Faculty

Summary of Expertise

• Latinx literature, history, visual culture & performance
• Immigration & assimilation 
• Zoot suits & style politics
• Historical memory
• Latinxfuturism 

Research Interests

I'm the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History (University of California Press, 2020) and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009).

With Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, I'm coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021). With A. Naomi Paik, I co-edit the Borderlands Section of Public Books. 

Since 2002, I've published more than a dozen essays about Latinx speculative fiction, a field I helped build with my catalytic 2004 article, "Deus Ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez."

With Jonathan X. Inda and the support of a Crossing Latinidades grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I'm coediting a volume tentatively titled Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Embodied Vulnerability, and Lived Experience. As part of my contribution to our collaboration, I study the figure of the child migrant and the value of time, youth, and vitality in racial capitalism and the postmigrant twenty-first century.

I'm also studying the life and work of Czarina Wilpert (née Huerta), an extraordinary and prescient scholar of migration, labor, and race in Germany.

In addition to my academic publications, I've written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Zócalo Public Square. 

Biography, Education and Training

I'm Professor and chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

From 2013 to 2018, I directed UC Santa Cruz’s Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas (formerly the Chicano Latino Research Center).

In addition to UC Santa Cruz's Excellence in Teaching Award, I've won awards from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and the Phi Beta Kappa Society. 

A first-generation college graduate, I have a PhD in ethnic studies and a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley. 

For my CV and more information about me and my work, please visit my website.

Honors, Awards and Grants

• 2025-26 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar
  
  
• Co-Principal Investigator (with Sylvanna M. Falcón and Jessica Taft), Archiving Dolores Huerta's Legacy and Shaping the Future of Latinx Studies at an HSI Campus, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2024-27)
  
  
• Lead Principal Investigator, Expanding Latinx Studies at and beyond UC Santa Cruz, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2023-24)
  
  
• Co-Principal Investigator (with Gabriela Arredondo and Carlos Martinez), UC Online Project Funding, UC Online (2023-24)
  
  
• Lead Principal Investigator, Bioprecarity: Latinx Migrants, Captivity, and Resistance, Crossing Latinidades Collaborative, Cross-Institutional, and Comparative Research Working Group in Latino Humanities Studies Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative (2022-24)
  
  
• Honorable Mention, 2019-20 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies for Assimilation: An Alternative History
  
  
• Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University (2019-20)
  
  
• Fellow, Executive Vice Chancellor Fellows Academy, UC Santa Cruz (2018-19)
  
  
• Lead Principal Investigator, Non-citizenship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures Grant (2016-17)
  
  
• 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)
  
  
• UC Santa Cruz Excellence in Teaching Award (2010)
  
  
• Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship (2001-02)

Selected Publications

• "How Real ID Excludes Real Americans," Zócalo Public Square, May 12, 2025. 
  
  
• "Humor and Fear, Kings and Soliders: Jason De León on the Untold Story of Human Smugglers," Public Books, March 11, 2025. 
  
  
• "Undocutime: DREAMers, Lost Children Archive, and the Politics of Waiting and Storytelling in Twenty-first-Century Migration Narratives," Latino Studies 22 (2024): 533-551, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-024-00463-5. 
  
  
• "The Border Is the Crisis: Reflections on the Centenary of the Immigration Act of 1924," Public Books, May 27, 2024.
  
  
• "The Economic Migrant and the Specter of Permanence in Why Cybraceros?, The Rag Doll Plagues, and Walk on Water." In The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, edited by Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, 189-200. New York: Routledge, 2024. 
  
  
• "The 1943 Riot That Spotlights How Drag Show Bans Can Fuel Violence," The Washington Post, June 15, 2023.  
   
• "Visualizing Precarity and Security: Mona Hatoum's Drowning Sorrows and Guadalupe Maravilla's Walk on Water," Refract 4, no. 1 (2021): 345-352. 
  
  
• "A Beacon of Futurity and a Balm of Security," Public Books, August 6, 2021. 
  
  
• "The Other Southland: Missions, Monuments, and Memory in Tovaangar," Boom California, July 26, 2021. 
  
  
• "From 'Crisis' to Futurity: Migration and Borderlands in the 21st Century," co-edited with Geraldo Cadava and A. Naomi Paik, Public Books, July 5, 2021. 
  
  
• Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship, co-edited with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (Rutgers University Press, 2021).
  
  
• "Public Thinker: Catherine S. Ramírez on Measuring the Unmeasurable" (with John Alba Cutler), Public Books, May 7, 2021. 
  
  
• "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, Honorable Mention, 2019-20 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies)
  
  
• "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," The New York Times, February 24, 2020. 
  
  
• The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Duke University Press, 2009).
  
  
• "Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin," Aztlán 33, no. 1 (2008): 185-194.
   
• "Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez," Aztlán 29, no. 2 (2004): 55-92.  

Selected Presentations

• "In Conversation: Troy Montes Michie and Catherine S. Ramírez," Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, September 24, 2022.
  
  
• "Precarity and Belonging" (with Sylvanna M. Falcón, Camilla Hawthorne, Steven C. McKay, Juan Poblete, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer), Research Center for the Americas, University of California, Santa Cruz, November 9, 2021. 
  
  
• "Assimilation: An Alternative History," James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference, Emory University, September 27, 2021. 
  
  
• "3 to 1: Mona Hatoum, Glass, Bottles, and Migration" (with Kathryn Wade and Tali Grinshpan), San José Museum of Art, August 20, 2021. 
  
  
• "The Other Southland: Missions, Monuments, and Memory in Tovaangar," Research Center for the Americas, University of California, Santa Cruz, May 13, 2021. 
  
  
• "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

• e.l.f. x The Pachucas, dir. Chris Sojka (2024)
  
  
• Catherine Ramírez: Production of Migration, Interdisciplinary Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies, Universität Osnabrück November 16, 2024. 
  
  
• "AeroEspacial: El Dorado of Possibilities" (with Beatriz Cortez and Clarissa Tossin), Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, August 10, 2023.
  
  
• "Catherine Ramírez, Redefining Assimilation," Misma Project, July 2, 2023.
  
  
• "What Is Fellowship at CASBS?," Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, August 4, 2022.
  
  
• "America and the Zoot Suit" (with Jonathan Green), Blueprint, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, July 17, 2021. 
  
  
• "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

• Latinx literature
• Immigrant storytelling
• Speculative fiction, Afrofuturism and Latinxfuturism
• Immigration and assimilation
• Introduction to Latin American and Latinx studies
• Comparison as method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences
• Research in Practice 
• Global Internship (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Latin American Spain (Madrid, Spain)