Author: Perla M. Guerrero

Perla Guerrero is Associate Professor of American Studies and U.S. Latina/o Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching interests include relational race and ethnicity with a focus on Latinxs and Asian Americans, space and place, immigration, legality, and deportation, labor, U.S. history, and the U.S. South. She has received multiple awards including a Ford Postdoctoral Fellowship and two from the Smithsonian Institution to be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of American History (NMAH). Her first book, Nuevo South: Latinas/os, Asians, and the Remaking of Place, examines how racial cleansing and sundown towns made northwest Arkansas into a particular kind of place and analyzes the political and economic factors that are shifting social conditions and racial mores in the U.S. South. Nuevo South posits that to fully understand the racialization of Asians and Latinas/os we must also understand the history of place-specific ideologies that are at the center of more recent instantiations of racialized relationships. She’s currently working on her second book, Deportation’s Aftermath: Displacement and Making a Life in Exile, that explores what happens to different kinds of people after repatriation—those deported by the nation-state, those who are forced to return (meaning state and federal policies made life so difficult they were coerced into leaving), and those who chose to return to their birth country. Taking Mexico City and the state of Puebla as research sites, the book seeks to understand how U.S.-based inequality, criminalization, and stigma are reproduced in Mexico after repatriation. Guerrero’s term on the Editorial Board is from 2020-2024.