The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio

I am an Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies in the Department Ethnic
Studies. I am fortunate to co-lead the Latinxs and Democracy Cluster initiative at UCB
and serve as Faculty Co-Director of the UCB Latino Social Science Postdoctoral Pipeline
Initiative (LSSPPI), both of which aim to advance Latinx social science scholarship and
strengthen academic pipelines.
My research is situated primarily in the social sciences with foci on ethnoracial
classification, identification, and stratification. Most of my scholarship draws from
nationally representative data and explores questions of ethnoracial boundaries,
patterns of label use, racial ideology adherence, contested racial identity, and Latina/o/x
experiences in higher education with particular attention paid to various organizational
and individual markers of racialization. Methodologically, my core aim is to think
critically about the utility of race data for identifying and rectifying societal, systemic,
and structural racisms.
I currently serve on the National Advisory Committee of the U.S. Census Bureau, as
Associate Editor of the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and as Past-Chair of the
American Sociological Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Prior to
UCB, I was Coordinator of Latino Studies at the University of Florida’s (UF) Center for
Latin American Studies, Associate Professor of Sociology at UF, and Assistant
Professor in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of
Texas at Dallas.