Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Migration and citizenship studies; assimilation and immigrant integration; Latinx literary, cultural, and visual studies; United States cultural, ethnic, and immigration history; Mexican American history; comparative ethnic studies; feminist and gender studies; speculative fiction and alternative futurisms

Research Interests

My current research interests include race, migration, citizenship, assimilation, and immigrant integration. My current book projects are Assimilation: An Alternative History and Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship. The former excavates the history of the concept of assimilation in the United States and explores what's at stake in debates about assimilation and assimilability. The latter, a volume I'm co-editing with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steve McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, emerges from Borders and Belonging, a series of events on human migration hosted by UC Santa Cruz's Chicano Latino Research Center (now the Research Center for the Americas) in the spring of 2016, and Non-citizenship, our 2016-17 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture.

I'm also a scholar of Mexican American history, women's history, feminist and queer theory, popular, visual, and material culture, and speculative fiction. My book, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009), excavates the participation of Mexican American women in the World War II-era zoot subculture and the significance of the figures of the pachuca and pachuco in twentieth-century Chicanx cultural production. My work on Chicanafuturism, a term I coined in my 2004 essay, "Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez," explores the nexus of race, gender, technology, environment, and futurity.  

Biography, Education and Training

I'm Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. My current research interests include migration, citizenship, and immigrant integration and my current book projects are Assimilation: An Alternative History (forthcoming in 2020 from the University of California Press) and Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (co-edited with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steve McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer and under contract with Rutgers University Press). I'm the author of The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009) and several essays on race, gender, and science fiction. From 2013 to 2018, I directed UC Santa Cruz’s Chicano Latino Research Center, now the Research Center for the Americas. Over 2016-17, I was the Principal Investigator of Non-citizenship, UC Santa Cruz’s first Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. A first-generation college student and a participant in the University of California’s First-Generation Initiative, I hold a Ph.D. in ethnic studies and a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley. I'm a recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award, UC Santa Cruz’s highest teaching honor, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Over 2019-20, I'm a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  

• Ph.D., Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
• Designated Emphasis, Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley
• B.A., English, University of California, Berkeley

Honors, Awards and Grants

• Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2019-20)
• Fellow, Executive Vice Chancellor Fellows Academy, UC Santa Cruz (2018-19)
• Board Opportunity Fund Grant, UC Santa Cruz Foundation (2017-19)
• Principal Investigator, Non-citizenship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture (2016-17)
• Board Opportunity Fund Grant, UC Santa Cruz Foundation (2015-16)
• Co-principal Investigator, Working for Dignity, Engaging Humanities Public Humanities Project Grant, University of California Humanities Research Institute (2014-15)
• Co-principal Investigator, Latino Cultures Network, University of California Humanities Network Multicampus Research Group (2011-12)
• University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS) Grant (2011-12, 2015-16)
• UC Santa Cruz Excellence in Teaching Award (2010)
• Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2001-02)

Selected Publications

• "What Does Assimilation Mean?" Public Books, February 27, 2020.
  
  

• "The New Wealth Test for Immigrants Is Un-American," New York Times, February 26, 2020. 
  
  
  
• The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009).
  
  
  For more publications, please visit my website.  

Selected Recordings

Click here for links to audio interviews. 

Teaching Interests

Migration and citizenship studies; Latinx literary, cultural, and visual studies; United States cultural, ethnic, and immigration history; Mexican American history; comparative ethnic studies; feminist and gender studies; speculative fiction and alternative futurisms