Unlocking Knowledge: LAS Professor Reinvents Her Award-Winning Book
Interview with Xóchitl Bada Heading link
Name: Xóchitl Bada
Title: Professor
Department: Latin American and Latino Studies
Tell me a little bit about your work at LAS and LALS. What is your most proud accomplishment in your 16 years at UIC?
My biggest accomplishment has been to participate in the curricular development and creation of the first Master’s of Latin American and Latino Studies Program in the city of Chicago. More than 65 students have graduated from this program since 2012. For example, Tania Carrasco Unzueta, a graduate of our first cohort, now serves as Political Director of Mijente, a racial, economic, gender, and climate justice Latinx and Chicanx national nonprofit organization.
What do you hope your students will get out of an LAS degree?
Our graduates are equipped with the best liberal arts education, including a strong foundation in political science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and the humanities. Our students acquire practical skills in logical reasoning, quantitative analysis, professional writing, oral communication, and evidence-based interpretations. They also gain empathy towards different cultures and diverse ethnic groups and become proficient in cross-cultural communication.
What role does research have in your role as a faculty member at UIC?
We conduct research to better understand human action and to bring awareness to the needs of underserved populations in the United States. In LALS, we also strive to bring visibility to the political, social, and economic conditions in Latin American countries to understand the root causes of migration that lead to the formation of Latinx communities in the United States.
You were recently recognized as the recipient of The Latin@/x Caucus Best Book Award for your book Scaling Migrant Worker Rights that you wrote with Shannon Gleeson. Can you talk about this book and your research behind it and why the research is so topical?
Taking Mexico and the United States as entry points, this book analyzes how an array of organizations put tactical pressure on government bureaucracies to holistically defend migrant rights. For over a decade, we interviewed more than 200 organizational leaders and government officials on labor standards including consular officials, labor standards enforcement bureaucrats, labor unions, worker centers, legal aid groups, and other immigrant advocates. We found a multi-layered transnational ecosystem of advocates who are fighting to improve access to migrant worker justice across borders. This advocacy work is frequently underfunded and invisible.
I’m curious about the concept of portable rights – can you speak more on this in your research and what it means to you?
Portable rights is a concept that comes from grassroots organizing. The concept of portable rights for migrant workers encompasses a demand for justice prior to, during, and even after migrants return to their country of origin, regardless of their immigration status. In the year of 2005, the nonprofit Global Workers Justice Alliance (now Justice in Motion) introduced the concept of portable rights to the United Nations in Geneva, and several migrant rights organizations subsequently adopted this advocacy platform to bring visibility and awareness to the needs of temporal migrant worker who need to protect their labor rights across different geographical jurisdictions, frequently spanning more than one country.
Has anything surprised you in your research for this book?
Yes. It surprises me the inadequate staffing of inspectors at the U.S. Department of Labor to guarantee the enforcement of labor rights in the United States. For example, while doing our research, we learned that it would take sixty-six years for investigators of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once, assuming 2012 staffing levels.
You are currently in production of a new radio show that continues the work of your book Scaling Migrant Worker Rights. What do you hope to achieve with this continuation of your research?
In the book, we found that Mexican migrant workers are more likely to experience abuses at their workplace as they toil in dangerous industries with scant regulation. For example, Mexican migrant workers are the most affected by fatal occupational injuries among foreign-born workers. Between 2011 and 2018, 2,894 Mexican workers died in the workplace, representing 65% of the total work-related deaths among foreign-born workers in the United States.
In my planned radio show on labor education in Spanish language, I plan to educate migrants on fundamental protections for all workers- including those without work authorization, such as occupational health and safety standards, paid sick and family leave, laws governing predictable hours and work schedules, child labor laws, workers’ compensation, minimum wages, and anti-wage theft provisions, collective bargaining rights and organizing resources, and anti-discrimination protections. My collaborative pilot radio/podcast series on workplace rights in Spanish will discuss basic expectations, effective strategies for protecting oneself from workers’ rights violations, resources for enforcing workers’ rights, and tools to report labor violations and submit claims to the appropriate labor standards enforcement agencies. I will launch this radio series in collaboration with faculty from the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, the School of Public Health, and the College of Engineering. We are also collaborating with five Chicago-based worker centers.
Where will listeners be able to tune into your radio show?
Listeners will be able to tune in on Lumpen Radio throughout Chicago at 105.5 FM and tune-in everywhere from the internet at lumpenradio.com. We expect to launch our radio series later this fall.