Welcome! I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at CSU Fullerton. My research focuses on race, immigration, culture, and social movements. For my dissertation, I investigated the roles and actions of Latina/o immigrant workers, African American residents, and White college-aged volunteers as they engaged in local justice organizing in post-Katrina New Orleans. For the research, I developed a model I called “racialized political cultures of opposition” (RPCO) that drew from the literature on race, revolutions, and globalization. In more recent work, I used the model to assess Central American child migration in the summer of 2014 and the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. In my current research, I consider the RPCO framework to examine the role of Chicana/o cultural power in the university. 

Based on semi-structured oral history interviews and archives, my current research investigates localized and external factors that led Chicanas/os to establish and maintain space at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Launched in January 1970 as both a concept and a building, El Centro was designed to “house” all components of Chicano Studies. The first of its kind, it was envisioned as a new way of doing higher education that centered Chicana/o interests, so conflict was inevitable. 

In thinking about El Centro and the role of student activist organizations (SAO), my research aims to theorize the significance of Chicana/o cultural power in the university and how El Centro went from initiating Chicano Studies in the UC system in five years to meeting its near demise in five years. The study further seeks to explain the utilization and meanings assigned to El Centro across generations that span over half a century. In connection with my current research, I serve as a Research Associate and Humanities Advisor to the Global Latinidades Project at UCSB. The related special project, Isla Vista Reformists, Radicals, and Revolutionaries: A Multimedia Series on the Local and Global Legacy of Student and Community Activism on the California Central Coast, 1965 – Present, will document “the student activist and radical activist legacy of UCSB and surrounding areas.” For more information on the special project please visit here. 

*My role as an undergraduate UCSB is documented in the book Starving for Justice: Hunger Strikes, Spectacular Speech, and the Struggle for Dignity by Dr. Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval.