JLCS Speaker Series: Celebrating Scholarship, Community, and Impact: A Conversation with Dr. María Vélez in Honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month

Celebrating Scholarship, Community, and Impact: A Conversation with Dr. María Vélez

This event is presented in recognition of National Hispanic Heritage Month.

Redlining, Latino Immigrant Revitalization, and Neighborhood Violence

How does the legacy of redlining continue to shape neighborhood violence—and can immigration alter these historical trajectories? Drawing on research examining homicide patterns in San Antonio, Texas from 1950 to 2011, Dr. María Vélez explores how Latino immigration may disrupt the enduring effects of historical redlining and neighborhood disinvestment. Her findings highlight the potential for Latino immigrant revitalization to reshape trajectories of neighborhood disadvantage and violence.

María B. Vélez is an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. Her research seeks to understand how stratification along ethnoracial, political, and economic lines shapes the patterning of crime and justice outcomes. Key themes include investigating the influence of political conditions on crime patterns across neighborhoods, the dynamic nature of neighborhood crime, and the consequences of structural racism across a variety of institutional domains such as housing on the ethnoracial divide in neighborhood crime. She recently served as a Committee Member of the Consensus Panel for “Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice, and Policy” for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is co-director of the Racial Democracy Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN) with Dr. Rod Brunson.