Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Lisa Martinez

Colectivo sat down with Dr. Lisa Martinez, professor of sociology and criminology in the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, to chat about her ongoing research with the immigrant community in Denver. Read below to learn more.

Interviewer: Firstly, I want to say thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and do this interview with me. So, can you please tell me a little bit about yourself? Who you are, where you’re from, what your career and research has been like so far…

Dr. Martinez: Yeah, I don't know how biographical you want me to get but I was born and raised in El Paso, Texas, which is a border city. I am third generation in the U.S., my grandfather migrated to the United States from the state of Chihuahua as a young man and settled in El Paso and raised ten children with my grandmother, who I didn’t know. She passed just before I was born, but they raised ten children together and one of them is my dad. I probably didn’t quite know it at the time, growing up in a border city where literally, depending on where you are, you can actually look into the Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, there’s always sort of been this sense of two worlds, right? It's certainly having one foot in the U.S. context, but also being very closely tied to the Mexican context.

Following college where I majored in sociology, I knew I wanted to go into grad school and the path that I took in grad school... I was actually kind of interested in a different research agenda than what I ultimately started doing when I got to DU. When I did get to DU, around 2005, it was shortly before the immigrant rights mobilizations were taking place across the country, and so I was at a point where I was looking for new research opportunities and being in a new city, I thought, “Why not think about a research agenda that's kind of tailored to some of these questions?” And so that's essentially what got me down the path that I am today. The project that I launched in 2005 or 2006 was more about the immigrant rights mobilizations, but then over time, I think largely from my interactions with former DU students, I started recognizing their plight, hearing about their challenges, because they weren’t documented. That helped inform the next research agenda and the one I’ve actually been working on the last several years. This research is on DACA recipients, so we’re really trying to understand the impact of legal reforms, in this case DACA, on the educational and occupational trajectories of young people here in Colorado. Something that I've experienced since I've been here is that other scholars who do this kind of work are often situated in California or New York or Texas, places that are considered more traditional immigrant destinations. There was always a sense that my work was well-received, and I think there was interest there, but I always had to sort of justify the Colorado case, as to why it's important to understand these issues or ask some of these research questions in these less traditional contexts, even though Colorado has a rich history of immigrants and particularly Latinx immigrants. There’s always a sense of having to do a lot of justification for Why Colorado? And so I wanted to do a project that not only focuses on the impact of these reforms and what it would mean for the mobility prospects of people who received deferred action, but also really make a sense of how local, politicized contexts matter in these trajectories.

So what we see in college in California is obviously going to be different than here in Colorado. Opportunities may be different. How much does politics play a part in that? How welcoming or unwelcoming are our contexts and how does that also alter or shape these trajectories that young people find themselves on? So that’s been the most recent work, and I’m currently working on a book related to that research project, and hopefully it’ll be published soon, given that we are coming up on the 10-year anniversary of DACA next year. I’m really excited about it because it’s been a labor of love and I hope it contributes to the literature in regards to the impact that legal reforms have had here and at home, and of course, what that means relative to other contexts across the country. So that's a very long winded answer to your question, but that’s a little about me.

Interviewer: It was a broad question so I appreciate the in-depth answer. Is the research you do largely qualitative? Do you interview community members? What is the structure of this work?

Dr. Martinez: Yeah, you know, it’s funny because I actually began my life in grad school as a quantitative scholar. I wouldn’t say that I was really good at it because it was certainly a steep learning curve for me, but I enjoyed it. So much of the work I did in grad school, including my dissertation, was quantitative. And then I think once I got here, getting a sense of the land and learning what was happening around immigrant rights, it just seemed like it best lent itself to doing quantitative work. So my book project is based on qualitative interviews and participants observation as well. I’m not discounting that I'll ever I'll not go back to quantitative. I actually just recently submitted a paper with a co-author at Arizona State where we analyzed immigration attitudes, Pew Research data, and so that was very heavily quantitative as well. Much like my upbringing, I tend to straddle two worlds in a lot of ways in who I am and in the work that I do.

Interviewer: Okay, that’s interesting. I know that you said you’re coming up on the end of this research on DACA and you’re writing a book… Is there any way that students can get involved in your research in they’re interested?

Dr. Martinez: I don’t have a lab on campus, and that might be partly due to the fact that we are an undergrad-only department, so we don’t have as many opportunities to work with grad students, and we don’t have dedicated spaces to do research. But I will say that in the data collection phase I did involve students, and have involved students in other work. At this point, the data is mostly analyzed and it’s just a matter of writing the book, so there’s less opportunity to engage students right now. However, I’m always willing and receptive to students who have an interest in similar research, or even if it’s not necessarily similar. I’m always open to working with students who have an interest in understanding some of these sociological questions, whether it's migration, whether it's social inequality, whether it's related to school outcomes, whether it's related to political participation, specifically of people in communities of color. I welcome those questions, and I have had opportunities to work with students, both in terms of collecting data and helping analyze data and transcribing interviews. I’ve also published with a couple of former students.

Interviewer: How can students find your research and the work you’ve already published?

Dr. Martinez: Well, one way is probably to go to my department’s website that lists all the faculty. So if you go to the Department of Sociology and Criminology, the faculty is listed alphabetically. If you click on my name, it should take you to that information that has specifics about me. It’s probably not been updated in a little while though, so some of the things that are cited as publications might be a little bit older. But you know, Google Scholar. If people just want to search by my name or by DACA, you know, keywords are “DACA” or “immigration” or “social movements.” Chances are you might come across some of my work there. And then of course, at some point, once the book is published and out, I’m sort of thinking through what, if any, publicity I might do on campus and/or in the community, so that might be another way to engage too… I would love for people on campus and in the community to read it.

Interviewer: As far as teaching, do you teach any courses specifically on migration?

Dr. Martinez: I do. Many years ago, I taught an advanced seminar called Immigrant America, and I really enjoyed that class because it was taking a broad look at various immigration issues, starting from very historical and kind of moving to the present. And then, because a variety of administrative roles came up, I stopped teaching that class. More recently, I think it’s been three years now, one of my colleagues, Professor Liz Escobedo, who is faculty in the history department, recruited me and a couple other faculty to be part of what became known as the Casa de Paz learning community. So in partnership with Casa de Paz, which supports people who are in detention at the Aurora detention facility nearby, we crafted courses where students not only have the opportunity to take our classes, but also to volunteer with Casa.

And so now we’ve actually had a few cohorts of students who have gone through. What’s often the case is that students will take her course, and then they’ll take my course, or they’ll take another faculty member’s course, and we work to not only teach the courses, but also to do programming across the classes as well. What that usually looks like is an end of year event where we invited our community partners, volunteers, people we’ve met as part of the service work, and you know, whether it's a film screening and talk back, or one year we did a “cook in” where we cooked meals from some of the countries of the people that students had met while visiting the detention. Things like that are part of the learning community, and I’m scheduled to teach that in winter quarter, so that’s been a really great experience insofar as it combines my research and work and interest in immigration, but then also allows me to to engage with colleagues who are also teaching and doing similar kinds of research.

Interviewer: Just to clarify, this course is only available to undergraduate students?

Dr. Martinez: Yes, undergrad only.

Interviewer: OK, and if a student or community member wanted to reach out to you, what’s the best way they can find you?

Dr. Martinez: Email. It’s just my name-- lisa.martinez@du.edu.

Interviewer: Fantastic. Anything else you want to share?

Dr. Martinez: I would just like to put a plug in for the new Center for Immigration Policy and Research, which Dr. Rebecca Galemba and I are co-leading. This is part of the multi-year “Knowledge Bridge” initiative, and we were selected as some of the finalists, so we’re very much in the process or building the Center, or CIPR, as we call it. And so if people have any questions or any interest in getting involved with that, they can also reach out to me and or Rebecca. We also have an email-- CIPR@du.edu.

Interviewer: Thank you.