Roland Garcia Tel 713.374.3510 Fax 713.754.7510 [email protected]

August 12, 2021

Mayor Sylvester Turner c/o Jackie Schuessler-Kimsey ’s Hispanic Advisory Board 901 Bagby, Third Floor , TX 77002

Re: Nomination of Dr. Cecilia Balli for Education in the Community Award

Dear Mayor Turner:

It is my pleasure to wholeheartedly nominate Dr. Cecilia Balli for the 2021 Education in the Community Award.

I have had the pleasure of knowing Dr. Ballí for nearly 20 years, since she was a PhD student at Rice University. She has risen in the ranks of education, scholarship, research, and cutting-edge research and analysis on demographics on voting trends. She has become a prolific magazine writer and a respected academic, first as an Assistant Professor at the University of at Austin, and now as a Visiting Scholar at the ’s Center for Mexican American Studies. In her 23-year professional career, she has blazed her own unique path at the crossroads of scholarly research and journalism, studying and writing about the U.S.-Mexico border and Latinos in Texas. She has served as a uniquely important voice for Latinos in two fields where Hispanics are vastly underrepresented: media and academia. Along the way, she has taught, mentored and inspired many young students and young professionals. Please allow me to tell you a little more about her work and impact.

I first met Cecilia in the early 2000s, at a Mexican American history conference at the University of Houston. A native of the Rio Grande Valley, Cecilia had attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, then worked for two years as an education reporter for the Express-News. Now she had enrolled in the doctoral program in cultural anthropology at Rice University, choosing a graduate program in Texas so that she could continue writing as a journalist even as she took on full-time graduate studies. After publishing one story for Texas Monthly, she was invited to join the prestigious magazine as a writer-at-large, making her the first non-white writer on the masthead in its nearly 30-year history. As the first Hispanic writer, Cecilia was interested in challenging stereotypical narratives about the U.S.-Mexico border and making Texans aware of the realities and contributions of Mexican Americans, who she felt had been washed out of our state’s history. Although she was only in her mid-20s, she was quickly becoming

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GREENBERG TRAURIG, LLP  ATTORNEYS AT LAW  WWW.GTLAW.COM 1000 Louisiana Street, Suite 1700, Houston, Texas 77002  Tel: 713.374.3500  Fax 713.374.3505 August 12, 2021 Page 2 a singular, sought-after voice in mainstream Texas media. Her first pieces for the magazine explored the history of Mexican American land dispossession and Tejanos’ role in the Texas Revolution. But soon after, the U.S.-Mexico border began to witness unprecedented levels of violence, as border enforcement increased and organized criminal groups began to wield more control over local communities. Cecilia began immersing herself in Nuevo Laredo, where the Gulf and Sinaloa drug cartels were at war with each other, and in Ciudad Juárez, where poor, young women were systematically being disappeared and sexually murdered. Far before politicians created the current media spectacle around the border, Cecilia was constantly traveling there, bringing voice to immigrants, victims of violence, and residents whose communities had been equally overrun by organized criminals and federal agents.

Even as she continued writing magazine stories about border violence, history and culture, Cecilia focused her anthropological research on the women’s killings, spending 18 months in Juárez interviewing victims’ relatives and Mexican government and law enforcement officials. After finishing her dissertation, she was hired by the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department. Given the interdisciplinary nature of her research, Cecilia was also affiliated with the Center for Mexican American Studies, the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. As a result, Cecilia’s teaching and research thus had a far-reaching impact across various programs and departments. She mentored students not only from the liberal arts, but from journalism, from the law school, and from the business school. Students sought her out for her expertise on the border and her unique skills as both an academic and journalistic writer. She taught narrative writing workshops to undergraduates, graduate students, and other faculty members. During her time at UT, Cecilia also took a two-year leave to conduct extensive ethnographic research on the 700 miles of border fencing that were approved under George W. Bush’s presidency. She drove by herself along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, listening carefully to federal agents, local government and community leaders, and residents whose properties were being seized for the wall’s construction.

As someone who began writing for her hometown newspaper, The Brownsville Herald, since high school, Cecilia has always been invested in current events and public dialogue. She prefers to be positioned as a public intellectual—someone who researches issues with the careful training of an academic, but uses the findings to engage the public in timely conversation. Eventually, it became challenging to balance a full-time teaching job with the frequent travel required for her journalistic assignments, and in 2014, Cecilia made the difficult decision to leave her position at UT. She focused on her magazine writing at first, also serving as the ed itor of Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Julián Castro’s autobiography. But eventually she missed doing research, and in 2019, she founded Culture Concepts, a consultancy focused on ethnographic research, cultural analysis, and strategic communications. This consultancy allows Cecilia to work with nonprofits, foundations, and research groups that are engaged in critical public issues, trying to effect discourse and action. For example, she recently conducted a year-long, groundbreaking study for the Texas Organizing Project Education Fund to better understand how Latino voters and nonvoters relate to voting, government, and political parties. The study received national attention after she wrote about her team’s findings in Texas Monthly. As a result o f that work, she was

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GREENBERG TRAURIG, LLP  ATTORNEYS AT LAW  WWW.GTLAW.COM August 12, 2021 Page 3 invited to join the University of Houston’s Center for Mexican American Studies as a Visiting Scholar, where she is continuing her research while teaching and mentoring students.

As you can see, in the two decades I’ve known her, Cecilia has had a far-reaching impact in the field of education, not only as an educator, but also through her widely read publications that have brought nuance and depth to critical issues affecting Hispanic communities and Texas and the country more broadly. And she has done this while making many sacrifices along the way. Cecilia often put her own emotional health and physical safety at risk as she reported from the border’s frontlines. She also overcame many personal barriers, serving as an inspiration and role model for young Latinos. Cecilia grew up in Brownsville, the daughter of Mexican immigrants who labored for ten years as migrant farmworkers in the tomato fields of California. Her father Cristóbal later bought a taxi and became a cab driver. But he was diagnosed with cancer likely resulting from pesticide exposure as a farmworker, and he died when Cecilia was just ten years old. Her mother Antonia subsequently found a job as a public school cook and raised Cecilia and her two sisters alone. Despite growing up with very little, Cecilia and her sisters ultimately thrived. Cecilia graduated valedictorian of her large public high school and was admitted to Harvard and Columbia universities as well as Stanford. Today, her older sister Cristina serves as Ex ecutive Director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, and her twin sister Celia is Senior Director of Litigation at KBR, Inc.

Although she is only halfway through her career, Cecilia has already made a big difference in other people’s lives. I have no doubt that in the years to come, she will continue breaking new ground and working in novel ways to impact public issues. Cecilia is an important asset to our community, to students at the University of Houston, to the organizations she works for as a consultant, and to the wide publics she reaches through her writing. I hope you’ll agree with me that she deserves to be honored for her achievements and contributions. Please let me know if I can answer any further questions about her or her work.

Thanks for your consideration.

Very truly yours,

Roland Garcia

Enclosures

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GREENBERG TRAURIG, LLP  ATTORNEYS AT LAW  WWW.GTLAW.COM