Dr. Vanessa Cruz Nichols Spotlight

CRRES interviewed Faculty Affiliate Dr. Vanessa Cruz Nichols about the Latinx Politics Lab and her current interdisciplinary and mixed-methods book project, “Catalyzing Political Action Beyond Threats: Latinxs, Immigration and Messages of Peril and Promise.” In this interview we chat about paying it forward as an academic, how exposure to a balanced political message influences political activism, and ‘tooling up’ with a new skillset.

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dr. Cruz Nichols: My name is Vanessa Cruz Nichols, and I am a political science professor. I first arrived at IU Bloomington as a CRRES post-doc in 2017. My work is at the intersection of immigration activism, civic engagement, and policy feedback. Some of my work has also delved into public health and how people carry out routine behaviors like making healthcare appointments, reporting crime to police, or interacting with their kids’ school authorities, and how that is shaped by context and how communities experience policies. I am originally from Chicago, and I am a daughter of immigrant parents. I carry that identity very close to my heart. Another important note about my work and background is I am a political scientist who is very interdisciplinary, and so I am always reading outside of political science given my work centers the experiences of diverse immigrant populations and a Latinx community that is not monolithic.

You’re currently the Director of the Latinx Politics Lab. Could you tell us more about the lab?

Dr. Cruz Nichols: It's been my pride and joy as a faculty member to create a lab experience for my research assistants. That’s something I learned and was a part of in my graduate school experience with my advisors and mentors. Then my friends and I spearheaded our own lab as grad students to bring together people from different disciplines and who I would later publish with. We were in the same sort of graduate level standing in our PhD programs and decided to co-found our own interdisciplinary lab group, or workshop group, to deal with questions regarding Latinx families from a psychology, political science, public health, and social work background. That was the most exciting aspect of academia for me.

My lab here at IU involves undergraduate and graduate students. I really enjoy the intergenerational peer mentorship that goes on organically between them because they have a lot in common with one another. They ask each other questions like how to tackle the next research task, reading and writing for a literature review, or methods. It's a wonderful community for my students to experience peer mentorship and a sense of solidarity with one another. I think paying it forward is the most important component as a scholar and how I caught the research bug when I was an undergraduate student at DePaul University. It is really important for me to make sure I continue to share that model of apprenticeship of working together in groups. Academia can be very isolating. I am trying to demystify that for them and show there are ways to build community and the best work is done in community. It’s a great learning space for all of us involved.

You recently received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on your upcoming book. Could you tell us more about your book and its broader message?

Dr. Cruz Nichols: The book project is titled, “Catalyzing Political Action Beyond Threats: Latinxs, Immigration and Messages of Peril and Promise.” I help folks understand the crux of this project by zooming out and thinking more broadly about what we do know about political advertising. The most go to strategy has often been to use fear-mongering tactics to get the attention of busy citizens. The expectation comes from an evolutionary behavioral background that if you make people aware of potential losses or potential threats to their status, then they should engage in a fight or flight mode. The inherent problem with that assumption is these theories have focused primarily on groups who already have access to resources. They have this inherent assumption that their anger or grievances would be listened to and that elected officials would pay attention when they exercise their political voice. They've relied primarily on white samples for this fight or flight loss aversion model. I am arguing and borrowing from work in public health and environmental climate change research, where they've learned to move away from public service announcements or fear-mongering campaign messages. They've learned how to take a more balanced approach. They've realized that showing a black lung to somebody who's a smoker isn't going to change their behavior. Same thing with climate change. If you paint it too despairing and too overwhelming, like having images of polar bears on melting glacier caps, people will feel like their input in the system or incremental change as an individual person is not going to matter.

I argue we should move on to using more balanced strategies within the realm of mobilizing activism in other policy areas, like immigration. When understanding when the Latino electorate tends to participate, the literature has predominantly relied on this dominant narrative that threatening immigration policies tend to be a very big motivator of Latino political turnout. But plenty of us know, if you interact with this group, they're not a monolithic group where everyone pays attention to immigration in the same exact way. More importantly, they've neglected the potential battle fatigue and inherent sort of missing part of the equation when it comes to any contested policy domain. There are often signals of threat as well as advocates on the ground who are promoting policies that increase access. The coupled threat-and-opportunity strategy in my theory argues that threat is only part of the equation. Threat reminds people that something is threatening their status quo, and simultaneously reminding them of a policy opportunity signals a policy benefit that is going to improve the status quo for them or their community. I focus on broad forms of collective action and political participation in my book project. I focus on outcomes beyond the ballot box because the Latinx population is younger than the average American voter, as well as you have a larger portion that is ineligible due to citizenship status. I focus on civic engagement including the intent to vote, but also willingness to volunteer for an organization, join a march, donate money, talk to friends and family about politics, and contact an elected official.

Your work uses a mixed methods approach which includes survey experiments, cross-sectional survey analyses, and interviews with leaders of immigrant organizations. How did you come to use several methods?

Dr. Cruz Nichols: When it comes to research design for a project, I can really geek out on this. You have to think about whether the question lends itself to multiple methods and what is that additional dataset or design? How does that build on current research and how is that novel? As you think about ways to incorporate additional methods in your work, it's really important to start from square one and tool up in the skill set needed for a separate data set or endeavor. I always think about how an additional component is broadening the conversation, poking holes to what you couldn't find, or what you couldn't test in the previous data set.

I initially thought, is there some inkling of this in existing datasets? Can I show there is at least a relationship or a correlation between some of the concepts I am thinking about and civic engagement outcomes? For scholars studying marginalized populations sometimes mainstream datasets cannot lend themselves fully, but they can give you an initial scratch of the surface. I used the American National Election Study (ANES) to start to show that there is this potential relationship between people feeling fearful and hopeful in an election cycle and how that’s more mobilizing than just fear or hope alone. When it comes to survey experiments, polling firms oftentimes charge a premium for hard-to-reach populations because they are a more transient community. There are often language barriers, and so they need staff with a higher skillset to reach those communities. I pulled together several resources to launch my first bilingual survey experiment, and it lent itself so that I could design the questions I needed for the second experiment. Both of the experiments allow me to test the causality behind my hypotheses for the coupled threat-and-opportunity strategy.

In this year as a Ford Fellow, I moved on to using qualitative interviews in my research design. Although I am trained as a quantitative scholar, I often felt like it was detached from what was going on the ground, and so I didn't want to publish a book without anchoring my findings in conversations with those most impacted by this area, and those most engaged in this area. I didn't want to continue to play around with the sort of white canvas approach to my experiments, or cross-sectional data analysis without having very deep conversations and rigorous analysis of the important work of community organizers and leaders of non-profit organizations within the immigration advocacy space. It involved tooling up and learning how to conduct and analyze qualitative interviews (in either Spanish or English). As you think about ways to incorporate additional methods in your work, it's really important to start from square one and tool up in the skillset needed for a separate dataset or endeavor.

Is there anything else you would like to add that maybe wasn't covered?

Dr. Cruz Nichols:In my book project and my other publications, the common thread in terms of the so what is trying to lay out a blueprint for democratic responsiveness. A blueprint so that we can have a more competitive and healthy democracy where leaders and organizations are defining the political landscape in ways the public can understand and participate in. So, it's partially about providing clear information and realizing that people are not siloed. It shows people's emotions are not operating in a vacuum and emotions play an important role in how people navigate their political decisions. I hope that this is a helpful intervention to combat the cynicism, the lack of efficacy that a lot of populations feel as you approach an election, and especially among more hard-to-reach marginalized populations. I'm really excited to try to combat that sense of battle fatigue, provide an antidote of some sort with this more balanced approach of threat and opportunity. It's important to be innovative, to borrow from other disciplines, and to talk to people on the ground, so that we can help both organizers and the public. Those are the main, so what of my work.

Interested in reading Dr. Cruz Nichols's research? Check out her recently published research on the spillover effects of immigrant policing, and untangling racialized threat in Latinx mobilization.