Dr. Jessala A. Grijalva is a political scientist specializing in Latino political behavior, political psychology, and computational methods. Her research provides new frameworks for understanding how individuals navigate politics under conditions of cultural diversity and how democracies function in pluralistic societies.
Born and raised in South Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Grijalva's academic journey reflects the very diversity she studies. Beginning at Pima Community College while raising three children as a single mother, she transferred to the University of Arizona, graduating magna cum laude before earning her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 2024. Her lived experience informs research that challenges how political science understands Latino political identity.
Her dissertation introduces the Dynamic Acculturation Model (DAM), which demonstrates that traditional binary frameworks misclassify 75% of Latino voters who navigate politics through hybrid cultural orientations. This work identifies four distinct acculturation orientations—including a previously unrecognized "demicultural" category—each with predictable effects on political behavior. Methodologically, she advances comparative cluster analysis as a rigorous tool for theory-testing and applies machine learning with SHAP interpretability methods to model evolving Latino electoral behavior.
As Co-Principal Investigator of Notre Dame's $100,000 Democracy Initiative, Dr. Grijalva leads interdisciplinary research on how diverse democracies achieve genuine power-sharing. Her broader research agenda examines what she terms the "herrenvolk democracy gap"—how standard democratic indices can overlook exclusionary practices that prevent pluralistic citizenry from exercising meaningful power.
Dr. Grijalva's work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She currently serves as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, where she continues to advance scholarship on Latino political behavior, computational methods, and democratic theory.