Elana Zilberg
Associate Professor of Communication
Faculty Affiliate: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a and Latino/a Arts and Humanities, Critical Gender Studies, Center for Global California Studies
Education
Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin, Department of Anthropology (2002)
Research
Elana Zilberg is Associate Professor in the Communication Department and Associate Director of the Center for Global California Studies at UCSD. Her research interests lie at the intersection of security, space, and movement between the Americas. In her forthcoming book Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador (Duke University Press Fall 2011), Zilberg examines how the borders of the nation state are policed on the streets of immigrant barrios in the United States and barrios marginales in El Salvador, and how the political geography of these urban landscapes are integrated into what Zilberg terms “neoliberal securityscapes” by the combined forces of neoliberalism and globalization, and the intersection between immigration, criminal, and antiterrorist law. Her new project examines the role of rivers in the cultural life and politics of the U.S. – Mexico border region – again broadly conceived to include the Los Angeles and San Antonio rivers in California and Texas respectively, and the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers where they meet the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico respectively. Zilberg teaches courses on the built environment and the production of space, ethnography, race and representation, globalization, immigration, borders, violence and consumption.
Publications
- Space of Detention: The Making of a Transnational Gang Crisis between Los Angeles and San Salvador forthcoming with Duke University Press Fall 2011.
- “"Inter-American Ethnography: Tracking Salvadoran Transnationality at the Borders of Latino and Latin American Studies” in Companion to Latino Studies Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo, eds. Oxford: Blackwell (2007).
- "Refugee Gang Youth: Zero Tolerance and the Security State in Contemporary US-Salvadoran Relations, in Youth, Law and Globalization, Sudhir Venkatesh and Ronald Kassimir, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press (2007).
- "Gangster in Guerilla Face: The Political Folklore of Doble Cara in Post-Civil War El Salvador,” in Anthropological Theory. Yael Navarro and Kay Warren, eds. (Vol. 7 No. 1, March 2007).
- "Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador).” American Quarterly, Vol. 56, Number 3, 759-779 (Honorable Mention 2005 Constance Rourke Prize Committee of the American Studies Association (2004).
- "A Troubled Corner: The Ruined and Rebuilt Environment of a Central American Barrio in Post-Rodney King Riot Los Angeles,” in City and Society IVX(2):31-55 (2002).
- "Falling Down in El Norte: A Cultural Politics of the ReLatinization of Los Angeles,”in Wide Angle,Guest editors Jesse Lerner and Clark Arnwine,special issue on film, architecture and urban space, Vol. 20, no. 3, 182-209 (1999).