Ralph Cintrón
Professor Emeritus
English; Latin American and Latino Studies
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About
Ralph Cintrón holds a joint appointment in the Latino and Latin American Studies Program, where his scholarship bridges rhetorical studies, urban ethnography, urban theory, globalization, political theory, particularly the anthropology of democracy—and broader traditions in social theory. He currently serves on the Executive Board of the Rhetoric Society of America.
His ongoing research includes a multi-disciplinary ethnographic study of Puerto Rican and Mexican communities in Chicago, a project that will culminate in a collaboratively authored volume. While much of his fieldwork is situated within an aldermanic office, the broader study interrogates labor and housing dynamics, transnational political and economic forces, and the shifting contours of political ideology within urban communities.
Cintrón is also affiliated with the International Center for the Study of Human Responses to Social Catastrophe at the University of Illinois Chicago, through which he has conducted fieldwork in Kosova and co-authored work on humanitarian intervention and international state-building. In addition, he contributes to the International Rhetoric Culture Project at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, an initiative that brings together anthropologists and rhetoricians to advance interdisciplinary inquiry.
His forthcoming work includes a co-edited volume on politics, alongside a single-authored book that offers a theoretical and ethnographic critique of central democratic topoi—such as transparency, equality, freedom, and rights—interrogating the underlying ruses of liberalism. A former Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Cintrón is the author of Angels’ Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday, which received honorable mention for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association.