When Armando Ibarra, who studies Chican@ and Latin@ working communities and international labor migration, makes a discovery in his research, he might publish in a journal or bring the insight into one of the classes he teaches at UW-Madison, but he won’t stop there.
Most likely, he’ll also share that finding beyond the university. In fact, odds are that some of those community stakeholders helped set his research agenda in the first place. That kind of collaboration is a hallmark of Ibarra’s work.
“I see my work as something that’s larger than the research question,” says Ibarra, who in 2011 joined the Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program and the School for Workers, a university-based labor education program that began in 1925. “It’s about creating a richer dialogue and balancing academic interests and community needs.”
For the past year, Ibarra has been director of Chican@ and Latin@ Studies, a certificate program that offers interdisciplinary analysis of Mexican- and Latin-American-origin people and cultures within the United States, with an emphasis on understanding both their unity and diversity.
While Ibarra grew up in California — and earned a PhD in political science from the University of California, Irvine — he was attracted to UW-Madison because of the Wisconsin Idea, the guiding philosophy that knowledge produced at the university should benefit all citizens of the state.
“Being able to engage in knowledge production and use it for society at large is important to me,” he says. “It’s research with a purpose.”
It’s something Ibarra emphasizes in his classes. Students in his Latinos in Small Towns and Rural Areas class worked closely with organizations such as Centro Hispano, the Worker Rights Center, the Latino Academy for Workforce Development and other nonprofits that serve Spanish-speaking communities in Madison.
“They learn about large intellectual ideas and how to go out and actually engage,” he says.
Outside of teaching, Ibarra has taken on a range of applied research projects — work that’s designed to address a specific problem or question. For UW-Madison Division of Extension, he led an assessment on Latinos in Wisconsin to learn more about that growing population. He conducted one-on-one interviews, focus groups and surveys with hundreds of residents across the state.
“We were able to collect their life stories and, from their perspective, what they need,” he says, adding that he and partners produced a report with a list of recommendations for education and programming and launched a Latino task force made up of community members throughout Wisconsin. “The work continues. It’s amazing.”
The project overlapped with Ibarra’s ongoing interest in identity — and the notion that identity is more fluid and nuanced than often thought. The term “Latino,” for instance, carries a wide range of meanings dependent on individuals’ experiences and realities.
Unpacking and exploring those narratives and considering them alongside working-class identity and within the context of migration and U.S. foreign policy led Ibarra to publish The Latino Question: Politics, Laboring Classes and the Next Left with Rodolfo D. Torres of UC Irvine, and Alfredo Carlos of California State University, Long Beach.
“The Latino Question is really looking at working-class Latinos and where they fit,” Ibarra says. “It’s about how Latino workers participate in identity but are also creating a better world for themselves.”
And Ibarra and his co-authors place themselves within the conversations in the book. “We’re very cognizant of it, and we say it up front,” he says. “All three of us are Latinos, first generation to go to college, first generation to get PhDs.”
This summer, the Latino Caucus of the American Political Science Association chose The Latino Question for its 2019 Best Book in Latino Politics Award, praising the book for challenging characterizations of Latinos as a single voting bloc.
Ibarra is now working on two new books — about working-class Mexican Americans and about immigrant labor rights and social movements. And insights gleaned from research will undoubtedly make their way into the classroom and far beyond, continuing to bridge campus and community.
“To not have these conversations in tandem is a mistake,” he says.