Juan De Lara

Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Founding Director of the Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies, University of Southern California

Juan De Lara is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and recently began his tenure as the founding director of the USC Center for Latinx and Latin American Studies. His interdisciplinary research focuses on three broad themes. The first centers on urban political economy, racialization, and the politics of space. A second set of research interests focuses on the use of data science and technology to reorganize how various state agencies are restructuring the social relations of race, immigration, and labor. A third set of projects focus on public-facing research that supports community-based organizations in their efforts to resolve social disparities. His first book, Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Inland Southern California (University of California Press, 2018), uses logistics and commodity chains to unpack the black box of globalization by showing how the scientific management of bodies, space, and time produced new racialized labor regimes that facilitated a more complex and extended system of global production, distribution, and consumption. De Lara holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.A. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.A. in Sociology and Labor Studies from Pitzer College.