Juan Flores (professor)

Juan Flores (born John Martin Flores; September 29, 1943 – December 2, 2014) was a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of Latino Studies at New York University. He was considered a leading pioneer, scholar, and expert in Latin American and Nuyorican culture, often working with his wife Miriam Jiménez Román.
Educational Background.
Flores received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Queens College in New York, and both his Masters and Ph.D from Yale University in German Literature. Flores' major areas of interest include social and cultural theory, Latino and Puerto Rican studies, popular music, theory of diaspora and transnational communities and Afro-Latino culture.
Social and cultural theory.
Flores' work articulates how culture is represented, identified, produced, consumed and regulated within Latino diasporic communities in more recent times.
Theory of diaspora and transnational communities.
In his book "The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribeño Tales of Learning and Turning", Flores distinguishes between “new diasporas” and those of earlier time periods by noting the difference in “the intensity and reciprocity of the ties between emigrant or exiled populations and their countries of origin” (Flores, 2009). Flores regularly uses the analogy of seeds being spread and growing where they land to describe the Latino diasporic experience. Flores describes the culture formed in the communities where they reside as dynamic and continuously changing due to the exchange of cultural remittances. He focuses specifically on the transculturation that occurs as groups move from their homeland to the U.S. and back.
Afro-Latino culture.
Much of Flores' work on the Afro-Latino culture has focused on its progression in the United States. In "The Afro-Latino Reader", he analyzes the way in which Afro-Latinos are racially categorized according to Eurocentered colonial standards and how this categorization changes according to location. Jiménez Román and Flores received an American Book Award for The Afro-Latin@Reader in 2011.
Death.
On December 2, 2014, Flores died at the age of 71 of an apparent pulmonary embolism at the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. He also was afflicted with Guillain–Barré syndrome.
Awards.
Flores has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including: