Latin American Perspectives Distinguished Lecture: Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America

The Stanford Center for Latin American Studies  and the Latin American Perspectives Journal cordially invite you to the 2023-2024 Latin American Perspectives Distinguished Lecture by Professor Susan Eckstein. Kindly email clasevents [at] stanford.edu (clasevents[at]stanford[dot]edu) if you would like to attend in person. 

For over sixty years the US has granted Cubans, one of the largest immigrant groups in the country, unique entitlements, while subjecting other unauthorized immigrants to detention and deportation and denying them legal rights. Cubans, most of whom have entered the country without authorization, benefit from welfare, work, citizenship, and other rights. This talk, which builds on Susan Eckstein's book Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America, will reveal the range of entitlements granted to Cubans over the years, beginning with the Eisenhower administration and continuing to date, under the Biden administration. Initially privileged to undermine the Castro-led revolution in the throes of the Cold War, one US president after another will be shown to have granted Cubans new entitlements, even since the Cold War’s end. Eckstein will highlight how entitlements transformed Cuban immigrants from agents of US Cold War foreign policy into a politically powerful force influencing domestic policy. Comparing treatment of Cubans and Haitians, she will highlight the racial and political biases of US immigration policy.

Susan Eckstein is a professor in the Pardee School of Global Studies and in the Sociology Department at Boston University. She is the 2024 Latin American Perspectives Distinguished Lecturer at the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University. She has written numerous books and articles on Mexican urban poor, political-economic developments in Cuba, Cuban immigrants, immigration policy, impacts of Latin American revolutions, and has edited books on Latin American social movements and social rights, and on immigrant impacts in their homelands. Most recently she published Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America. Previously she published How Immigrants Impact Their Homelands (co-editor), The Immigrant Divide: How Cuban Americans Changed the U.S. and Their Homeland, What Justice? Whose Justice? Fighting for Fairness in Latin America (co-editor), Struggles for Social Rights in Latin America (co-editor), Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro, Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (editor), The Poverty of Revolution: The State and Urban Poor in Mexico and The Impact of Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of Mexico and Bolivia. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council on Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Tinker Foundation, and Christopher Reynolds Foundation. She has received a number of awards for her publications, and is the recipient of the Latin American Studies Association Kalman Silvert Lifetime Achievement Award.

Livestream: https://tinyurl.com/laplecture2024

The Latin American Perspectives Distinguished Lectureship is made possible thanks to the generosity of the Latin American Perspectives Journal.