wheaton College, where we first presented our work in 2002. Without the extraordinary organizational skills of María Elena Cepeda, the first Beyond El Barrio symposium would never have happened. We are grateful for the financial and intellectual support she and Macalester College provided for “Beyond El Barrio: Symposium for New Directions in Latina/o Studies,” that took place in April 2005. A subsequent symposium at the University of Illinois in Spring 2007 provided another important moment for many of the contributors to present their work and to receive helpful feedback. Burgos would like to thank x | Acknowledgments in particular the Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Sarah Mangelsdorf, for much needed institutional and financial support, as well as then-graduate student Jennifer Guiliano as co-organizer of the symposium. Pérez is grateful to Micaela di Leonardo, Jane Collins, and Brett Williams for organizing the Advanced Seminar “New Landscapes of Inequality” at the School for American Research in March 2006, where she benefited significantly from feedback on her work as well as larger conceptualizations for the anthology. We also offer our deepest thanks to John McKiernan-González and Cary Cordova for coming to the rescue when we struggled to find an appropriate image for the anthology’s book cover. The image “Rhythmo del Pueblo,” perfectly captures a new way of looking at the barrio. As Guridy noted in our conversations about the choice of it, the swaying buildings represent the disruption of the “barrio” and the road through it could convey our desire to move “beyond” it. We are especially grateful for the generous feedback offered by the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript and are indebted to a number of senior scholars who have provided sustained intellectual and emotional support, encouragement, and wisdom over the years. Working with New York University Press has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Our thanks to Eric Zinner for first believing in the project and for countless conversations about it, as well as to Ciara McLaughlin, Despina Papazoglou Gimbel, and Robert Swanson for their guidance and patience at various stages in the process of completing the manuscript. We also offer heartfelt thanks to colleagues and friends at Oberlin College, the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Illinois for the support that made such a long-term project possible. Finally, we are immeasurably indebted to our families who have offered us love, encouragement, and sustained intellectual engagement over the years. Our lives have been enriched by our children (Antonio, Pablo, Lucia, Zaya, Miranda, and Julia) who continue to inspire us to do what we can to build a better world. But none of this would have been possible without the indefatigable support, love, and patience of our partners, Baron, Deborah and Dolly. We humbly dedicate this book to them. ...