Research

My newest research project is Migration, Community and Politics: Colombian Immigration in the United States. The first part of this work traces the history of Colombian migration from the 1950s until today using immigrants’ narratives. The main task consists of weaving immigrants’ stories within the larger political, economic, and social context of Colombia, Latin America and the United States, using the valuable work already done by many other scholars as well as my own research. In the second part, I use interviews with immigrants and other primary and secondary sources to reconstruct, compare and analyze the story of four Colombian immigrant communities, addressing the question of their social, economic and political integration.

Previously, I had done research on three other areas. One area is migration, citizenship, and political participation. An initial research project was focused on Colombian dual citizenship. Later, I extended this work into comparative research on dual citizenship and immigrant rights in Latin America. Some of the papers written in this area on citizenship and immigrant rights were commissioned by the Global Citizenship Observatory (GlobCit).  The final research project within this general area was done along with other collaborators in the United States (James McCann and Renelinda Arana), Europe (CatyMcIlwaine and Anastasia Bermudez) and Colombia (William Mejía). Together, we carried out quantitative research on migrant transnational political participation in Colombian elections.

My second area of research is Latino immigrant organizations in the United States. I was co-investigator (with Alejandro Portes) in the Comparative Immigrant Organization Project (CIOP), at the Center for Migration and Development (CMD) at Princeton University. In this qualitative and quantitative research, we compared Colombian, Dominican and Mexican immigrant organizations. We studied their contribution to development in their countries of origin and to political incorporation in the United States.

The third area of research includes projects I did early on in the Colombian countryside, focused on problems of land concentration and inequality, formal and informal rural politics (social movements, clientelism, violence, etc.) and the obstacles rural inhabitants face in exercising their political rights.