Highlights
Student Profile: Alyssa Ribeiro
by Gina McDonell
Has the recent presidential election changed the race discussion in America? While Obama’s campaign avoided calling direct attention to race, the possibility and then reality of an African American becoming president sparked much conversation about race issues.
During his campaign, President Obama gave just one major speech on race relations, in which he chided anyone so naïve as to think that “we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy.”
In a January 2009 Washington Post interview, Obama said, “What I hope to model is a way of interacting with people who aren't like you and don't agree with you that changes the temper of our politics. And part of that will be changes, how we think about moving forward on race relations. Race relations becomes a subset of a larger problem in our society, which is we have a diverse, complicated society where people have a lot of different viewpoints.”
Under intense public scrutiny and seemingly-impossible expectations, Obama has made progress already by inciting America to start acknowledging race relations by talking about them more directly.
Alyssa Ribeiro (A&S G ’10) has been interested in issues of race and urban development since she was a child. Growing up in North Carolina, she says, “Race permeated everything, especially politics and education.”
Recognition of the effect of race on urban life eventually led Ribeiro to study history when pursuing a bachelor’s degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her honors thesis traced the course of urban renewal upon the Black community of Hayti in Durham, North Carolina.
After graduation, Ribeiro wanted to continue researching race relations in a historical context. The University of Pittsburgh was a good match for her interest, given its reputation for urban history research and the history department’s thematic concentration on race, ethnicity, and gender. She completed an MA in history in 2006, supported by a thesis that considered the aftermath of Pittsburgh’s April 1968 riots.
Continuing on the PhD track at Pitt, Ribeiro found a gap in current research that provided an interesting dissertation topic. Relations between Blacks and Whites in American history were the subject of much research and documentation, but relations between Blacks and Latinos had not received much attention. The relationship between these two minority groups would provide a more complete picture of how cities and citizens adjusted to provide services for an increasingly diverse population. Ribeiro decided to study relationships between African Americans and Puerto Ricans in post-World War II Philadelphia (from the 1950s to the 1980s).
Documentation to inform Ribeiro’s research was plentiful. However, almost everything was archived in Philadelphia, requiring her to spend significant amounts of time there. To cover costs associated with the on-location research, Ribeiro secured funding from two Philadelphia institutions—Temple University Libraries’ Urban Archives and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. These awards, combined with support from Pitt, sponsored multiple trips to Philadelphia in fall 2008.
“The archives in Philadelphia are extensive,” Ribeiro says. “Correspondence, meeting minutes, and even activity logs are available for a multitude of community organizations, which is not the case in many cities. I photocopied and photographed thousands of pages of this material and hundreds of newspaper clippings.” She is currently analyzing the information and will use it to establish a chronology of events, investigate prominent individuals of the period, and document the level of cooperation or tension between Blacks and Puerto Ricans of the time.
Ribeiro is on track to finish her dissertation in 2010. Prominent urban historians have noted the need for work on the interactions of Latino and African American groups in American cities, ensuring that her work will have high visibility in the profession.
