Pastora San Juan Cafferty, professor emerita at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and a leading scholar on race and ethnicity, died at her home in Chicago. She was 72 years old.
A native of Cuba, Cafferty and her family moved to Miami when she was 8 years old. The family later settled in Alabama where her mother taught Spanish at the college level. Dr. Cafferty was a graduate of St. Bernard College in Cullman, Alabama, and earned a Ph.D. in literary and cultural history from George Washington University.
After working in the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Nixon administration, she joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1971. She moved up the academic ranks and was named a full professor in 1985.
Dr. Cafferty was co-editor of The Diverse Society: Implications for Social Policy (National Association of Social Workers, 1976) and co-editor of Hispanics in America: An Agenda for the Twenty-First Century (Transaction Publishers, 1999).
Upon her retirement from teaching at the University of Chicago in 2005, the university created the Pastora San Juan Cafferty Lecture on Race and Ethnicity in American Life in her honor.