UCLA scholar to lecture on survey of day laborers

Author: Dennis K. Brown

Abel Valenzuela Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty at UCLA, will deliver a lecture at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday (Nov. 17) in the Hesburgh Center auditorium at the University of Notre Dame.

Titled “Working the Streets: Preliminary Findings from the National Day Labor Survey,” the lecture will focus on Valenzuelas ongoing examination of the social and labor market processes of day laborers – immigrant men who solicit temporary daily work in open air markets such as street corners, empty parking lots and store fronts. The talk is free and open to the public.

Valenzuela holds a joint faculty appointment in UCLAs Department of Urban Planning and the Cesar E. Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana/o Studies. He has published numerous articles on immigrant settlements, labor market outcomes and inequality.

Valenzuela is the first speaker in the 2004-05 Labor, Education and Immigration Public Policy Lecture Series sponsored by Notre Dames Institute for Latino Studies and Kellogg Institute for International Studies. The second talk in the series, “Broadening Access to Higher Education: Lessons from the Lone Star State” by Princeton University sociologist Marta Tienda, will take place Feb. 9. Jorge Chapa, founding director of the Latino Studies Program at Indiana University, will deliver the concluding lecture, “Apple Pie&Enchiladas,” on April 6. Both talks also will take place in the Hesburgh Center auditorium at 4:30 p.m.

TopicID: 8106