Victor Valle

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Victor Valle, a professor of ethnic studies at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, specializes in critical urban studies and nonfiction literature, and also the design and collaborative creation of community-academic archiving projects. He has taught in the California state university system for 20 years. Prior to that, he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, where he earned several honors during an eight-year career, including a 1984 Pulitzer Prize shared with fellow Latino journalists.

Valle will dedicate his time at Radcliffe to researching and writing his next book, "The Aesthetics of Fire: On the Art of Chile Eating," a blending of cultural history, memoir, and aesthetic philosophy that interprets the ways in which North America's capsicum aficionados understand and express the fruit's beauty, including its piquancy.

Valle is a graduate of Medill's journalism program at Northwestern University. The Los Angeles native's recent works of creative nonfiction and cultural political economy consist of experiments in urban ethnography. Recipe of Memory: Five Generations of Mexican Cuisine in Los Angeles (New Press, 1995) draws on Guadalajara's 19th-century archives, in-depth interviews, family photographs, and cookbooks to relate a Los Angeles family's 20th-century social history. Latino Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) interprets the political, economic, and cultural significance of LA's new Latino majority. Valle's latest book, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California (Rutgers University Press, 2009), constructs a cultural genealogy of the privatization of southern California government during the region's emergence as the nation's global trade clearinghouse.