Pamela Long (scholar)

Pamela Long is a scholar and activist, who is currently an associate Professor at Auburn Montgomery and is best known as a pro-immigration activist and the plaintiff in a lawsuit that challenged Alabama HB 56, a law directed against illegal immigration.

Career

Long received a BA in Mass Communication and an MA in Hispanic Studies from Auburn University (1977 and 1981), and a PhD in Spanish Language and Literature from Tulane University (1990). As of 2012, she is currently the director of Auburn Montgomery's International Studies program. Long is a scholar of the Spanish Baroque, and has published a book on Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana/música. How the Décima Musa composed, practiced, and imagined music (Lang, 2009). She is the editor of Barroco, a dual-language journal on the Baroque culture of Spain and Latin America.

Long (a lay Hispanic minister of the Episcopal church in Montgomery) is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit originally brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center that challenged the validity of HB 56, an anti-immigration bill widely seen as one of the most restrictive in the United States. The law would render those providing aid of various kinds to undocumented immigrants liable to criminal prosecution—such aid includes taking them to grocery stores, court appearances, churches, and medical providers, work that Long has been engaged in for years.