April 30, 2003

Puerto Rican Chicago


The next Great Cities Faculty Scholar Seminar will be held on Wednesday, April 30 at 9:00 am in the Great Cities Institute conference room. Faculty Scholar Ralph Cintron will lead a discussion on the following topic:

Puerto Rican Chicago

Dr. Cintron, together with some colleagues, have developed a plan for integrating a variety of research projects regarding Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Although the research is still in its infancy, he will report on the broad outlines and present some of the early results from his own corner of the plan.

Ralph Cintron is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His interests are in rhetorical studies; ethnography, particularly urban ethnography; international studies, and Latino studies. He teaches survey courses in rhetorical history and theory; rhetoric and the public sphere; ethnographic methodology; and ethnography and social theory, particularly theories of social class. Research wise, he is currently participating in a multi-disciplinary, ethnographic study of the Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Chicago. After completing fieldwork, the study will become a jointly authored book. The focus is upon the history of migration and transmigration, the evolution of political ideology, the marketing of expressive culture, and the defense of space and place against gentrification. He is also associated with UIC's International Center for the study of Human Responses to Social Catastrophe. In association with the Center, he is doing fieldwork in Kosova and is currently writing a jointly authored essay for the Boston Review concerning humanitarian interventionism and international state-building. In addition, he is associated with the International Rhetoric Culture Project, which brings anthropologists and rhetoricians together, at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. He has completed a recent essay for them on 9/11 and is scheduled to be a co-editor for a forthcoming volume on politics. He is also scheduled to be a co-editor of a special issue on latinidades for Latino Studies. He is a former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and one of his books, Angels'Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday, won honourable mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association.

Please join us....we look forward to seeing you. (Light breakfast refreshments will be served.)