Dissertation:

My dissertation aims to investigate the question: how do structural, systemic, and compounding pressures towards Latinos affect their organizing capacities, emergence, and lobbying behaviors?

Over the last two decades, Latinos have faced a number of crises, such as health disparities, educational inequities, over-policing, higher vulnerability to environmental pressures, immigration enforcement, state violence, and more. Most research studies these events in isolation; however, my project instead introduces and measures a concept I call racialized compounding crises: crises that occur when multiple disruptive events unfold simultaneously or in rapid succession, rather than merely accumulating, they intensify and transform one another, producing effects that are multiplicative rather than additive. 

To study this, I built an original index measuring the presence and severity of compounding crises across every U.S. county from 2005 to 2024, drawing on nearly 90 indicators across seven domains and totaling almost 62,000 county-year observations. Alongside this, I constructed a longitudinal database of over 700 Latino-serving organizations, built yearly from two decades of IRS tax filings using a combination of Python-based web scraping and hand coding, resulting in over 12,000 organization-year observations. I use this data to examine how compounding crises shape whether these organizations form, the capacity of organizations that do emerge, and their lobbying behaviors.

I'm currently extending this quantitative foundation with qualitative research, including surveys and interviews with organizational leaders, to validate the index and surface the mechanisms behind these patterns.