Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; Mexican American cultural history; comparative ethnic studies; migration and citizenship studies; speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism

Research Interests

I'm a scholar of Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; Mexican American cultural history; comparative ethnic studies; migration and citizenship studies; speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism.

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.

I've also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Boom California.   

My current research project examines the temporalities of migration, with a focus on the child migrant story and what I call undocutime, the prolonged waiting, permanent temporariness, enforced presentism, devaluation of the time, and persistent patience of the undocumented.

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 2014, my colleagues and I welcomed the first cohort of students in our doctoral program, the first in the world to link Latinx and Latin American studies. I help shape and expand these fields and I work for a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive university via my program-building, advising, mentoring, fundraising, and leadership. 

In addition to winning UC Santa Cruz's Excellence in Teaching Award, I have won grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. 

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

• Principal Investigator (with Jonathan X. Inda and Rebecca Schreiber), 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 (2022-2024)
  
  
• 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)
  
  
• 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)
  
  
• 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

• "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," 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

• "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

• "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

I've taught an array of courses, including lectures with hundreds of undergraduates, intimate graduate seminars, surveys, composition and methods courses, and asynchronous, online courses. Notwithstanding their variety, the common thread running through my courses is my commitment to ethnic and feminist studies, evident in my use of an intersectional framework to explore the uneven distribution of power in our world and the myriad ways people have responded to that unevenness.

• Latinx literary, cultural, visual, and performance studies
  
  
• Migration and citizenship studies
  
  
• Immigrant storytelling
  
  
• Speculative fiction and Latinxfuturism
  
  
• Comparison as method in the humanities and qualitative social sciences
  
  
• Comparative ethnic studies
  
  
• United States cultural, ethnic, and immigration history