Dr. Marc Simon Rodriguez of the University of Notre Dame faculty will present the address "The Legacy of César Chávez - Politics of Activism" through the annual César Chávez Lecture Series at HopeCollege on Wednesday, March 31, at 4 p.m. in the Maas Center auditorium.
The public is invited. Admission is free.
Rodriguez is an assistant professor law and a Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Working within the fields of Mexican American and American legal history, he focuses on the relationship between migration, ethnicity, youth politics, state reform and labor after 1945.
He came to the University of Notre Dame in 2003 after spending the 2003-04 academic year as The Bill & Rita Clements Research Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. He was previously an assistant professor in the Department of History at PrincetonUniversity, where he was also executive secretary of the ShelbyCullomDavisCenter for Historical Studies.
He most recently completed two edited volumes dealing with international and North American migration in comparative context. In 2007, Rodriguez received a Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Rodriguez is currently completing his first book, tentatively titled "Mexican Americanism: The Tejano Diaspora and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin after 1950" (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press), which details the growth of Mexican American politics among migrants and activists in both Texas and Wisconsin after 1950. His new research project is an examination of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments with an emphasis on the struggle for jury representation for Mexican Americans, African Americans, and women.
He holds a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Northwestern University, and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School.
The César Chávez celebration at Hope is named in honor of César E. Chávez (1927-93), who played a leading role in the 1960s in organizing the nation's migrant farm workers, and was the first head of the National Farm Workers Association, later the United Farm Workers. March 31, his birthday, is the official César E. Chávez Day of Service and Learning, which is a holiday in multiple states, including Michigan, and dozens of cities and counties throughout the nation.
The lecture on March 31 is co-sponsored by the college's La Raza Unida student organization, Office of Multicultural Education, and Dean for International and Multicultural Education.
The Maas Center is located at 264 Columbia Ave., on Columbia Avenue at 11th Street.