Roger S. Cadena, Jr. (2023)

Roger S. Cadena, Jr. is a doctoral candidate of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Roger’s research generally exists at the intersections of race, ethnicity, culture, and politics. Specifically, their research is interested in understanding how racialization shapes Latinxs’ social and political identifications.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with US Latinxs from around the country, Roger’s dissertation is organized around three major themes. First, it seeks to understand how Latinxs construct interpretations of social structure, social identifications, and political parties. Second, it seeks to uncover how Latinxs connect those interpretations to political behavior. And third, it seeks to understand how Latinxs communicate those interpretations to their families, peers, and colleagues. Especially within the context of political uncertainties, this project’s goal to better inform people about the Latinxs’ heterogenous social and political lives and how Latinxs currently and in the future will map onto national political cleavages. The National Institute of Social Sciences Dissertation Grant will fund conference travel and presentations, interviewee incentives, transcription services, and qualitative analysis software.

Prior to attending Notre Dame, Roger was a social studies teacher in Chicago Public Schools. Roger also received an M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago and a B.A. in History-Social Science Education at Illinois State University. Roger’s research on Latinx Republicans has been published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. As well, Roger has a project elaborating W.E.B. Du Bois’ theorization of racial ideologies and school curricula currently under review at a sociology journal.