This listing is by no means exhaustive of the LGSA body. We have collected short biographies mostly from current and former board members, some of which are now Princeton alumni, and some of which remain enrolled and are active members, despite no longer having official positions in our student group. We have plenty more members that attend our events, and our e-mail list typically contains 150-200 names!
LGSA Board Members
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RENE FLORES
Co-President 2010-2011
Vice President 2009-2010
Secretary 2008-2009
Rene hails from Mexico City. He received his B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies with Highest Honors from UC Berkeley in 2007. He is a 3rd year graduate student in the Sociology Department. His research interests include Spain and Latin America, inequality, immigration, ethnicity, and globalization. He is trying to learn to play tennis and likes 80's music.
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DANIEL POLK
Co-President 2010-2011
Treasurer 2009-2010
Daniel was born and raised in Southern California. He hails from the great Inland Empire, a place where urban sprawl gives way to not only suburban sprawl but also the fading greenish hues of once-abundant orange trees, expansive landscapes of the ancient desert creosote, and the socio-political resonance of an ever-shifting and diverse population (a place with "the most democratic and racially mixed neighborhoods in the state," explains one local historian). Daniel graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Riverside in 2008 with a B.A. in history and as a member of the University Honors Program. During this time he did work on the legal history of human rights struggles along the U.S./Mexico border. Now a third-year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton, Daniel's interests lie in the Southwest, Central and South America, and the anthropology of water.
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RODOLFO RIOS
Vice President 2010-2011
Rodolfo is a fourth year graduate student in the Mathematics Department. He was born and raised in Mexico City and did his undergraduate studies in the city of Guanajuato. His main research interests include representation theory and dynamical systems. He also enjoys swimming, water fights, dancing, baking, learning foreign languages, art, hiking, canoeing, teaching, and amateur microscopy.
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Maria is a second year graduate student in the Sociology Department. She was born in Havana, Cuba, and has lived in various parts of the United States including, most recently, Florida. Maria graduated from Columbia University in 2009, and her research interests include immigration, Latinos, and political sociology.
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Margarita Fajardo is a Colombian graduate student in the History Department. Margarita graduated from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, with a double major in History and Economics. Her research interests include the history of development and development economics, the work of Latin American economists as both intellectuals and technical experts, and the political economy of development programs in Latin America. Currently, she is working on ECLA's technical missions during the 1950s as a counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of an intellectual challenge from the periphery. Margarita also loves to dance salsa, merengue and reggaeton and loves arepas and envueltos.
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Carolina Alvarado is a first-year gratuade student in the English Department. Though born in the Dominican Republic, Carolina was, for the most part, raised in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated magna cum laude from CUNY's Brooklyn College with a double major in English and Religion. Her research interests include American modernism, 19th and 20th century literature, the novel as form, and the use of memory, time and space in fiction.
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Héber is a first-year graduate student pursuing a Master in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. His concentrations are Economics and Public Policy and Urban Policy and Planning and his main interests are in development, impact evaluation, infrastructure and transport. Prior to coming to Princeton, Héber received a Bachelor's degree in International Political Economy from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Subsequently, he worked for the Millennium Challenge Corporation in Washington, DC and for ideas42 (Harvard) and Innovations for Poverty Action in the Dominican Republic and Colombia where he designed, implemented and evaluated experimental development programs. Héber was born in Ciudad Juárez, México and was raised primarily in the U.S. Héber hopes to continue his professional career in Latin America upon graduating from Princeton.
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VERONICA GUERRA
Cultural Events Chair 2010-2011
Veronica grew up in and around San Pedro, CA which is located in the Harbor Area of Los Angeles. She attended UCLA as an undergraduate majoring in Sociology and Chicana/o Studies with a minor in Public Health. While at UCLA she became involved in various grassroots organizations that focused on issues of labor, immigration, and education in marginalized communities. More recently she could be found in various community clinics conducting research for the Department of Family Medicine at UCLA. Her project was focused on health policy issues for vulnerable populations which include the homeless and low-income Latino patients. Currently, she attends the Woodrow Wilson School with an emphasis on domestic politics and is pursuing a health policy certificate. Upon graduation from Princeton, Veronica hopes to use her degree as a tool to provide better quality health care for her community.
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Active Members and Former Board Members
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MATT TRUJILLO
President 2009-2010
Vice President 2008-2009
Matt Trujillo was born and raised in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. He received his bachelor's degree, Summa Cum Laude, from Arizona State in Psychology with a minor in Sociology. He graduated from the Barrett Honors College at ASU and his honor thesis examined the effects of priming various aspects of religiosity on prejudicial attitudes. Currently he is in the Ph.D. program for Social Psychology working under Nicole Shelton. In the broadest sense, his research interests fall under stereotyping and prejudice. More specifically, he wants to look at the effects of ethnic miscategorization as well as immigration attitudes. Outside of school Matt is into sports and can often be seen cheering on his local Arizona teams.
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ALEJANDRO OCHOA GARCIA
Technology Specialist 2007-2008, 2008-2009, 2009-2010
Alex Ochoa, a doctoral candidate in the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton, was born in El Paso, Texas, and raised in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. He studied Biology and Mathematics at MIT. He has broad interests ranging from biology, math, and programming, to music, photography, languages, and linguistics. He also enjoys futbol, cycling, and skiing, writes music and plays the guitar, and is very excited to meet incoming students. You can visit his personal website.
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Coming soon!
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IVAN ORTIZ
President 2008-2009
Secretary 2007-2008
Cultural Events Spring 2008
Like many of the members of LGSA, Ivan was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. He received his B.A. in English Literature with Departmental Distinction from Stanford University in 2005. After earning his B.A., Ivan moved to San Francisco for two years where he had a brief stint in the corporate world working for a small business and litigation consulting firm, Celerity Consulting Group. During this time, he also learned to appreciate the beauty and splendor that is San Francisco. With an unwavering passion for the written word, Ivan came to Princeton in 2007 to begin his PhD in English Literature. While his primary interests in literature are Romanticism, the Gothic, and Poetry, he has found that his intellectual eye will stop wandering and has begun to think about gender and sexuality and narratology as well.
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ALEJANDRO RIVAS
Treasurer 2007-2008, 2008-2009
B.A. Human Biology (Health Policy), Stanford University, 2006. M.A. Sociology (Stratification and Inequality), Stanford University, 2006. Alex is a native of Southern California in his third year in the Sociology and Social Policy program at Princeton. His area of interest is immigration, in particular how both governmental and non-governmental institutions and organizations and their policies facilitate or hinder immigrants' ability to make the most of the resources America has to offer (education, health care, employment, housing, justice). In list form, his interests are "immigration, social policy, mobility, demography, poverty, stratification, inequality, and race and ethnicity."
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MONICA TRUJILLO
Co-President 2007-2008
Monica Trujillo is originally from Los Angeles and is currently in the Sociology Department. Her broad interests include education, race and ethnicity, immigration, stratification, and identity formation. She graduated Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania with honors in Sociology and double minors in Psychology and Women's Studies. She was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania where she completed her thesis on bilingual education in California, looking specifically at the effects of bilingual students on public schools in California. In other research, she has looked at ethnic minority business owners in the city of Chicago, as well as how high achieving minority students differ from the less achieving at elite universities.
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SERGIO DELGADO
Co-President Fall 2007
Mr. Delgado is a doctoral student in the Department of Spanish Languages and Cultures at Princeton under a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship. He was born in Tijuana, Mexico. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in Spanish, with highest honors, and in philosophy. He received the Cervantes Prize and the J.K Walsh scholarship for his excellence in undergraduate research. He is a member of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honors Society, since 2004.
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JESSE SALAZAR
Working on my PhD in twentieth century American History, I primarily study metropolitan, economic, and business history. I am the consequence of loving family and friends, a small town upbringing, an adventurous personal life, and Reaganomics. In my spare time, I serve on the board of an international human rights organization, sport around, and fix my addiction to TV.
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ROSA MARGARITA ANDUJAR
Founding member 2005-2006
Rosa Margarita Andujar is a PhD student in the Department of Classics. Her primary research interests lie in the realm of Ancient Greek Literature, in particular Greek Tragedy and the Ancient Novel. Though born in Norway and partially raised in the Dominican Republic, Rosa is proud to claim New York City (the Bronx, specifically) as her true home. Rosa is a graduate of Wellesley College, where she studied Classics, Mathematics and French, as well as of King's College, University of Cambridge (UK), where she read for a second BA degree in Classics. She is currently a Resident Graduate Student (RGS) at Mathey College.
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DIANA LEE
Founding member 2005-2006
Diana Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Economics Department, with a concentration in Development Economics. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Diana graduated from Yale University and worked at Goldman Sachs in New York before coming to Princeton.
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LGSA Alumni
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TAINA BORRERO
Earned her Masters Degree in Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, Spring 2010
Cultural Liaison 2009-2010
Taína is a second year Master's in Public Affairs candidate at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, where she is focusing on domestic/urban policy. Her policy areas of interest include urban education reform; health care reform; and the connections between poverty, race, and economics in urban America. Born and raised in New York City, she has lived most of her life there but also spent four of her early adolescent years in Ponce, Puerto Rico (where both of her parents were born). Taína graduated from the City University of New York's Hunter College in 2006 with a BA in Political Science. Prior to coming to Princeton, she worked first for former US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and later for the President of her alma mater, Hunter College, on government & community relations.
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GRISELDA CRISTINA MORA
Co-President Spring 2008
Undergraduate and Recruitment Liaison 2007-2008
President 2006-2007
G. Cristina Mora is originally from Los Angeles and is currently a fourth year graduate student in the Sociology Department. Her dissertation examines the institutionalizaiton of panethnic categories in US government policy, among policitical groups and in market sectors. More specifically, she examines the historic construction of US Latino panethnicity and assesses its impact on Latino political mobilziation efforts. During the 2002 academic year Cristina was a visting scholar in the Sociology Department of La Universidad de La Habana, Cuba.
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BENNY A PADILLA
Academic Events Spring 2008
After 17 years in sunny Southern California, Benny decided a change of scenery was warranted for his undergraduate studies; a distant trek ensued to slightly less sunny Northern California. At Stanford, where he majored in International Relations with a minor in Spanish language, he delved into three main studies: 1) environmental justice; 2) Latin American policies; and 3) security policies in East Asia. He is currently an MPA student at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and continues to study those three issues. In his spare time Benny enjoys playing a game of basketball (or anything really), watching political thrillers and comedies, and spending time with family and friends.
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ISABEL MIDORI VALDIVIA
Earned a dual Master degree in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning at the Woodrow Wilson School, Spring 2008
Alumni Liaison Spring 2008
Community Liaison Fall 2007
Midori focused on domestic policy and community and economic development in urban cores, specifically with low-income communities. Before coming to Princeton, she was at the Mayor's Office in the City of Pittsburgh and was a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs. This summer she worked for Habitat for Humanity in Viet Nam and Cambodia and was happy to find Latin American friends working in Sai Gon. She graduated in 2005 from Penn State University with an honors thesis focused on representation of Latino-related policy issues in the U.S Congress from 1947-2005. Midori grew up in Japan and the U.S. but misses her parents' homeland--Peru!
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ASTRID GARCIA
Earned a dual Master degree in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning at the Woodrow Wilson School, Spring 2008
Outreach Liaison 2007-2008
A graduate of Pomona College in International Relations and former Fulbright Scholar in El Salvador, Astrid has used her diverse experiences to focus on issues of urban inequality and transnational communities. Prior to arriving at the Woodrow Wilson School, Astrid worked in the Los Angeles District Office of U.S. Congressman Xavier Becerra, which inspired her to continue a career in public service. This summer Astrid worked for the United Nations International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland where she gained greater appreciation of migration as a global phenomenon. Astrid enjoys running, journaling and traveling around the world, but her favorite city is still her hometown of Los Angeles.
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STEVEN ALVARADO
Social Events 2007-2008
Steven was born and raised in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley and is a sociology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin. He is a Visiting Research Collaborator in the Office of Population Research for the 2007-08 year working with Doug Massey & Alejandro Portes. He enjoys college football (GO BEARS!) and eating mountains of pupusas on saturdays and running models every other day of the week. For more fun facts, please visit his site.
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SIMON N TAFOYA
Earned a dual Master degree in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning at the Woodrow Wilson School, Spring 2007
A native of the American Southwest, Simon was born in Pueblo, Colorado where he was raised in a working class family and attended public schools. He ventured off to the Colorado College where he earned his Bachelors of Arts in International Political Economy and Hispanic Studies. After his undergraduate studies he worked with El Pomar Foundation, one of Colorado's largest philanthropic foundations, managing community outreach, among other responsibilities. He then attended Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs where he earned the dual Degree of Master in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning. While at Princeton he served as a Board Member of the Latino Graduate Student Association, Diversity Chair of the Woodrow Wilson Action Committee, and was a member of Grupo Folklorico de Princeton.
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JESSICA COLON
Earned a dual Master degree in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning at the Woodrow Wilson School, Spring 2007
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MARCOS A. MARRERO RIVERA
Earned a dual Master degree in Public Affairs and Urban and Regional Planning at the Woodrow Wilson School, Spring 2007
Marcos studied Political Science and Economics as an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico near his home in San Juan. Before coming to Princeton, Marcos worked as an economic analyst for the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and policy analyst for the governor's transition committee. During the last year he was a project manager at Habitat for Humanity's Latin American office in Costa Rica, evaluating the organization's model in four countries and worked on "The Garden State in the Greenhouse", a graduate student workshop-report on climate change mitigation and adaptation recommendations for New Jersey.
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