Professor Receives Latino Grant

After submitting an “ambitious” proposal aiming to bring Harvard to the forefront of major research on Latino studies last April, a leading Latino studies professor has received $75,000 from University Provost Steven E. Hyman to spearhead an interfaculty initiative on “Immigration and Well-being.”

Describing the grant as the first phase of an ongoing initiative, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, chair of the Inter-Faculty Committee on Latino Studies at the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, said the money will be used to coordinate research efforts of about a dozen professors studying issues surrounding immigration and culture in the United States.

The original proposal was signed by over 30 members of the Faculty of Arts Science and Harvard’s professional schools.

“This is clearly a step in the right direction, and it will help us to generate a momentum and work on the contours of our major research agenda,” Suarez-Orozco said.

But while many professors said they were excited about the success of their proposal, they expressed frustration over having waited so long for its approval.

“The provost promised us publicly that he would keep this proposal on the ‘front burner.’ It seems to me that the fire must have been on low heat for a long time,” said Rudenstine Professor of Latin American Studies David L. Carrasco in an e-mail.

And in addition to involving fewer faculty, the proposal that was approved has taken on a very different shape from the one first discussed with Hyman with last year.

While Suarez-Orozco said he had originally hoped to focus on the Latin American population, he and his colleagues broadened their scope after they met with Hyman last January.

After that meeting, which was scheduled to discuss the impending proposal for a Latino Studies center which was submitted the previous summer, Hyman invited the professors to submit a proposal for an inter-faculty initiative on globalization and immigration.

Hyman’s suggestions were consistent with University President Lawrence H. Summers reluctance to support “narrowly defined” inter-faculty initiatives.

“I have expressed quite strongly the view that the University needs to be quite careful about taking on commitments to new centers,” Summers said Monday.

But since last year, professors have been saying they do not think Summer’s attitude is the best one for the University.

Carrasco said he thinks the University should be putting more support behind “one of the most significant social revolutions of our time.”

“I believe that Harvard is still being too tentative about supporting and nurturing balanced and aggressive research.” he said.

And others, such as Suarez-Orozco, continue to stress the importance of taking a multidisciplinary approach to contemporary research.

“The big problems of today will require the employment of multidisciplinary states. We must deploy more than one lens,” he said.

Suarez-Orozco said the $75,000, in addition to recent “gifts” from the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and a private donor, will allow professors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and many of Harvard’s graduates schools to “wrap their collective minds around scholarly puzzles.”

He said the money will fund new research on “the epidemical paradox” that immigrant children often have increased resistance to certain disease, gender relations of immigrant children and identifying the “skills and sensibilities” that make some immigrants more adaptable to new environments than others.

Doris Sommer, a professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures who will be actively involved in the new initative, said she plans to study “cultural agency,” which she defines as finding cultural mechanisms for attending to ethnic differences in today’s society.

Sommer said she and her colleagues have already begun formulating their agendas and that they hope to be able to hold a conference this spring.

But Suarez-Orozco is quick to point out that they still have a long way to go.

“The U.S. is the only industrial democracy where immigration is both history and destiny. This is really just the beginning—a point of departure for major research that needs to be done,” he said.

—Staff writer Jessica E. Vascellaro can be reached at vascell@fas.harvard.edu.