A book launch and conversation with Lázaro Lima and Cristina Beltrán.

In the book Being Brown, Lázaro Lima frames the conditions that have led to the unrelenting assault on Latinx lives, communities and histories by contrasting our historical moment with the storied biography of the country’s first Latina Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor. In a moment of state-sanctioned violence against Latinxs, and previously unimaginable “blood and soil” Nazism, this conversation discussed what we stand to lose when we allow democratic values to be trampled through forms of symbolic inclusion that do little to redress systemic exclusion and democratic state failures under neoliberal austerity.

Lázaro Lima and Cristina Beltrán

Lima is a Professor of Latinx Studies at Hunter College, CUNY, in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican, & Latinx Studies. Lima is the author of The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory (NYU Press, 2007), Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing, with Felice Picano (U of Wisconsin Press, 2011), and Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question (U of California Press, 2019). His documentary film-work includes Las Mujeres: Latina Lives, American Dreams (Deronda Productions, 2016), and the award-winning Rubí: A DACA Dreamer in Trump’s America (Deronda Productions, 2019). Lima’s Twitter, @LazLima

Beltrán is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is author of The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity (Oxford University Press), which received numerous awards, including the Casa de la Américas Prize for the best book on Latinos in the United States. Her research has appeared in the journals Political Theory, Aztlán, Politics & Gender, Contemporary Political Theory, Political Research Quarterly, and the Du Bois Review as well as various edited volumes. Beltrán is co-editor of the journal Theory & Event. 

Event Recap