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SPEAKER: ANDREW SANDOVAL-STRAUSZ, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF THE LIBERAL ARTS
The path to understanding the origins of Trumpism runs through communities undergoing rapid demographic and economic change; we thus need a detailed history of Latina/o/e migration and political response. Pennsylvania is the perfect place to do that: it is the nation’s largest industrial swing state and is home to a more recent population of nearly 1,000,000 people of Latin American ancestry.
Since around 1980, some of the state's industrial cities have changed from overwhelmingly white Anglo to predominantly Hispanic at the same time as they lost working-class job opportunities. The basic historical raw material here is places like Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, York and Hazelton, and their highly political bellwether counties of Lehigh, Berks, Lancaster, York and Luzerne — four of the ten biggest cities and five of the ten most populous counties in Pennsylvania. There’s an existing narrative of blue-collar disenchantment that seeks to explain this, though that narrative has been largely debunked by political scientists and other observers. If we’re going to understand political change in Rust Belt communities, we need to know exactly what happened in these smaller metropolitan areas. And we need to look at all these communities specifically in historical time—because xenophobia became political over the course of decades, with people and elected officials drawing upon their sense of what had happened previously in the next city over.
Lunch will be provided.