Dr. Raquel Moreira wins 2026 Independent Scholarship, Research and Creativity Award

Excellent work, Dr. Moreira!

COMM Assistant Professor Raquel Moreira was one of 11 University of Maryland faculty to win a 2026 Independent Scholarship, Research and Creativity Award (ISRCA). 

ISRCA provides grant funding to support projects that range from explorations of migration and artificial intelligence to studies of world literature and urgent environmental challenges. This program champions bold, original work across disciplines. Established in 2019 and administered by the Office of the Provost and the Division of Research at UMD, the ISRCA program supports the professional growth of faculty involved in scholarly and creative work. 

Dr. Moreira won for Latinidad's Racial Bind, a book project that examines how ideas of pan-ethnic Latinidad and mestizaje shape racial discourse in the United States by challenging the common assumption that Latinidad exists primarily as a “brown” identity outside the Black–white racial binary.

The project's abstract is as follows: Throughout Latin America, mestizaje has been an ideology that, among other things, aims to dilute or disappear African ancestry through racial mixing to lighten populations in the region. Although racial mixing had been common in colonial Latin America, mestizaje was more purposefully articulated as a nation-building, homogenizing ideology in the early 20th century to oppose the United States’ segregationist version of white supremacy, especially since several postcolonial Latin American countries had sizeable racially mixed populations. Often, scholarship in communication studies and adjacent disciplines gloss over the history and purpose of mestizaje in their apprehensions of its potential racial transgressions against U.S. white supremacy that regulated miscegenation via the Black/white racial binary. As a result, Blackness and Latinidad tend to be understood as mutually exclusive in the United States. This, in turn, makes it seem that Latines have no stakes in antiblackness, are not implicated in the replication of it, and/or are not Black at all. Mestizaje is the unexamined logic undergirding these epistemological tendencies. Latinidad’s Racial Bind dissects hemispheric Latinidad’s reliance on the logic of mestizaje with special attention to its antiblack roots, calling into question the naturalization of Latinidad as “brownness.” Investigating the hemispheric contours of mestizaje is thus imperative to interrupt epistemological and political barriers for coalitional work that exists within the confines of a paradoxically homogenized “brownness.” Ultimately, Latinidad’s Racial Bind pushes public discourse to interrogate Latine identification, asking what might exist beyond Latinidad, potentially transforming the way the United States understands race.

When reflecting on the award, Dr. Moreira stated, "I am excited to take on an issue that I feel so personally and viscerally as a Latina and immigrant from Brazil. My hope is that Latinidad's Racial Bind will strengthen coalitional possibilities across racial lines in the United States, and perhaps even help Latines change how we self-identify."

Congrats on this amazing honor!