Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Race, migration, and citizenship; Latinx literary, cultural, and visual studies; history of the present; United States cultural, ethnic, and immigration history; Mexican American history; immigrant narratives; comparative ethnic studies; feminist and gender studies; speculative fiction and alternative futurisms

Research Interests

I'm a scholar of race, migration, and citizenship; Mexican American, U.S., and women's history; immigrant narratives; Latinx literature; feminist and queer theory; popular, visual, and material culture; and speculative fiction. My current project explores the political economy of deservingness, with a focus on economic migrants and the welfare state in and beyond the United States.  

My book, Assimilation: An Alternative History (forthcoming from the University of California Press), excavates the history of the concept of assimilation in the United States and looks at what's at stake in debates about assimilation and assimilability.

With Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steve McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, I'm co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press). Our volume examines how the movement of people and their incorporation, marginalization, and exclusion, under epochal conditions of labor and social precarity, have challenged older notions of citizenship and alienage. We think mobility, precarity, and citizenship together in order to explore the points of contact and friction, and, thus, the spaces for a possible politics of commonality between citizens and noncitizens.

Precarity and Belonging stems from Borders and Belonging, a series of events on human migration that I convened in the spring of 2016 when I was director of UC Santa Cruz's Chicano Latino Research Center (now the Research Center for the Americas). Our volume also grows out of Non-citizenship, my 2016-17 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Culture. 

My first 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 looks at 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," examines the nexus of race, gender, technology, environment, and futurity.  

Biography, Education and Training

I'm a historian of the present and the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History (forthcoming in 2020 from the University of California Press); Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship, co-edited with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steve McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2021); 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've been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award, UC Santa Cruz’s highest teaching honor; a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship; and a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  

My current research interests are migration, citizenship, and labor.

• 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

• Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020)
  
  
• "What Does Assimilation Mean?" Public Books, February 27, 2020.
  
  

• "The New Wealth Test for Immigrants Is Un-American," New York Times, February 24, 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; history of the present; Latinx literary, cultural, and visual studies; United States cultural, ethnic, and immigration history and immigrant storytelling; Mexican American history; comparison as method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences; comparative ethnic studies; feminist and gender studies; speculative fiction and alternative futurisms