Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Race, migration, and citizenship; Latinx literary, cultural, and visual studies; Mexican American history; immigrant narratives; comparative ethnic studies; feminist and gender studies; speculative fiction

Research Interests

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT MY RESEARCH, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE.

I'm a scholar of race, migration, and citizenship; Mexican American history; immigrant narratives; Latinx literary, cultural, and visual studies; gender studies; and speculative fiction. My current research interests are economic migration in and beyond the United States, Latinx studies beyond the Americas, and photography and migration.

My book, Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020), narrates a 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, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, I'm coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2021). Our volume 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). Precarity and Belonging also grows out of Non-citizenship, our 2016-17 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures.

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.  

I have also written for The New York Times and The Atlantic. 

Biography, Education and Training

FOR MY BIO AND MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ME, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE.

I'm Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I began working at UC Santa Cruz as an Assistant Professor in 2002.

From 2013 to 2018, I directed UC Santa Cruz’s Chicano Latino Research Center, now the Research Center for the Americas.

I've been awarded fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; UC Santa Cruz’s first Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures; and the Excellence in Teaching Award, UC Santa Cruz’s highest teaching honor.

With Geraldo Cadava and A. Naomi Paik, I co-edit the Borderlands section of Public Books. I serve on the board of directors of Humanizing Deportation/Humanizando la deportación; on the editorial board of the Rutgers University Press Latinidad series; on the academic advisory board of the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement; and as a consultant to Vanessa Sanchez and La Mezcla's dance production Pachuquísmo. I'm also a member of Translations of Migration, a group of migration scholars based in the US, the UK, and Europe.

A first-generation college student and a participant in the University of California’s First-Generation Initiative, I hold a PhD in ethnic studies, with a designated emphasis in gender and women's studies, and a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Honors, Awards and Grants

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT MY AWARDS, HONORS, AND GRANTS, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE.

• 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 Cultures (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

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT MY PUBLICATIONS, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE. 

• "Latinx Assimilation," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jon Butler, February 23, 2021. 
• "The U.S. Must Do More to Care for Its Caregivers" (with Glenn Kramon), The Atlantic, January 24, 2021. 
• Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020).
• "Essential and Excluded: The Paradox of Assimilation in the United States," USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute, November 13, 2020.
• "For Hispanic Heritage--Why We Need to Build Toward a Latinx Future," UC Press Blog, October 8, 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).
  
  
  

Selected Presentations

FOR LINKS TO MORE OF MY INTERVIEWS AND TALKS, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE.

• "Contesting the Nation" (with Kathleen Belew, Jefferson Cowie, and Margaret Levi), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, February 25, 2020.
• "Human Migration," UC Santa Cruz Original Thinkers Friday Forum, Santa Cruz, CA, January 27, 2017. 
• "Home and Mobility." Event Santa Cruz VI: Bridging the Gap between UCSC and Downtown Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, March, 19, 2014.

Selected Recordings

FOR LINKS TO MORE OF MY INTERVIEWS AND TALKS, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE.

• "Catherine Ramirez on Missions, Monuments, Sites of Memory & Sites of Dispute" (with Chris Benner), The Cutting Edge, KSQD 90.7FM, Santa Cruz, CA, April 25, 2021. 
• "Catherine S. Ramírez Talks: Pachucas, Latinx Futurisms, Assimilation & Precarity" (with Frederick Luis Aldama), Latinx Pop Lab, March 3, 2021. 
• "Science Friday Book Club: Conjuring an Alternate History of Colonization" (with Aisha Matthews and Christie Taylor), Science Friday, October 16, 2020. 
• "Homeland Security," First Person Singular, KUSP 88.9FM, Santa Cruz, CA, May 15, 2011.

Teaching Interests

FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT MY TEACHING, PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE.

Migration and citizenship studies; 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