Ana Ramos-Zayas
Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas is the Frederick Clifford Ford Chair in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She received her BA in Economics and Latin American Studies from Yale College, and her MA/PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of National Performances: Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago (The University of Chicago Press, 2003; ASA Latino Studies Book Award, 2006) and Street Therapists: Affect, Race, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark (The University of Chicago Press, 2012; Frank Bonilla Book Award 2010-12). Her most recent book, Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2020), examines the parenting practices of Brazilian and Puerto Rican upper classes, as these alter urban landscapes; provide moral justifications for segregation, surveillance, and foreign interventions; and recast idioms of crisis, corruption, and austerity according to the dictums of US empire.
Ramos-Zayas is also co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (Routledge, 2003); co-editor of Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies (NYU Press, 2022); and co-editor of Whiteness in Latin America and the Caribbean (LACES, Latin American Studies Association, 2023). Ramos-Zayas has published journal articles in the fields of youth culture, race, citizenship and migration, the anthropology of emotion and affect, therapeutic cultures, and Latin American and Caribbean elites. Prior to joining Yale in 2017, Ramos-Zayas conducted post-doctoral work in Educational Evaluation Research at Harvard; taught at Rutgers University-New Brunswick; and occupied the Valentin Lizana y Parrague Endowed Chair at the City University of New York.
Ramos-Zayas’ ethnographic work examines systems of power and cultures of privilege at various scales in the Americas. Issues of social justice and the intersection of intimate worlds and political economic structures are fundamental concerns in her research. Her current ethnographic fieldwork focuses on the therapeutic cultural workers that serve Latin American dynastic families and socialization into wealth.
Books:
Parenting Empires: Class, Whiteness, and the Moral Economy of Privilege in Latin America. Duke University Press, April 2020
Street Therapists: Race, Affect, and Neoliberal Personhood in Latino Newark. The University of Chicago press, 2012.
National Performances: Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (co-authored). Routledge, 2003.
Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies A Reader (co-edited). NYU Press, 2021.
Recent Publications Include:
–Parentalidade soberana” em bairros afluentes da América Latina: raça e a geopolítica dos cuidados com crianças em Ipanema (RJ) e El Condado (Porto Rico). Revista de CiênciasSociais. Fortaleza, v. 48, n. 2, p.137-184, jul./dez., 2017
–(co-authored). Racializing Affect: A Theoretical Proposition. Current Anthropology. Featured/Anchor Article for the Journal Issue, Volume 56, no. 5, October, 2015, pp.654-677.
–Learning Affect, Embodying Race. Transforming Anthropology, Volume 19, Issue 2, October 2011, pp. 86-104.
– Urban Erotics and Racial Affect in a Neoliberal “Racial Democracy”: Brazilian and Puerto Rican Youth in Newark, New Jersey. Identities, Volume 16, Issue 5, 2009, pp. 513-47.