TAULA by Michael Rodriguez Muñiz, Dept. of Sociology, Brown University, "Figures of the Future: Temporal Politics and Latino Demographic Demonstrations in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election." TAULA: Taller Urbano de las Américas/Cities of the Americas Workshop. A series to highlight path-breaking scholarship on the dynamic urban worlds of the modern Americas.
Manchester Hall Lounge - 3:30pm-5:30pm
Abstract: Recent demographic projections have provoked significant public and scholarly debate about the future of the U.S. ethnoracial order. Sociologists, in particular, have examined the social causes of population trends and theorized on their potential consequences. However, almost no attention has been given to the role of statistical knowledge in emergent racial projects seeking to variously avert or accelerate projected demographic futures. As part of a larger study, my talk explores the “temporal politics” of national Latino civil rights leaders during the 2012 presidential election. Conceptualizing temporal politics as the explicit production and mobilization of temporal representations for political ends, I examine the deployment of three statistics about the growing “Latino vote.” The first statistic, produced months before the election, was the projection that 12.2 million Latino voters would participate in the election. The second expressed that 50,000 Latino citizens turn 18 every month and would continue to do so into the foreseeable future. The third statistic claimed that for the first time Latino voters accounted for 10% of cast ballots, a figure that came to validate the idea that the “Latino vote” was “decisive” on Election Day. Drawing on the sociology of quantification and STS research on public demonstrations, I show how these statistics—coupled with an expansive civic engagement campaign—were mobilized to publicly demonstrate a future in which the Latino “sleeping giant” had realized its political potential. This analysis, however, reveals that the aims of this temporal project proved elusive for various reasons, not the least of which were the vulnerabilities of the statistics themselves and the temporal tensions they indexed. My talk concludes with implications for theoretical work on the performativity of statistics and substantive debates about the so-called “Browning of America.”
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. His research interests include knowledge, science, culture, politics, and race and ethnicity. He has published work on pan-Latino identity formation within Chicago’s immigrant rights movement and recently co-edited a special issue of Qualitative Sociology on Actor-Network Theory (December, 2013). Based on eighteen months of qualitative and ethnographic research, his dissertation examines the cultural politics of demographic change among national Latino civil rights organizations and spokespersons. This research has received support from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
For more information, contact: Claudio Benzecry at claudio.benzecry@uconn.edu