Ernesto Castañeda

Ernesto Castañeda is the Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, the Immigration Lab, and the Masters in Sociology, Research, and Practice at American University in Washington, DC. He conducts research on contentious politics, immigration, borders, Latin people, health disparities, and homelessness. He is the author of A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Belonging and Exclusion in New York, Paris, and Barcelona (Stanford University Press 2018); Building Walls: The Exclusion of Latin People in the U.S. (Lexington Books 2019), and with Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood of Social Movements 1768–2018 (Routledge 2020). He is the editor of Immigration and Categorical Inequality: Migration to the City and the Birth of Race and Ethnicity (Routledge 2018); and co-editor with Cathy L. Schneider of Collective Violence, Contentious Politics, and Social Change: A Charles Tilly Reader (Routledge 2017). He has written for The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Hill, CityLab, The Conversation, Medium, and NPR, among other outlets. He is a frequent analyst of current events in U.S. and international news programs.

Fulton Armstrong

Fulton T. Armstrong is a Senior Research Fellow at CLALS. Armstrong has followed Latin American affairs for almost 30 years in a number of U.S. Government positions. He served as a senior professional staff member responsible for Latin America on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from July 2008 to October 2011, where he also worked closely with the committee’s investigations team. Prior to that, he served in the Executive Branch in a series of policy and analytical positions. Among other senior positions, he was National Intelligence Officer for Latin America – the U.S. Intelligence Community’s most senior analyst – in 2000-2004, and he served for six months as the chief of staff of the DCI Crime and Narcotics Center. He served two terms as a Director for Inter-American Affairs at the National Security Council (1995 97 and 1998-99), between which he was Deputy NIO for Latin America. In 1980-84 he worked for U.S. Representative Jim Leach (R-Iowa). He has spent 11 years studying and working in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He speaks Spanish and Chinese.