The Fund for Latino Scholarship encourages and supports the recruitment, retention, and promotion of Latino/a political scientists. The fund also seeks to support research on Latino/a politics. The Fund for Latino Scholarship is jointly administered by the Latino Caucus in Political Science and APSA, with support from the APSA Committee on the Status of Latinos and Latinas in the Profession.
Submit your application now.
Alejandro Beltran Aguirre is a PhD candidate at the School of Government and Public Policy of the University of Arizona. He received his BA from the Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa and has a book on local governance in Spanish published through his alma mater. Alejandro’s dissertation explores how corrupt politicians in Mexico avoid accountability at the ballot box by buying off voters as well as exposing corruption in the auditing process of public finances at the state and local level. Through the use of econometric methods, he demonstrates that mayors are systematically embezzling money during election years and through the use of network models he finds that auditors avoid investigating corrupt mayors. As a first-generation college graduate and first-generation immigrant, Alejandro understands the barriers that many Latino students face when choosing to enter grad school, which motivates his goal of recruiting more Latino undergrads into PhD programs. Alejandro is excited to use the support of the Fund for Latino Scholarship to travel to the 2019 APSA Annual Meeting to present his research and to interview for potential tenure track positions at minority serving institutions where he can fulfill his goal of mentoring students and recruiting them into political science and grad school.
Daisy Vera is a doctoral student in the political science department at UCLA focusing on immigrant political representation and participation. She graduated from UC Irvine in 2017 with a BA in political science and Chicano/Latino studies. Her current work studies how immigrant-serving organizations mediate the representation process for undocumented immigrant constituents across states and localities. Daisy’s previous research has examined the impact of institutional practices that support educational equity for undocumented immigrant college students and the legislative process and implementation of state-level immigrant policies. She is currently a senior research fellow at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative conducting research on the topics of Latino representation and voting rights. Daisy is a recipient of the Ford Predoctoral Fellowship, 2018 APSA Minority Fellowship and the Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellowship from UCLA. The Fund for Latino Scholarship will allow her to continue data collection efforts for her project on the role of immigrant-serving organizations’ advocacy efforts on legislative behavior and policy outcomes.