Ana Ramos-Zayas

Frederick Clifford Ford Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Professor of American Studies and of Anthropology

Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas received her BA in Economics and Latin American Studies from Yale College, and her MA/PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of National Performances: Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago (The University of Chicago Press, 2003; ASA Latino Studies Book Award, 2006) and Street Therapists: Affect, Race, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (The University of Chicago Press, 2012; Frank Bonilla Book Award 2010-12). Her most recent book, Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2020), examines the parenting practices of Brazilian and Puerto Rican upper-classes, as these alter urban landscapes; provide moral justifications for segregation, surveillance, and foreign interventions; and recast idioms of crisis, corruption, and austerity according to the dictums of US empire.

Ramos-Zayas is also co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (Routledge, 2003); co-editor of Dialogos Criticos in Latina/o Studies (NYU Press, in press); and co-editor of Whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean (LACES, Latin American Studies Association, forthcoming). Ramos-Zayas has published journal articles in the fields of youth culture, race and critical race theory, citizenship and migration, the anthropology of emotion and affect, and Latin American and Caribbean elites. Prior to joining Yale in 2017, Ramos-Zayas conducted post-doctoral work in Educational Evaluation Research at Harvard; taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick; and occupied the Valentin Lizana y Parrague Endowed Chair at the City University of New York.

Ramos-Zayas’ ethnographic work aims to understand and disentangle systems of power and privilege at a variety of scales, ranging from U.S. imperial and white supremacist politics to how individuals and communities make sense of everyday forms of power and subordination. Issues of social justice and the intersection of intimate worlds and political economic structures are fundamental concerns in her research. Her current research focuses on race, privilege, and the culture of mental health and psychology in US Latinx and Latin American neighborhoods.