We are delighted to celebrate the publication of Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz, the new book by Karma Frierson, who was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and is currently Assistant Professor at the Frederick Douglass Institute & Department of Black Studies at the University of Rochester.

In this compelling study, the author explores how Blackness—both Afro-Caribbean and regionally rooted—is woven into the cultural fabric of Veracruz. Through local traditions, history, and everyday life, she reveals how residents internalize and express the centrality of Blackness in shaping regional identity.

Local Color offers an important contribution to our understanding of race, culture, and belonging in Latin American port cities.

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The New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA), in collaboration with the History & Preservation Section of the New Jersey Library Association, Rutgers University Press, and Special Collections and University Archives of Rutgers University Libraries, has announced the recipients of its 2025 Author Awards. These annual awards honor outstanding publications that offer new insights into New Jersey’s history and culture through original research and innovative use of local resources.

This year’s award in the Edited Works category has been presented to Aldo A. Lauria Santiago and Ulla D. Berg, editors of Latinas/os in New Jersey: Histories, Communities, and Cultures, published by Rutgers University Press.

The volume offers a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of the diverse Latina/o communities that have shaped—and continue to shape—the cultural, economic, and political fabric of New Jersey. Spanning topics from migration and labor to activism and cultural expression, the book provides a long-overdue scholarly focus on one of the state’s most dynamic and historically significant populations.

In addition to the editors, the book brings together a broad and impressive group of scholars whose contributions deepen the volume’s impact and scope. Their collective work represents a major milestone in the study of Latina/o histories and communities in the region.

The Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University congratulates Professors Lauria Santiago and Berg—as well as all contributing authors—on this well-deserved recognition and the important scholarly achievement it represents.

Buy the book.

Laura De Moya-Guerra, PhD candidate in History, was selected as one of the 2025 recipients of the Open Educational Resources (OER) in Caribbean Studies, awarded by the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at the University of Florida.

De Moya-Guerra proposed the creation of a multilingual digital project titled “The Anti-Chinese Caribbean: Restrictive Immigration Legislation.” The project traces and interprets the history of anti-Chinese immigration laws across the Spanish and English speaking Caribbean from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including legislative records, parliamentary debates, and historical newspapers, the project will reconstruct the regional landscape of exclusionary policies and make these materials freely accessible through an open-access platform.

By combining digital humanities with Caribbean legal history, De Moya-Guerra’s project expands scholarly understanding of migration, race, and state formation in the region while advancing dLOC’s mission of open access to Caribbean studies resources. The digital collection is expected to launch in 2026.

¡Felicidades, Laura!

For more information about the award, visit https://dloc.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/2025/news/oer-in-caribbean-studies-stipend-recipients-2025/

Jennifer Vilchez, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, has recently published a chapter titled “How We Became Latinx: The Role of Data on Identity in the Twenty-first Century” in the new volume Constructed Latinx(s) Identities: Racialized Bodies in Visual and Textual Culture, edited by José I. Lara.

In “How We Became Latinx,” Jennifer analyzes Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer as a conceptual metaphor to develop her theoretical concept of “tethering.” Tethering provides a framework for understanding the role of data in shaping contemporary identity formation. Through the revolutionary collaboration of the film’s three main characters, she illustrates what “tethering” allows scholars to perceive and accomplish when studying identity. Constructed Latinx(s) Identities is currently available as an open-access edition on Fulcrum and can be freely downloaded as a PDF, EPUB, or MP3 audiobook. Hard copies are also available for purchase through the publisher here, as well as wherever books are sold.

Jennifer’s dissertation, co-chaired by Ed Cohen and Carlos U. Decena, examines the historical conditions and effects of how Hispanics and Latino/as have been categorized by the state, institutions, the media, and activists—and what the category Latinx makes possible as a new way of representing this population. Her project reveals how categories can turn individual lives into targets of political, scientific, and bureaucratic control, while also opening liberatory possibilities when they disrupt conventional forms of classification.

In addition to her research, Jennifer currently serves as a Graduate Fellowship Advisor at GradFund, the external fellowships office in the School of Graduate Studies.

Congratulations on this exciting publication, Jennifer!