Cecilia Marquez is retelling the history of the American South with Latinos at the center.

She's a new book out making the Latino South.

And in it, Cecilia takes us back to the 1940s

when she argues that non-black Latinos were on the road to whiteness, attending white

schools and living in predominantly white neighborhoods to the early 2000s, when a combination of post-911

xenophobia and an economic downturn targeted those same communities, creating what would become a dramatic racial evolution.

Cecilia, who is now the Hunt Family Assistant Professor in History at Duke University,

shares how these histories inform modern-day political identity,

and how writing this book informed her thinking about her own identity.

Cecilia, thank you so much for being here.

Yes, thank you for having me.

I'm excited to talk about your incredible work, your incredible book.

But first, I have a burning question that the Google did not have an answer for me on, which is, where did you grow up?

I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, which, depending on who you ask, is or is not the South. If you ask my family in Georgia,

they would tell you, of course I'm not from the South. And if you ask the kids I went to school outside of Philly, they would tell you I'm from the Deep South. But it's not your experience

growing up in what is arguably the American South. So much as it is this moment when you're at

a conference about the history of SNCC,

the student nonviolent coordinating committee, that seems to me in the retelling to really crystallize

for you this area of inquiry. What is it that happens there that sets the light bulb off over your

head? I am a junior in college at Swarthmore College, which is right outside of Philly.

I'm in a women in the civil rights movement class. And I go to Shaw University, which is just

down the street from where I am now in Durham, North Carolina. And I get to interview all of

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