People in Sociology - Faculty

Tanya Golash-Boza

Assistant Professor

Email: tgb@ku.edu
http://www.people.ku.edu/~tgb/index.html

---

Tanya Golash-Boza (PhD North Carolina, Chapel Hill) has a joint appointment in Sociology and American Studies at the University of Kansas. She has conducted ethnographic research in Peru that focused on racial identity, collective memory, and social whitening among Peruvians of African descent. Golash-Boza has also conducted research on the Latino/a community in the United States, and has published an article in International Migration Review on the advantages of bilingualism for immigrants in the US, and an article in Social Forces on the relationship between race and assimilation. She is currently writing a book on racial and national identity among African-descended Peruvians. Areas: Race and Ethnicity, Latin America, Immigration, and Ethnography.

 

HOW ARE RACIAL IDENTITES CONSTRUCTED IN THE US AND LATIN AMERICA? .........My work involves two interrelated projects – one on the racial identities of Latinos and Latinas in the US, and one on racial identities in Latin America.  While “Latino/a” is used as an ethnic category in the U.S. Census, my work explores the ways that Latinos/as are treated as a racial group in certain contexts in the U.S.  My second project takes this discussion of race, identity and social context to Latin America.  .........In my work on African-descended Peruvians, I question the extent to which racial categories are more fluid in Latin America than in the U.S. I also explore what it means to self-identify as black in Peru, where most "blacks" do not see themselves as the descendants of African slaves or as producers of "black" cultural products.  I argue that while "black" is a globalized term, people translate global and transnational understandings of blackness in different ways depending on who they are and where they live.

 

 

Professor Tanya Golash-Boza Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

 

Selected Publications

Golash-Boza, Tanya and Parker, Douglas A. 2007. "Human Rights in a Globalizing World: Who Pays the Human Cost of Migration?" The Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 34-46. Available in PDF format here.

Golash-Boza, Tanya and Darity, William Jr. 2008. "Latino racial choices: The effects of skin colour and discrimination on Latinos' and Latinas' racial self-identifications" Ethnic and Racial Studies pp. 1-36. Available in PDF format here.