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Elizabeth Barahona (she/her)

PhD Candidate in the Department of History

Elizabeth Barahona (she/her)

I am proud that I believed in myself, created a beautiful community, and grew as a scholar in my field.”

Elizabeth Barahona is a PhD candidate in the Department of History in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. She studies how Black and Latino community members actively worked past their xenophobia and anti-Black prejudices to create campaigns to address poor housing, labor exploitation, and over-policing in their neighborhoods. Elizabeth is a member of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society and was an Arch Scholar graduate intern and past recipient of the Northwestern History Department Research Grant Award.

How would you describe your research and/or work to a non-academic audience?
I study how Black and Latino communities in the southern United States worked together to improve their social, political, and economic conditions in the 1990s. I am writing a local southern history about how these two communities created grassroots coalitions that improved their daily lives, their children’s education, and their housing conditions and brought attention to how the city and county governments failed to respond to their basic needs. Not only did the coalitions supplement services to residents that the local government failed to provide, but the organizations’ missions, strategies, and structures also served as blueprints for other coalitions across the country.

Tell us what inspired your research and/or work.
I was inspired to study Black and Latino coalitions after working as a student activist at Duke University, where I worked alongside Black, Indigenous, and Asian American students. I was moved by the work Durham activists were doing to take down racist public statues and end immigration raids. I also was curious to better understand the relationship between Black and Latino communities after the George Floyd protest in the summer of 2020.

What do you find both rewarding and challenging about your research and/or work?
I am incredibly thankful to the community members who share their stories with me. I hope to honor them in my work. It also is incredibly challenging to write recent history because I have the added pressure to "get it right" from the community I study.

What is the biggest potential impact or implication of your work?
I want my research to serve as a guide for Black and Latino organizations and activists to renew or create multiracial grassroots coalitions in their communities. Understanding the history of how these coalitions have failed and succeeded can be instrumental for future alliances.

Tell us about a current achievement or something you're working on that excites you.
I am proud that my research on the history of Latino students at Duke University has become required reading in history and Spanish courses at Duke and was featured in a museum exhibit at the university. Currently, I am excited to be writing my first dissertation chapter about impactful Black activist women in Durham who dedicated themselves to their community in the 1990s and deserve their flowers.

What are you most proud of in your career to date?
I am most proud of persevering as a PhD student. Being a doctoral student is incredibly difficult—moving to a new place, making a community, surviving the pandemic, and supporting my family—all of it was challenging. I am proud that I believed in myself, created a beautiful community, and grew as a scholar in my field.

Published: November 29, 2022


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