I am a political scientist whose research examines race, democratic development, and the distribution of political power in the United States. My work asks how democratic institutions define political membership, how racial and ethnic boundaries are maintained over time, and how political power is shared or withheld across groups.

My research brings together American political development, democratic theory, race and ethnic politics, Latino politics, political behavior, and measurement. My book project, Herrenvolk Democracy: Race, Immigration, and the American Political Order, examines how citizenship and immigration have structured the racial boundaries of the demos across American political development. The project argues that the United States has remained a multiracial state without consolidating as a multiracial democracy because formal democratic development has repeatedly coexisted with racially structured limits on power-sharing.

A second line of my research examines Latino political behavior, including acculturation, Latino conservatism, support for Trump, and within-group political divergence. This work asks why shared racialization does not produce uniform political behavior and how identity, group position, threat, deservingness, and perceptions of political power shape political attitudes and alignments.

Across these projects, I develop and apply tools from measurement, survey research, computational social science, and historical analysis. My methodological work includes index construction, construct validation, machine learning applications to survey data, and survey-experimental designs for studying representation, power-sharing, intergroup relations, and democratic inclusion.

In Fall 2026, I will join Harvard Law School as a Guinier Fellow with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice. At Harvard, I will extend this research agenda to voting rights and electoral reform by studying how electoral rules and institutional design shape power-sharing, representation, intergroup relations, and democratic competition.

Background

Born and raised in the South Side of Tucson, Arizona, I began my academic journey at Pima Community College before transferring to the University of Arizona. I later earned my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame.