Dear RSF:
Please join us next Wednesday, January 14th at 11 in the library and on Zoom for presentation by Karen Tejada-Peña, “Putting them on ICE: Policing Salvadorans on Long Island.” Click here for a background article.
Tejada-Peña is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Hartford, Hillyer College, where she has been since 2008. She arrived at Hartford as a Jackie McClean Fellow, later serving as a selection committee member for that fellowship, helping to choose new recipients for the honor.
She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University at Albany and a BA in Sociology with a minor in History from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tejada-Peña is a champion for diversity and inclusion, chairing the Diversity Committee at Hillyer (2023), serving as co-chair for the university-wide DEI committee (2017), and organizing Latino Roundtables for recent ASA meetings. Her courses concentrate on the areas of immigration, criminal justice, race and their intersections, with her most current research focusing on Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S.
At RSF, Tejada-Peña is completing a book examining the impacts of “crimmigration” – the merging of the criminal justice and immigration systems – on Salvadorans in Long Island, New York. She argues that gang-related enforcement efforts are one way to facilitate this “racial project” and fuel the deportation machinery. Based on a multi-sited and multi-year qualitative study, her work shows the toll that this “legal violence” takes on these communities and suggests this is by design, scapegoating Salvadorans in order to expand the role of the U.S. criminal justice system.