For decades, numbers and narratives about ethnoracial demographic change have flooded U.S. public life. Yet, to date, scholarly attention has been more concerned with the sources and consequences of projected trends than with the political struggles and meaning-making processes through we have come to envision and sense demographic change in the first place.

Drawing on his book, Figures of the Futures: Latino Civil Rights and Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz will explore the racialized population politics of national Latino civil rights organizations. Specifically, it shows how Latino advocates have worked—and struggled—to render the “Latino demographic” and its growth politically potent and socially palatable. Along with insights into the contemporary state of Latino civil rights advocacy, the talk offers conceptual tools and methodological insights to challenge essentialist, deterministic, and depoliticized treatments of population dynamics. 

Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching concerns the intersections of race, politics, and knowledge, with an emphasis on Latinx communities and movements. 

This lecture is a part of the Migrations Summer Pathways program.