Welcome.

My name is David Cortez; I am assistant professor of political science and Latinx studies at the University of Notre Dame. My research centers on ethnic and racial identity with particular focus on intersectional and situational identity salience. Motivated by my own experiences growing up in Brownsville, TX, my current book project explores the emergence of a disproportionately-Latinx immigration law enforcement workforce as a metaphor for the minority experience in the United States. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, including interviews with and observations of more than one-hundred Immigration and Customs Enforcement - Enforcement and Removal Operations (ICE-ERO) agents across Arizona, California, and Texas, my research engages questions of belonging, obligation, and liminality to reveal the careful negotiation of cross-cutting social group memberships of Latinx immigration agents caught between two worlds: the police and the policed. I am an alumnus of the American Political Science Association Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, and my research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Political Science Association Minority Fellowship Program, and published in the Annual Review of Sociology.
 
Thank you for visiting my website. Here you can find a bit more information about me, the classes I offer at ND, and keep up to date on general goings on. For now, though, please follow me on Twitter and enjoy a personally-curated Spotify playlist.