Victoria Ibáñez
Ph.D. Student
by Rebekah Tilley
photos by Richie Wireman
Second year political science graduate student Victoria Ibáñez is from a county in southern Texas that is one of the poorest in the United States. Within the county are a number of unincorporated neighborhoods, or colonias, where many people live without electricity and running water. As colonias are primarily located along U.S.-Mexico border regions, some residents are immigrants while others have been there for generations. Those who live there build their homes one wall at a time using any building materials they can find, and some live in old abandoned school buses.
Ibáñez’s mother is a sheriff’s service officer and part of her job responsibilities includes community work in these underserved areas, where the poverty rates are extremely high, and the lack of potable water and sewage infrastructure results in increased levels of disease.
“I come from a part of the country that is approximately 90 percent Latino,” said Ibáñez. “Growing up watching my mother interact with people in these high-poverty communities has been a huge influence on my interest in education policy and anti-poverty policy and how they affect the socioeconomic status of underprivileged Latinos.”
This past summer, Ibáñez worked at The University of Texas-Pan American in the Center for Survey Research as a research assistant where she began looking at Latino attitudes toward various public policy issues with acculturation and religiosity as the primary explanatory variables.
“The thing about Latinos is people assume that they are just an immigrant population, but the vast majority of the Latino population has been here for generations,” said Ibáñez.
“The interesting thing about the group as a whole is it’s very heterogeneous. I’m looking at how acculturation - meaning how politically and socially incorporated Latinos are in the mainstream American political society - functions as a moderating variable.”
Ibanez reasons that based on different levels of acculturation, Latinos should have different policy preferences and should be targeted strategically by different political elites.
She measured a number of variables including if the responders could speak English, how well they could speak English, their socioeconomic status and what generation they were in America – first, second, third or possibly further back.
Ibanez noticed a few things in the preliminary data. “With immigration, the less acculturated Latinos are more supportive of permissive immigration policies, and as they become more acculturated they tend to become more restrictive.”
Additionally, protestant evangelical Latinos tend to have stronger anti-abortion political positions than their highly religious Catholic Latino counterparts. Ibanez found this to be counter-intuitive. “This highlights the importance of taking within-group variation in Latino political preferences into account when studying the group, especially if their issue preferences cut across party lines.”
The full results of the summer research are still being examined by Ibáñez and her coauthors, who plan to submit the results for publication when it is completed.
Despite Ibáñez’s strong roots in southern Texas, she chose to come to the University of Kentucky due largely to the highly personal and professional atmosphere of the UK Department of Political Science.
“At the end it was really between UK and Rice University,” said Ibáñez. “But when I visited both schools and got a feel for the environment, it seemed like the graduate students here were working a lot harder, and the faculty were more involved and concerned with assisting their research. They were even offering to help me even though I was just visiting, and suggesting different ways that I could advance my own research interests.”
Even the distance from home served its purpose. “When you’re so far away from home, you feel this especially strong connection with who you are and that had a strong influence on my decision to focus my research on Latino politics.”
Since arriving at UK, Ibáñez has taken classes with several members of American Politics faculty who are among the best scholars in their field. Professors Mark Peffley, Richard Fording, Richard Waterman and Stephen Voss have had a profound influence on Ibáñez’s development as a scholar.
“I can literally just walk into their office or shoot them an email and they will suggest several ways I can deal with any research issue,” said Ibáñez. “Even more importantly, taking Mark Peffley's political behavior seminar is what really led me to decide I wanted to focus on mass political behavior. Each week, the readings for his course got more and more interesting, and his guidance helped me form a potential dissertation topic.”
Ibáñez is on track to graduate August 2012, just in time to examine how the Latino vote could influence the next presidential election.