S01 E01 The Forerunner

In the episode The Forerunner, migration historian Christoph Rass and Latin American studies scholar Catherine Ramírez speak with one of the pioneers of migration research in Germany: Czarina Wilpert. Raised in a Mexican immigrant family in the United States, she came to Berlin in the late 1960s for love — and, through her research, helped shape a field that was still in its infancy in Germany: migration studies. The conversation traces her life and career, the biographical experiences that shaped her, her work as an activist in a country that long defined itself as a “non-immigration country”, and the challenges and opportunities she encountered as an immigrant scholar in academia. As someone with her own experience of migration, what was Czarina Wilpert able to see that her predominantly male colleagues, with their “purely German gaze”, could not? And what does her story teach us about the "production of migration” and reflexive research? Christoph Rass and Catherine Ramírez reflect on these questions at the end of the episode.

About the Guest

 Dr. Czarina Wilpert, née Huerta, is considered one of the founders of migration studies in Germany. She grew up as the child of a Mexican immigrant family in Los Angeles and moved to Berlin in the late 1960s. In 1980, she earned her doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin with a dissertation on the futures envisioned by second-generation immigrants. The second generation — their expectations, visions of the future, and concepts of identity — would remain one of her central research interests in the years that followed.

Throughout her career, Wilpert held a range of positions as both a salaried and freelance researcher. She worked at institutions including the  Berlin Social Science Center, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB), and coordinated major international research projects — among them a project in the 1980s involving twelve European countries on cultural identity and migration, funded by the European Science Foundation.

Alongside her research on migration, gender, generations, ethnic economies, citizenship, and racism, Czarina Wilpert was active in a range of civil society organizations. In 1990, she co-founded the  Initiative Selbstständiger Migrantinnen e.V., which to this day supports immigrant women in starting their own businesses under the motto "By immigrant women, for immigrant women." In 1996, she founded the association  Eine Welt der Vielfalt e.V., serving as chair of its board until 2017; the association offers diversity and anti-discrimination training. She was also a founding member and board member of the  Deutsches Gründerinnen Forum e.V. and of the association AKARSU, which focuses on health, support, and career development for immigrant women.

For her commitment to migrant women, diversity, and anti-discrimination work, Czarina Wilpert has received numerous awards, including the  Berlin Women's Prize in 2006 and the Körber Foundation's  Zugabe Prize in 2024.

About the Hosts

 Prof. Dr. Christoph Rass holds the Chair of Modern History and Historical Migration Research (NGHM) at Osnabrück University — a founding professorship at the Research Center  Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and a key professorship in the  Department of History (Hist.OS). His research focuses on interdisciplinary and reflexive historical migration studies, as well as the social history of violence and war.

Within Collaborative Research Centre "Production of Migration" (SFB 1604), he co-leads subproject  A3 You Are Guest Worker Children! Science, School, and the Production of Migration Figures together with Prof. Dr. Lale Yildirim. This subproject examines the categories used to classify young people perceived as migrants in school contexts and explores, among other things, how academic language shapes the realities of a migration society.

Together with Catherine Ramírez, and as part of the "Translations of Migration" research group, he investigates how terms used to describe migration — such as " guest worker" or "assimilation" — are translated across different cultural contexts.

 Prof. Dr. Catherine S. Ramírez is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on immigration and assimilation, historical memory and forgetting, the history of Mexican American women, style politics, and Latinx futurism. She is the author and editor of several books, including the monograph  Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020). In it, she argues that assimilation is not only a product of immigration but also a consequence of historical processes such as the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, U.S. imperialism, and slavery. Understood this way, assimilation is a power relation that negotiates the boundaries between unequal groups and between an "inside" and an "outside" — and one that can cause those boundaries to blur, shift, or harden.