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Ted Henken

Departments of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies

Professor Henken earned his Master’s (1998) and Ph.D. (2002) degrees from Tulane University’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies (New Orleans). His Master’s thesis, “Cuban and Mexican Migration to the United States: Refugee Flows and Labor Migration in the Modern World System,” was partially based on interviews with Cuban and Mexican immigrants in the United States and their families at home in Cuba and Mexico. His doctoral dissertation, “Condemned to Informality: Cuba’s Experiments with Self-employment during the Special Period” (completed in April, 2002), describes the recent growth of Cuba’s underground economy and the emergence of semi-legal, private, micro-enterprises on the island since 1993.

Before beginning graduate school in 1996, professor Henken worked as an English teacher in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and in Mobile, Alabama, resettling Cuban refugees through Catholic Social Services. Additionally, each summer for the past twelve years (1991-2003), he has worked with the Mexican immigrant community of Baldwin County, Alabama, in the capacity of teacher, social worker, and parent-involvement coordinator at La Casa de Amigos, a Head Start school for migrant children.

Professor Henken has traveled to Cuba numerous times since 1997 in order to conduct research and attend academic conferences. During the spring of 2001, he worked in Cuba for Tulane University’s Cuban Studies Institute as the in-country liaison and program coordinator. He has been a consultant on Cuba for the U.S. Department of State and has lectured widely on contemporary Cuban issues. Recently, he has begun coordinating cultural exchanges between New Orleans and Cuba with the non-profit group, CubaNola Collective. In this capacity, Henken helped guide U.S. groups to the Havana Jazz Festival in December, 2002, and the celebration of Carnival in July, 2003, in Santiago de Cuba.

Ted en Santiago

Link to Notes from the Underground" A Brief Guide to Havana and Santiago’s Paladares, Bed & Breakfasts, and Night Life [Ted Henken, Ph.D. - August, 2003].

His current research deals with different manifestations of the changing nature of work, across national borders and outside state regulations. Apart form continuing his work on Cuba’s underground economy, he is undertaking a transnational study of the immigrant networks among the growing, yet understudied Mexican communities in the U.S. South (Baldwin County, Alabama). His future research plans also include comparative research among the newly arrived Mexican and the more established Cuban immigrant communities in the New York metropolitan area.

At Baruch, professor Henken teaches introductory courses in Latin American Studies and Sociology. He teaches upper level courses on U.S.-Latin American relations, Latin American Immigration to the United States, and in Cuban Studies. He has published his research on Cuba’s underground economy in the journal Cuban Studies (2002) and in many volumes of Cuba in Transition, the Journal of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE). He has presented his research on Latin American immigration at the Cuban Research Institute’s Cuban and Cuban-American Studies Conference at Florida International University, in October, 2000, and at the Cuban Association of the United Nations Conference, Havana, Cuba, in April, 1999. He also presented a talk, “Latinos in the United States Military,” as the keynote speaker for the Marine Corps Reserve Battalion’s Hispanic Heritage Month Celebration, New Orleans, in September, 1998. He was interviewed as an immigration expert on the show Radio Bilingue, Fresno, California, in March, 1998, and more recently in the fall of 2003 by the Colombian-Mexican news magazine Cambio and on the Voice of America program Ventana a Cuba.

His publications in the field of international migration include an entry on “Immigration to Latin America,” in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures (Volume 2, pp. 753-754; Routledge: London, 2000) and a forthcoming entry on “Latin American Immigration in the United States” (co-authored by Héctor Cordero-Guzmán) in the Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (Oxford: London, 2004). Finally, Henken has just co-authored a review with Cordero-Guzmán of the books Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (2002) and Immigration Policy and the Challenge of Globalization (2002) to be published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (pp. 184-189, 2003).

Office: Vertical Campus, room 4-284
Phone: (646) 312-3888
E-mail: t_henken@yahoo.com