David Cortez

Assistant Professor
Political Science

Research Interests

Race and Ethnicity; Identity Salience; Criminal Justice; (Im)migration

Related Courses Taught

Race and Policing in the United States (USEM); American Citizenship in the 21st Century (SN SEM); The Politics of Borders (JR SEM); Latinos in U.S. Politics (Lecture)

Biography

David Cortez is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Latinx Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a faculty fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies and the Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights. Professor Cortez’s research centers on ethnic and racial identity with particular focus on intersectional and situational identity salience. His 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 (ICE) agents across Texas, Arizona, and California, his 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. Prof. Cortez is an alumnus of the American Political Science Association Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, his 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 and Political Research Quarterly.