Elizabeth Barahona is an Assistant Professor of Latinx History at Georgia State University. Her work focuses on Latinos in the United States, the American South, and cross-racial coalition building. She holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and a BA from Duke University.
Her book manuscript, “Shared Struggle, Collective Power: Black and Latino Coalition Building in Durham, North Carolina, 1980-2010,” examines how grassroots alliances between Black and Latino communities emerged in response to shared challenges and ultimately reshaped the city’s political landscape. By focusing on community-led pathways to resistance and liberation in a mid-sized Southern city, the project expands the fields of Black and Latinx studies beyond major urban centers. She also served as a curatorial fellow for Aquí en Chicago, the first major exhibition on Latino history at the Chicago History Museum, which opened in Fall 2025.
Elizabeth’s research project argues that the 1997 robberies targeting Latino workers in Durham exposed structural exclusion from civil justice and catalyzed community-driven responses that reshaped access to safety, financial security, and civic recognition. Through cross-racial coalition building, grassroots institution building such as La Cooperativa Latino Credit Union, and expanding bilingual civic infrastructures, Latino and African American residents advanced new, collective models of justice in the late twentieth-century US South.