2018 Fund for Latino Scholarship Application Due June 15 – Meet Estefania Castañeda Pérez

Apply for the 2018 APSA Fund for Latino Scholarship by June 15th!

Support from the APSA Fund for Latino Scholarship assisted 2017 recipient, Estefania Castañeda Pérez (MFP 2016-17),  a second year PhD student at UCLA studying international relations and race, ethnicity, and politics. Her research and educational experiences have been transformed by her trans-border lifestyle between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, CA. Inspired by her own experiences as a transfronteriza from Tijuana, Castañeda Pérez explores whether negative perceptions  of and experience with border enforcement at the Tijuana-San Ysidro Port of Entry impacts Mexican cross-border commuters’ sociopolitical integration in the U.S. Through the assistance of the APSA Fund for Latino Scholarship, Castañeda Pérez collected over 770 surveys at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. In summer 2018, she will begin the second stage of her project and will conduct an updated survey in El Paso, where she will also collect a representative sample.

Her research contributes to the Fund’s goals by examining whether notions of trust, exclusion, and citizenship at the border transform Latino political behavior and attitudes within the context of the borderlands. Furthermore, this project will serve as a stepping-stone for future work on similar populations in transit, which includes refugees and other types of migrants. Prior to UCLA, Castañeda Pérez was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Madrid and worked to prepare high school students to compete in Model United Nations competitions. In 2018, she received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the Ford Predoctoral Foundation grants. She has also received the Eugene V. Cota-Robles at UCLA, and the APSA Minority Fellowship Program award in 2016. Currently, she serves as the co-president of the Transfronterizo Alliance Student Organization at UCLA, which supports transborder and transnational students to find a sense of belonging on campus, and informs the broader Los Angeles community about the challenges that come with crossing the border on a regular basis.

Apply Now!  Applications are due Friday, June 15, 2018. 

About the Fund for Latino Scholarship
The fund’s primary goal is to encourage and support the recruitment, retention, and promotion of Latina/o political scientists (especially students and tenure track junior faculty); our secondary goal is to support research on Latino politics in the United States (especially students and tenure track junior faculty). Grants will be made to individuals, institutions, and projects whose purposes most clearly match the goals of the fund, and whose proposals most persuasively demonstrate capacity for successful completion. The Fund for Latino Scholarship is an APSA Centennial Center Research Grant.