Marisa Abrajano

Professor of Political Science
USIPC Faculty Affiliate

Marisa Abrajano is professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests are in American politics, particularly racial and ethnic politics, political participation, voting and campaigns, and the mass media. She is the author of several books, the most recent one entitled White Backlash: Immigration, Race and American Politics (with Zoltan Hajnal), published by Princeton University Press in 2015. It was the recipient of the American Political Science Association's Ralphe Bunch Award for the best book on Race and Politics in 2015. Her other award winning book, Campaigning to the New American Electorate: Television Advertising to Latinos , was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press. She is also the author of New Faces, New Voices: The Hispanic Electorate in America (with R. Michael Alvarez) published by Princeton University Press in 2012. Her other work has been published in leading journals in political science.

Wayne Cornelius

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science
USIPC Faculty Affiliate

Wayne A. Cornelius is an expert on comparative immigration policy and the mass politics of immigration, focusing on the U.S., Spain, and Japan, as well as Mexican politics and development. He is the author, co-author, or editor of nearly 300 publications dealing with these subjects, including 15 books on Mexican migration. His most recent book is The New Face of Mexican Migration (2016). A frequent contributor to national news media, he has written most recently on immigration for The Los Angeles Times. His research has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and other nationally circulating newspapers, as well as on CBS’ “60 Minutes” (twice), PBS’ “NewsHour” and “Frontline,” the NBC, CBS, and ABC nightly news programs, CNN, and the BBC World Service.  A summa cum laude graduate of The College of Wooster (Ohio), he earned his Ph.D. in political science at Stanford University. He has taught at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Oxford University’s Nuffield and St. Antony’s colleges, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Portland, and Dickinson College. He has also been a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Faculty Fellow at Stanford University, the University of Tokyo, and the Institute for Labor Studies (IZA) at the University of Bonn (Germany). He received six national and local awards for excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching from the University of California and MIT. He did field research with his students on Mexican migration to the United States nearly every year from 1976 through 2015, from 2004-2015 as founding Director of UCSD’s nationally recognized Mexican Migration Field Research and Training Program. He was also the founding director of two internationally respected, interdisciplinary research centers based at UC San Diego: the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies. He is an emeritus professor in the UCSD School of Medicine’s Division of Global Public Health, where he specialized in immigrant health. He is also Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, and the Theodore Gildred Professor of U.S.-Mexican Relations, Emeritus, at UCSD. He is the former President of the Latin American Studies Association, the world’s largest, cross-disciplinary organization of scholars specializing in Latin America. In 2012 President Felipe Calderón awarded him the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest decoration for foreign citizens, in recognition of lifetime contributions to immigration research and improvement of U.S.-Mexican relations. In 2015 the University of California awarded him the Dickson Prize for distinguished post-retirement contributions to student training, research, and national and community service. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Rafael Fernández de Castro

Professor School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) and Director of the Center of U.S.-Mexican Studies (USMEX)
USIPC Faculty Affiliate

Rafael Fernández de Castro is a professor at the School and director of its Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies (USMEX). A former foreign policy adviser to President Felipe Calderón, he is an expert on bilateral relations between Mexico and the U.S.

Fernández de Castro is founder and former chair of the Department of International Studies at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) in Mexico City. He has published numerous academic articles and written several books, including “Contemporary U.S.- Latin American Relations: Cooperation or Conflict in the 21st Century?” and “The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict” with Jorge Domínguez.

He also worked as the Project Director of the UNDP’s Human Development Report for Latin America 2013-14, “Citizen Security With a Human Face: Evidence and Proposals for Latin America.” He is the founder and editor of Foreign Affairs Latin America and contributes to the daily newspaper El Financiero and a regular contributor to Televisa.

His current research includes a book on leadership and decision-making in Mexican foreign policy and he serves as a principal investigator along with Professor Jenny Pearce from the London School of Economics for the project “Co-constructing Security Provision in Mexico: A Methodology and Action Plan from Communities to the State”. The project, funded by Mexico’s National Council of Science and Technology and the UK’s the Economic and Social Research Council, works with community, civil society and state actors to build shared understandings of the differential impacts of violence, insecurity and security provision to develop local security agendas constructed from the ground up in four cities severely affected by violence: Tijuana, Apatzingán, Acapulco and Guadalupe.

Zoltan Hajnal

Professor of Political Science
USIPC Faculty Affiliate

Zoltan Hajnal is a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.  A scholar of racial and ethnic politics, urban politics, immigration, and political behavior, Dr. Hajnal is the author of White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (Princeton – 2015 – Winner Choice Outstanding Academic Title), Why Americans Don’t Join the Party: Race, Immigration, and the Failure of Political Parties to Engage the Electorate (Princeton 2011 – Winner of the APSA’s Best Book on Race/Ethnicity), America’s Uneven Democracy: Race, Turnout, and Representation in City Politics (Cambridge 2010 – Winner of APSA’s Best Book on Urban Politics) and Changing White Attitudes toward Black Political Leadership (Cambridge 2006) and has published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Perspective on Politics and numerous other journals, edited volumes, and newspaper editorial pages.  He has received numerous honors for his research and writing including the Best Paper in Urban Politics Awards from the American Political Science Association.  Before joining the faculty at UCSD, Dr. Hajnal was a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brandeis University.