2006 Ralph Bunche Award

For the best scholarly work in political science published in the previous calendar year that explores the phenomenon of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

Award Committee: Daniel Kryder, Brandeis University; Rodolfo Rosales, University of Texas-San Antonio, Chair; Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, University of Rochester

Recipient: Lisa Garcia Bedolla, University of California, Irvine

Title: Fluid Borders: Latino Power, Identity, and Politics in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2005)

Citation: In this excellent study of the changing influence of stigma and identity on political efficacy as they cut across race, class, gender, language ability, generation, and social context, Dr. Lisa Garcia Bedolla establishes an exciting new paradigm by which to approach the political analysis of Latino community participation. While political scientists have focused on the individual to measure political efficacy, ignoring how that political efficacy came about, Dr. Bedolla carefully builds the context in which one can then link participation and efficacy and, more important, how they are prefigured by the factors in that context. Furthermore, in the presentation of this study Dr. Bedolla provides an excellent multi-disciplinary discussion of the various approaches to the study of efficacy and participation.

Dr. Bedolla's pivotal premise in her study of two Latino communities from East Los Angeles and Montebello is the distinction she makes between the electoral definitions of the collective identity as the abstract state as opposed to a more direct form of collective identity found in community mobilization in non-electoral activity. Based on this premise Dr. Bedolla's analysis then takes the reader into a really superb discussion of how women tend to be more connected to community. While this gender connection is documented in other studies, the analysis of how electoral politics is more individualistic an act as compared to community activism is a major contribution to the understanding of why not only Latinos, but minorities in general, are alienated from a system that in the end is distinctly Anglo in its individualistic approach to empowerment. Dr. Bedolla finds that "they [community members] can see clear connections between non-electoral activity and addressing group problems. When it came to electoral politics, these connections were more difficult for the respondents to see. Their general sense of separateness from Anglo society, and by extension formal politics, decreased their level of comfort with the electoral system."

Finally, Dr. Bedolla's study addresses a very important question about the electoral system in general. If this system is an individualistic process then how do we explain the participation rates of one community where there is greater participation and where the other participates little or not at all. In asking the question if stigma, identity, and group cohesion, which historically and politically characterize the Latino community, do not lend themselves to an individualistic process like voting Dr. Bedolla captures the distinct role of the historical, political, and cultural context of the two communities as explanatory forces for the various responses of Latino communities.