December 2011
Political Science professor Rodney Hero was in his early teens when he was shaken by news of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination on the campaign trail.
“I would watch the nightly news casts about it — I didn’t know many people my age who were doing that,” says Hero, now a UC Berkeley political science professor and leader of the Diversity and Democracy faculty research cluster in the Haas Diversity Research Center (HDRC).
Hero’s interest in politics blossomed during his undergraduate years at the Florida State University and through a Ph.D. program in political science at Purdue University. Now considered a leading thinker on issues of race, ethnicity, and politics in the United States — particularly with regard to Latinos — Hero was drawn to Cal last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he held an endowed faculty chair in political science. He has written or contributed to eight books, including the forthcoming Latino Politics in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Attitudes and Policy Preferences.
At Berkeley, he joins other faculty leaders in the Haas Diversity Research Center — an unparalleled national research endeavor across multiple disciplines that examines race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and more.
“Latino” meanings
Hero and his sister were born in a diverse, working class community in Tampa, Florida called Ybor City and later moved to an area known as West Tampa. “I grew up in areas where there was a big Latino population,” says Hero, whose ancestors hail from Spain and Cuba. “But at the time I just thought it was ‘people.’”
Hero says his mother and others around him used the word “Latino” when he was a kid, even though it wasn’t in the popular lexicon. “I didn’t hear the term again until the 1980s, and I said, ‘Oh, I know that term.’” Hero says.
In fact, Hero is still deconstructing the word “Latino,” in all of its complexities, for scholars and lay people. This semester he taught an undergraduate course called “Latinos and the U.S. Political System” that explored the social and political significance of this group in the political arena. Among many other questions, his students examined whether people who hail from many countries across the globe — who have been in the United States a matter of days or generations, and are of diverse political, social, and religious leanings — should still be grouped together as “Latinos.”
From a broad academic background in political science — which included a dissertation on federalism at Purdue — Hero began to hone his expertise and focus on Latinos in politics while on the faculty at the University of Colorado.
“These were some interesting and important issues not being raised or sufficiently addressed,” says Hero about examining race and ethnicity in politics. “I thought it was important to think about these things through the lens of political science.”
Because the body of political science work exploring race and ethnicity in political science was slim at the time, Hero says he relied on a few pioneering works to chart his research in this arena. His first scholarly paper in this area featured Federico Peña, then the mayor of Denver (and who later served as Transportation Secretary under President Bill Clinton).
California bound
Hero says making the move west has been significant. Although his work spans national politics, he says California is critical to the discussion.
“California versus Texas versus Florida versus New York — the politics are all very different,” Hero notes. “But the California experience has influenced how people study politics.”
Hero says coming west has also enabled him and his wife to be closer to his stepdaughter, a civil engineer who lives in Oakland and relatively closer to his daughter who lives in Denver. His stepson is a pilot for Airforce II that spirits the Vice President and other high officials around the world.
Hero says he enjoys teaching at a large and leading public university and Berkeley’s relative diversity, although he notes that more work must be done to recruit African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans to the campus. He says his work at the HDRC and as graduate director in the Political Science Department will enable him to attract applicants interested in studying race and ethnicity as well as more underrepresented students.
“On the one hand, I want students to understand Latino politics,” says Hero, about his teaching mission, “but it’s also about understanding American politics.”
Hero has high hopes for the work of the Haas Diversity Research Center, which he considers an academic and intellectual meeting place for faculty and students who might otherwise not find space for common ground.
