I am particularly interested in complicating how we think about the relationship between in-groups and out-groups and theorizing the fluidity (or lack thereof) of movement across groups.
This line of thinking led me to reflect more deeply about a group, Latinas/os, who are racially diverse and diverse in many other ways including gender, class, sexuality, nativity, generation, nationality, and skin color to name a few.
Much of my scholarship overlaps with the overall theme of an identity-to-politics link—the interplay between a population defined by shared racial and ethnic labels and a collective group politics based on those definitions. Within this area, I am primarily focused on how social identities and ideologies lend themselves to political attitudes and behavior and what that means for American politics more broadly.
In this work, I focus on
- the Latina and Latino communities in the United States
- how Latinas and Latinos understand their racial and ethnic identity
- the role of Latinas and Latinos’ racial identity on their political attitudes and behavior
- Afro-Latina political consciousness
My third and fourth book project, Living Afro-Latina Lives: An Afrodiasporic Feminist Approach to Understanding Identity Formation and Political Consciousness and Beyond Panethnicity: the Boundaries and Limits of Latino Identity and Politics, both examine the category “Latina/o/x” in the United States and beyond.
Invite me to speak
Yalidy is available for speaking engagements on these and other topics
- Latina/o public opinion and voting behavior
- Afro-Latina political consciousness
- Latino racial identity and political behavior
- Latino racialized ideologies
Email Yalidy.Matos@rutgers.edu
“When I speak of my own experience, I am talking about a long process of learning which occurred in my search for an identity as a black woman, within a society which oppresses me and discriminates against me because I am black. But a question of an ethical and political nature arises immediately. I cannot speak in the first person singular of something which is painfully common to millions of women who live in the region, those … ‘Amerafricans’… who are opposed by a ‘latinness’ which legitimizes their ‘inferiority’“
Lélia Gonzalez, 1988, a Black Latina and Brazilian Anthropologist
Related
Publications
- “The Politics of “Women of Color”: A Group Identity Worth Investigating” in Politics, Groups, and Identities
- “Afro-Latino politicians could bridge the African American-Latino divide” in The Washington Post, Monkey Cage Blog
- “A Legacy of Exclusion: the Geopolitics of Immigration and Latinas/os in the South,” in Southern Latinidades: New Directions in the “Nuevo South: A Roundtable, LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History
- “Proximal Contact with Latino Immigrants and Immigration Attitudes” in Politics, Groups, and Identity
- “Priming Legality: Perceptions of Latino and Undocumented Latino Immigrants” in American Politics Research
Yalidy Matos 