Faculty Profile: Professor Ana Ramos-Zayas

A Homecoming of Sorts…
Never in a million years did I think I would be returning to Yale as faculty!  Now in my third semester of teaching, I still have flashbacks of my own undergraduate years as an Economics and Latin American Studies major; hanging out at La Casa Cultural until late in the evening; and participating in many mentoring activities at Wilbur Cross High School.  After graduating from Yale, I went on to work at the Department of the Treasury in Puerto Rico, doing econometric analyses and sensing my soul slip away in the process.  Almost on a whim, I applied to PhD programs in different disciplines (except for Economics).  My attraction to NYC let me to pursue Anthropology at Columbia, where I wrote my dissertation on anti-colonial nationalism, neighborhood activism, and educational initiatives in Puerto Rican Chicago.  National Performances:  The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago became my first book, which I completed during a very lonely few years as a post-doc at Harvard.  As a result of my fieldwork in Puerto Rican Chicago, I was able to engage in collaborative work to understand the unique relationship that Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have to US Citizenship and racialization processes.  These were topics I examined in my second, co-authored book, Latino Crossings:  Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship.

I have been so incredibly fortunate to always have the most amazing, thoughtful, brilliant graduate and undergraduate students –first at Rutgers, where I got tenured in 2006, then at CUNY, and now at Yale.  Regardless of common headaches caused by institutional politics, I have always found energy and nourishment from classroom and student advising.  I view teaching and scholarship as intertwined; my research interests through the years have greatly benefited from what happens in the classroom.  My research has focused on anti-colonial practices and the affective dimensions of race among US Latinx populations, and in the American hemisphere.  These very topics have guided the courses I have taught.  While at Rutgers-New Brunswick, I taught courses on ethnographic research and long-term fieldwork where Newark, New Jersey, was a primary site.  I tried to de-mystify book writing for students who, as first-generation students of color, viewed a possible career in academia as inaccessible.  As I conducted fieldwork for my book Street Therapists: Affect, Race, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark, I would also relay tales of the unexpected aspects of research in the Puerto Rican and Brazilian neighborhoods where I was conducting fieldwork. 

While most of my research has focused on the experiences of working-class Latinx communities in the US, over the past several years I have decided to explore how affect and the politics of interiority intersect with whiteness in upper-class Latin American neighborhoods.  After doing fieldwork in El Condado and Ipanema, upper-class neighborhoods in Puerto Rico and Brazil, respectively, I came to understand how whiteness and white identity have become self-fashion interiority projects, through which narratives around emotional sophistication, affective depth, and engaging in self-knowledge become indispensable tools to the crafting of racial privilege from the inside out.   The book that has resulted from this research on race, affect, and Latin American elites is tentatively titled Sovereign Parenting: The Moral Economy of Space, Privilege and Austerity in Brazil and Puerto Rico, and should be out sometime in 2019.  I look forward to sharing the book with Yale graduates and undergraduates, and to having critical discussions on the role of ethnography on knowledge production in the Americas.