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Clay Latimer

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Arts and Media February 2011 Premium

Patricia Zavella: Exceptional Teacher, First-Rate Scholar, Committed Activist <b> Clay Latimer </b>

As chair of Latin American and Latino studies, Professor Patricia Zavella is charged with making things run smoothly in her department at the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC). But her job doesn’t end on the picturesque campus, nestled in the redwood forests and meadows overlooking Monterey Bay. Zavella spends much of her time in another part of the county – another world, really – the migrant labor neighborhoods in nearby Watsonville. For a decade, the acclaimed cultural anthropologist interviewed and observed migrant people for her forthcoming book, I’m Neither Here Nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty.

Arts and Media February 2011 Premium

Literature an Enduring Passion for Professor Ester González <b> Clay Latimer </b>

It was an ordinary day for most students at Johns Hopkins University. Classes, exams, meetings – the routine routine. But there was nothing mundane about it for Ester Gimbernat González, a young, ambitious literature student from Argentina. Filled with anticipation, she stepped for the first time into the campus library, a vast place where every section was lined with books she wanted to read or catch up on. “When the doors opened, I was so happy, I couldn’t leave,” she said. “I was in heaven.”

Hispanic Community March 2011 Premium

University of Illinois at Chicago’s Luis Alberto Urrea: From Despair to Acclaim, <b> Clay Latimer </b>

It was February 1982 and Luis Alberto Urrea, 26-year-old University of California- San Diego graduate, was doing full-time relief work with shanty dwellers in Tijuana’s wretched city dump. Surrounded by surreal squalor during the day, Urrea slept on relatives’ couches in Southern California at night, broke and depressed and worried about his future. Desperate to start over, Urrea wrote Lowry Pei, his college writing instructor who was now at Harvard, and asked for help.

Arts and Media May 2011 Premium

Central Valley’s Manuel Muñoz on the Right Page <b> Clay Latimer </b>

During a film studies class at Harvard nearly 20 years ago, Manuel Muñoz was watching a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho when a background detail caught his eye. In the scene where Janet Leigh’s character is driving along a stark high-way in California’s Central Valley, a sign appears bearing the name of Gorman, Calif., a small town located near Muñoz’s hometown, Dinuba.

Arts and Media May 2011 Premium

Michigan Professor Chronicles the Power of TV by <b> Clay Latimer </b>

Yeidy Rivero was where she liked to be best on a recent weekday night –sitting in her Ann Arbor home, watching TV for several hours. But it wasn’t to unwind. Watching television is Rivero’s profession. As associate professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, and the Program of American Culture, she studies the medium and its relationship with culture and race, with a special emphasis on subjects of interest to Hispanics.