Visualizing Mexican Migration

Gilberto Cárdenas is the Executive Director of the
Notre Dame Center for Arts and Culture. An internationally recognized scholar who has worked in the area of immigration for over 44 years, Cárdenas has been three times listed by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the 100 most influential Latinos in the United States.

Cárdenas was the founding Director of the Institute for Latino Studies and Assistant Provost at the University of Notre Dame (1999-2002). During this time he also held the Julian Samora Chair in Latino Studies. He is a full professor in the Department of Sociology with research interests in the fields of immigration, race and ethnic relations, Latino art and culture, and visual sociology.

His passion for the arts led him to create Galería sin Fronteras, a commercial art gallery in Austin, TX, which features the works of Chicano/Latino artists. He is an avid collector of Latino art and has established the largest private collection of Latino art in the world.

Published work includes co-authorship of Los Mojados: The Wetback Story 1971 (Julian Samora, with Jorge Bustamante & Gilbert Cardenas); co-editorship of Health and Social Services among International Labor Migrants: A Comparative Perspective (1998, University of Texas Press, Center for Mexican American Studies CMAS as part of their Border Series) and editorship of La Causa: Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Struggle for Equality in the Midwest (2004, Arte Público Press, Hispanic Civil Rights Series). Cárdenas was the Latino Series Editor for Notre Dame Press and previously served as the Mexican American Series Editor for the University of Texas Press. He serves on several editorial committees for book series, including the Critical Documents of Latin American and Latino Art, (Houston), the A Ver Series on Latino Artists (UCLA), and Ventana Abrieta (Spain).

In 1994 he founded and served as Executive Producer of Latino USA, a half-hour weekly radio program produced at the University of Texas at Austin, and distributed nationally by National Public Radio. Cárdenas also served on the Smithsonian Institution’s Oversight Committee for Latino Issues that lead to the report Toward a Shared Vision (1997) and is chairperson of the Latino Center Board, one of three national boards of the Smithsonian Institution.