Erika Arenas, Assistant Professor of Sociology, has teamed up with Emiko Saldivar, Lecturer in Anthropology, to pioneer a study of the Mexican national census, and other institutions that collect data on the Mexican population, with a special emphasis on policies that assure accurate counting of Indigenous and Black Mexicans. Without accurate counting, persisting racial inequities are rendered invisible. Support from the Kellogg Foundation has allowed Saldivar and Arenas to carry out this project, and to launch plans to found a “Laboratory for Statistical Literacy,” intended to help communities, grassroots organizations and local actors gain access to and make use of statistical information that often circulates only in the hands of experts and institutions.

Arenas has also won support from the Kellogg and Russell Sage Foundations, and from the CFE (a para-state Mexican organization), for her role in a major longitudinal study of Mexican migrants, which explores multiple dimensions of individual and family well-being. This study follows the same group of migrants since 2005, tracking their experiences as new arrivals to US society, comparing these experiences at different points in their own journeys, and under different macro political and economic conditions. The most recent iteration of this study will help scholars, policy makers, and activists better understand how Mexican immigrants have fared in the Trump era.