Spotlight - Alberto Díaz-Cayeros
(2009) Q&A with Alberto Díaz-Cayeros, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies)
Can you tell us about your educational background before coming to San Diego?
I was born in Mexico City, and I’ve been living now in the United States for nine years. Originally, I thought I was going to be living in the U.S. only temporarily. I had the opportunity to study in the U.S., and received my Ph.D. from Duke University in North Carolina. I was very fortunate to be studying along with my wife who is also a professor, so we’ve always kept kind of this possibility of having our career together. We spent a year at Harvard writing our dissertations, and went back to Mexico where I did policy work for a think tank and things related to NAFTA for several years. I spent a year after that at UCLA then 7 to 8 years at Stanford before coming here to IR/PS and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies (USMEX).
What brought you here to San Diego?
My dream while I've been in the U.S. has always been to have a foothold in U.S. academia while also having a foothold in Mexico. There's no place in the country that offers the possibilities we have in San Diego as a city, the University of California, San Diego as a university, and USMEX as an institution. There is no match.
I've always had this kind of schizophrenia of wanting to both really engage in the policy debates and in the economic community in Mexico, and that has been hard in the years I have been in the U.S., but I think San Diego provides this unique opportunity to do both things really well, so it's really exciting.
What are some of your research interests, and what are you currently working on?
My work until recently has dealt with federalism, one of the main areas I'm interested in. I wrote a book on the interaction in the Latin American federation on the questions of taxation, regional politics, and federalism within Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. In the past few years, I‘ve been working more on social policy, looking at poverty relief programs in Mexico researching the temptations that governments face when they set up programs that target the poor in a way to gain political support.
In the last year and a half or so I have started research on colonial Mexico, so it is much more historical. I'm looking at the 16th century Mexico and the geography of poverty today, especially the specific characteristics that are related to the types of places that poor people live.
I'm also doing a survey which is a discussion on local development that will come out soon on Mexican localities and Mexican local government. We are trying to provide some sense of why some local governments fail and others are more successful in providing public goods like drinking water, sewage, and electricity.
The other thing I'm questioning is when citizens see failures and have misgivings about the public services they are being provided, where do they think the blame lies? This is a whole under-researched area in Mexico that really has to do with the links of accountability of local government.
How will you bring your experience and research into your role as director of USMEX?
I think the Center, up until now, has had an incredible reputation in Mexico and in the U.S., too. In Mexico there is really big visibility for the Center. I think now that the Center has an incredible opportunity to become the central place where we think not about the democratic transition and about the work on immigration, but about the problem of development as a whole and also development on the local level.
In some ways I think that the USMEX should become the prime location people think of as a place where we do development work. We have the availability of Mexico as a place of field work and as a place of doing some interventions to try and figure out what works and what doesn't work. The Center should really become a location that scholars throughout the country or throughout the world recognize as an incubator of development thinking.
What are you most looking forward to in your new position at the Center?
I think the Center is meant to be a community, and it has to be a community of scholarship. The community of scholarship I think is achieved through some of the traditional things that we in universities always do; we have scholars who might be writing a book or doing their research project, we have conferences, we have seminars, and we regularly get together and discuss. However, I think because of the strategic location that we have near Mexico, we can also be a community that transcends the borders. We can go and have a presence in Mexico within a community that also exists in Mexico. I think within this vision of development, the Center should also become a facilitator of the movement of research into the field in Mexico. Our community has to be engaged in development problems, and in that sense, somehow use the Center as the institution that already has the reputation of doing scholarly work, but now becomes a catalyst for collaboration across both communities and both sides of the border. What classes will you be teaching at IR/PS?
This quarter, in spring I'll be teaching a class on political institutions in Latin America. The second course I'm teaching is on inequality and democracy in Latin America, which I hope will be more of a research group with a small number of students. I hope that this course plugs into a couple activities that we will be doing at USMEX in the next couple of months.
Life outside of the Center?
I spend a lot of time with my children. I have a 10-year-old daughter, a 7-year-old son, and a 4-year-old son, so they keep us very busy. I think of myself as a soccer dad in some ways, so my wife and I share a lot of responsibilities, and I do spend a lot of time with them.
Anything else?
I think the Center should be a place which always has an open door. The Center should really be thought of by IR/PS, by the IR/PS community, and by our students as part of who we are as a community. We want people to drop by and come in. We always have seminars going on, and I think, in general, we want to show people that the Center is what San Diego is offering you as part of the environment, part of this campus.
For more information on Professor Díaz-Cayeros' work and areas of expertise, please visit his IR/PS faculty page. Visit the USMEX website for the latest event listings and Center news.
