Aldo A. Lauria Santiago works as a Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is a historian of Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and Latinos in the US, and specializes in the study of peasant and workers, revolutions, ethnicity and race. He received his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago and his MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University. At Chicago he studied the agrarian, political and social history of Mexico with Professors Friedrich Katz and John Coatsworth.
Lauria Santiago’s first book, An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823-1914 (Pittsburgh UP 1999) traces the social, economic and political history of El Salvador during the nineteenth century from the perspective of its regions, municipalities and peasant communities.
With Jeffrey Gould (Indiana University) he continued his work on El Salvador into the twentieth Century with To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920–1932 (Duke UP, 2008). This book is a history of the 1932 peasant and communist revolt of El Salvador and the traumatic memory of state-sponsored mass murder that followed.
Lauria Santiago also co-edited two books on Caribbean and Central American studies (Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, Duke UP, and Landscapes of Struggle Politics, Society, and Community in El Salvador, U Pittsburgh P.).
He also began drafting a book on the regional history of the coffee-producing peasantry in Western Mexico in the late nineteenth century.
During the last ten years his work has turned towards the United States and the Caribbean. He now works on the history of the Puerto Rican (and other Latino) working class in New York City. Most recently he co-authored with Lorrin Thomas (Rutgers University) a book that examines the history of Puerto Rican struggles for empowerment in the US since the 1950s (Rethinking The Struggle for Puerto Rican Rights).
His work on the history of Puerto Ricans in New York City is ongoing. The first book, under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, is a history of Puerto Rican New Yorkers and the first second generation up to 1950. A second volume follows Puerto Rican working class communities from the late 1940s to New York City’s 1970s crisis. He is also working on aspects of the Puerto Rican migration process and Puerto Rico’s development.
With Ulla Berg (Rutgers, New Brunswick) he coedited the first ever volume on Latinos in New Jersey, forthcoming with Rutgers University Press.
At Rutgers he directs the Center for Latin American Studies and co-coordinates the Latino Studies Research Initiative with Prof. Kathleen Lopez. He also directs the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration.
He has served professionally in different capacities and served as chair of the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies for seven years.