The faculty selection committees in the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration announced the 2021 winners of the Justice Carlos R. Moreno Award. Established in the fall of 2009, the Justice Carlos R. Moreno Prize is awarded annually to the best senior essay focusing on the field of Latinx Studies, or on the Latinx experience in the United States.
Henry Rosas Ibarra (Timothy Dwight College), ER&M Major
Henry Rosas Ibarra’s “Generation SB 1070: Latino Cultural Citizenship, Political Powerbuilding, and Collective Trauma in Post-SB 1070 Arizona” provides a richly detailed and conceptually sophisticated analysis of immigration politics in the U.S.-Mexico border region. Attentive to legal and political developments, Rosas Ibarra focuses on political maneuvering in state government circles, on the lived experiences of immigrants and their families, on organizational efforts to contest discriminatory legislation and enfranchise communities, and on prospects for Arizona’s future. A work of interdisciplinary scholarship that incorporates history, ethnography, sociology, and psychology, “Generation SB 1070” advances a significant reinterpretation of contemporary Arizona that provides a model of creative, grounded research for future scholars.
Alondra Vázquez López (Grace Hopper College), ER&M Major
Alondra Vázquez López’s “American Movement: Contemporary Migrant Fugitivity Across the Americas” offers a stunning account of the ways that individuals left unprotected by, and often overpoliced by, the state have imagined space, storytelling, borders, and movement. Combining testimonies with policy analysis, and representing migrant perspectives in her original artwork, Vázquez López considers the meaning of corridors and exchanges to offer a new representation of hemispheric travel, kinship, displacement, and place-making.