Chanda Prescod-Weinstein grew up in East Los Angeles, a vibrant center of Mexican-American culture that was immortalized in the hit 1988 drama Stand and submit. As depicted in the film, it is a community that has struggled with poverty, gangs and violent crime.
“We were seen as the part of town to avoid,” says Chanda, a theoretical physicist who was born and raised in El Sereno, an East LA neighborhood, by her Barbadian mother. “When I went to college, I’d tell people where I came from and they’d say, ‘Oh, isn’t this the bad part of town?’” Changing people’s perceptions of the community is one of the goals of her writing. .
In accepting LA Times Science and Technology Book Prize last April for her 2021 work, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, she noted that she was possibly the first person from East LA to win in that category and the first black woman to win the adult writing category. “But I won’t be the last,” she told the audience. “I wrote this book to send the message that the cosmos belongs to all of us.”
In a Zoom interview five days after the ceremony, Chanda reflected on the moment. “It was important to me to represent East LA on a stage of such cultural importance to Los Angeles and to say that we—brown and black people from East LA—are intellects in our own right with our own stories to tell, it was important to me,” she. say.
Increasing inclusion and diversity within science and technology is one of the primary preoccupations of her work—a product not only of her East LA upbringing, but her strong Caribbean roots.
Chanda’s mother, Margaret Prescod, who raised Chanda alone after divorcing her father, comes from a family of teachers. Both of Margaret’s parents had been teachers in Barbados. The family settled in Brooklyn after immigrating to the United States when she was 12, and she and her brothers went on to become teachers in New York.
“My grandmother used to teach math and she was the one who taught me long division,” says Chanda. “She was one of my first writing teachers. She taught the neighborhood kids after school.” Margaret and the adults in Chanda’s life realized this early on – like the children within Stand and submit — Chanda was a gifted student who excelled in mathematics. “For them, it was natural to encourage my academic interest,” says Chanda.
Her mother sent her to magnet schools that catered to exceptional children. This meant Margaret couldn’t hold down a 9-5 job because to get her daughter to and from school, she had to drop Chanda off at the bus stop – a long way from where they lived – and pick it up in the afternoon. It’s something the world still means to Chanda. “My mom sacrificed so much,” she says, fighting back tears.
Chanda’s talent education didn’t stop with her schooling either. One Saturday, Margaret took a reluctant 10-year-old Chanda to see A brief history of time, a documentary about theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. It determined the course of Chanda’s life. She decided then and there that she wanted a career like Hawking’s.
The whole family supported her dream. Her mother’s brother bought her Hawking’s book, after which the documentary is named, for her 11th birthday. “He knew my mom didn’t have a lot of money to buy me things like that,” she says. “When I went to university, my mum’s older sister bought me bags so I could carry my own suitcases.”
Chanda studied physics, astronomy, and astrophysics at Harvard and the University of California before eventually earning a doctorate in physics from the University of Waterloo in Canada, becoming one of fewer than 100 black American women with such a degree. She is currently an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women’s studies, at the University of New Hampshire.
IN The Disordered CosmosChanda talks about the wonders of the universe along with the challenges of being a black Jewish woman studying and working in it—fluently weaving together issues of race, gender, and other socio-political concerns using a conversational style.
“What I like about this work is that this is the biggest picture there is: space-time and its (lack of) content,” she writes in the book. “It also feels like being the bearer of a deeply human impulse. To borrow a word from the indigenous communities from which my black ancestors may have come, I am a giant of the universe—a storyteller,” she continues. “And even though I am the first black woman to hold a faculty position at tenure in theoretical cosmology, I’m certainly not the first black woman to be a griot of the universe.”
Working as a blogger and essayist, with articles published in magazines including Young scientist AND American Scientistshe got a lot of encouragement to write The Disordered Cosmos – her first book. Her mother and aunt further encouraged her to submit it for this year’s Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, where she was longlisted.
“It was important for my mother to see the work her daughter had done be recognized by the home in that way,” says Chanda. “I think Caribbean people are very picky and discriminating – the bar is very high. So to have a panel of judges from the Caribbean look through all the incredible literature that people from the diaspora are publishing and choose my book as one of the best books of the year was a very big deal for me.”
She was against Jamaican Kei Miller’s book, Things I’ve kept secret, which was eventually shortlisted in the non-fiction category. “When I saw that Kei Miller was on the long list, it seemed like he was definitely going to win,” she says. “He’s such an incredible writer. To even compete against him was an honor.”
Her book’s longlist from the Trinidad & Tobago-based Bocas Literary Festival was not her first exposure to those islands. One of her uncles moved there; Trinidadian musician and educator Victor Prescod is her cousin. Perhaps most importantly, her paternal grandmother Selma James was married to Trinidadian intellectual icon CLR James and lived in Trinidad for a time with her son Sam Weinstein – a child from a previous marriage and Chanda’s father.
“He raised my father. So to me he is my grandfather,” Chanda says of James. “Selma is this incredible intellect in her own right,” she continues. “Even though she’s a white Jewish woman from Brooklyn, the Caribbean became such an important place of political education for her. I think Selma is who she is in part because of her time in the Caribbean and her relationships with Caribbean women and Caribbean women organizers. You can see how the Caribbean becomes part of my influences through it.”
Selma became involved along with CLR James with the push for West Indian independence and federation. Margaret met Sam through Selma, after they had developed a working relationship and co-founded the organization Black Women for Domestic Wages, which advocated for recognition of the economic value of family care.
Chanda says her strength as a writer and speaker, and the compulsion she feels to explain her work—and the issues that matter to her—in a way that everyone can understand is largely due to her family. “I come from a family of people who talk a lot. And I come from a family of teachers. I always understood that it was my responsibility to understand myself,” she says.
