The Faculty Advisory Board of the Latinx Research Center (LRC) is composed of distinguished scholars committed to advancing research, dialogue, and public engagement on Latinx issues. Our board members provide invaluable guidance and expertise, helping to shape the LRC’s initiatives and collaborations. We also recognize and honor the contributions of past board members whose leadership has helped sustain and grow our mission.
Kurt Organista
Interim Chair
A leading expert on social work practice within the Latino community, Dr. Organista’s research focuses on psychosocial problems within the Chicano and Latino communities, acculturation and adjustment of ethnic minorities to American societies, minority mental health, cognitive behavioral therapy, depression in Latinos and HIV prevention with Mexican migrant laborers/Latinos. Dr. Organista’s book, HIV Prevention with Latinos: Theory, Research and Practice, is the first-ever collection of texts written by leading authorities on the topic of HIV prevention among diverse Latino populations. It attempts to respond to the diminishing returns of the behavioral model of HIV risk by deconstructing the many social ecological contexts of risk within the Latino experience. He is also served as the principal investigator for a National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse Alcoholism (NIAAA)-funded project that seeks to developing and test a structural-environmental model of HIV risk and prevention for migrant day laborers in San Francisco and Berkeley (2010 to 2015). Dr. Organista currently teaches courses on social problems and psychopathology, stress and coping and social work practice with Latino populations.
Laura Pérez
Chair of the Latinx Research Center (On Sabattical 2024-2025)
Professor, Dept of Ethnic Studies
Professor Laura Pérez is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub, the Latinx Research Center, formerly the Center for Latino Policy Research. She is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007) in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities while archiving the work of more than forty Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. She curated UC Berkeley’s first and only US Latina/o Performance Art series in 2001-02; co-curated, with Delilah Montoya, the multimedia exhibition Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas at 516 ARTS gallery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from January-March of 2009, and curated Labor + a(r)t + orio: Bay Area Latin@ Arts Now at the Richmond Art Center, CA (April-June 2011). She has published in numerous publications on feminism, Chicana/o and hemispheric decolonial cultures. Her book, Eros Ideologies: Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial, was published by Duke University Press in 2019. With Dr. Ann Marie Leimer, she is co-editor of “Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision” (Duke UP, forthcoming in 2022) which was awarded the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Book Publishing Award. Pérez received her BA/MA from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Harvard.
John Alba Cutler
Associate Professor, Dept of English
John Alba Cutler researches in the fields of Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture; his teaching comprises courses in these fields as well as in modern and contemporary American literature. His book Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford, 2015) argues that Chicano/a/x literature provides a powerful counter-discourse to sociological accounts of assimilation in the post-WWII era. He is now working on a book tentatively titled “Latinx Modernism and the Spirit of Latinoamericanismo,” which examines the influence of Latin American modernismo on Spanish-language newspaper literature in the early twentieth century. The book shows how encounters with modernismo allowed Latino/a/x writers and readers to grapple with the conflicting legacies of Spanish and US coloniality. It also continues the first book’s investigation into literary institutions and in the generative (rather than merely representational) power of literary discourse. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume from Cambridge in the series Latinx Literature in Transition. Cutler has also published articles on Chicano/a/x and Latino/a/x literature and culture in such journals as American Literary History, English Language Notes, and Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and has contributed chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, American Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, and Culturas de la prensa en México. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Alice B. Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Before coming to Berkeley in 2021, Cutler spent more than a decade at Northwestern University, where he was recognized with a Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013.
Kris D. Gutiérrez
Professor, School of Education
Kris D. Gutiérrez holds the Carol Liu Chair in Educational Policy and is the Past President of the American Educational Research Association and the National Conference on Research on Language and Literacy. Gutiérrez was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a member of the National Board for the Institute of Education Sciences where she served as Vice-Chair. Her research examines learning in designed learning environments, with attention to students from non-dominant communities and English Learners. Her work on Third Spaces examines the affordances of hybrid and syncretic approaches to literacy, new media literacies, and STEM learning and the re-mediation of functional systems of learning. Her work in social design experiments seeks to leverage students’ everyday concepts and practices to ratchet up expansive forms of learning. Professor Gutiérrez’s research has been published widely in premier academic journals and is a co-author of Learning and Expanding with Activity Theory.
Armando Lara-Millan
Associate Professor, Dept of Sociology
Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and is a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar. He studies political economy in sociology. For him that means studying changing markets and their enabling institutions, but in such a way that centers history, culture/knowledge, and power. Lara-Millán is an ethnographer of well-positioned organizations and a historian of the fields those organizations shape. He is the current chair-elect of the Sociology of Law Section of the ASA, a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, and is currently a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
Lara-Millán's first major project was a political economy of American public hospitals and county jails. Long story short, caseloads that are usually thought of as cost incurring in public agencies actually make a lot of money for otherwise dying institutions. The book won the 2022 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association. A series of articles associated with this project were published in the American Sociological Review, Criminology, and the American Journal of Sociology.
G. Cristina Mora
Associate Professor, Sociology
G. Cristina Mora is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy) at UC Berkeley. She completed her B.A. in Sociology at Cal in 2003 and earned her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University in 2009. Her research focuses mainly on questions of census racial classification, immigration, and racial politics in the United States and Europe. Her book, Making Hispanics, was published by the University of Chicago Press and provides the first historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” panethnic category in the United States. This work, along with related articles, has received wide recognition, including the 2010 Best Dissertation Award and the 2018 Early Career Award (SREM) from the American Sociological Association. Making Hispanics has also been the subject of several NPR and national media segments on Census Politics and Latino identity (see links below). Her work has been published in venues like the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Latino Studies, and the Du Bois Review.
Lorena Oropeza
Professor, Dept of Ethnic Studies
I mostly study people who during the 1960s raised hell because they wanted to stop a war, or fight racial injustice, or overthrow patriarchy. Inspired by these activists, my research and teaching reflect my desire to harness what I consider the subversive potential of history to prompt new ways of thinking among academics and members of the public alike.
Most of my research stands at the intersection of race and empire. My first book looked at the Chicano Movement’s protest to the Vietnam War. My second is an award-winning biography of Chicano Movement leader who rose to fame by decrying the legacy of the U.S. takeover of northern Mexico in 1848. As a former journalist, I often employ oral history in my research, which has allowed me to incorporate women’s experiences that might otherwise be overlooked.
Delighted to be a member of the Chicanx/Latinx Studies Program within the Ethnic Studies Department, I also am a senior member of the Latinx Democracy Cluster (LDC), a group of scholars who were hired across several disciplines to advance Latinx-focused research across campus. The LDC directly aligns with another long-term interest of mine, advancing faculty diversity.
Dr. Hector P. Rodriguez
Professor, Health Policy and Management
Dr. Hector P. Rodriguez is Henry J. Kaiser Endowed Chair in Organized Health Systems, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and co-Director of the Center for Healthcare Organizational and Innovation Research (CHOIR) at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert in organizational analysis and performance management in health care organizations and public health systems. Prior to his academic career, he was a management consultant for The Permanente Medical Group where he worked with leaders and clinicians in Northern California to implement primary care practice redesign and evaluate their impact on patient care. He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including key articles focused on measuring and improving patients’ experiences of care and patient-reported outcomes, primary care teamwork, implementation fidelity, and multilevel organizational analyses. Dr. Rodriguez is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a recipient of the John D. Thompson Investigator Award from the Association of University Programs in Health Administration.
Pablo González
Continuing Lecturer, Chicana/o Studies Program and Ethnic Studies Department
Dr. Pablo Gonzalez is a Continuing Lecturer in Chicana/o Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His PhD is in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is originally from Berkeley, California. His work focuses on transnational social movements. In particular, he has investigated the political and cultural resonance of indigenous social movements on Chicanx and Latinx communities in the United States. Dr. Gonzalez also works on issues of criminality and illegality and he has also written on what a decolonial anthropology might look like. Dr. Gonzalez has presented and facilitated workshops on decoloniality in Mexico, Latin America, and Europe. He is currently working on his book manuscript which looks at Zapatista-inspired activism amongst Chicana/o activists.
Ramón Grosfoguel
Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies
Ramon Grosfoguel is internationally recognized for his work on decolonization of knowledge and power as well as for his work in international migration and political-economy of the world-system. He has been a research associate of the Maison des Science de l’Homme in Paris for many years.
Marcial González
Associate Professor, English Department
Marcial González received a B.A. in English from Humboldt State University in 1992, an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Utah in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000. He is the author of Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form: Race, Class, and Reification (U Michigan, 2009), and is currently writing a book on representations of migrant farm laborers in Chicana/o literature. He is also the co-editor of Dialectical Imaginaries: Materialist Approaches to U.S. Latino/a Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (U Michigan, 2018). His current research and teaching interests include Chicana/o literature, migrant and immigrant literature, farm labor social movements, and Marxist literary theory. He also recently co-convened a faculty working group entitled “Critical Prison Studies in an Age of Mass Incarceration” at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. Professor González is the recipient of research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.
Angela Marino
Associate Professor, Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
Angela Marino, Ph.D., New York University. Research areas are: Performance and Political Theory; Fiesta and Carnival; Popular Performance; Theater History; U.S. Latinx and Latin American Studies. Marino is author of Populism and Performance in the Bolivarian Revolution (Northwestern University Press, 2018); co-editor of Festive Devils in the Americas (Seagull Press/University of Chicago Press, 2015) and is published in the Latin American Theater Review (2008); Harvard Revista (2014); e-misférica Journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (2013); and Cultural Anthropology (2014). Prof. Marino is a Faculty Affiliate of the Latinx Research Center and served as Associate Director in 2018-19 and fall of 2019. They are also advisor to the Teatro Lab project, an ensemble course of community-engaged popular theater. More information on teaching, research projects, and publications can be found at angelamarino.net.
Génaro M. Padilla
Professor, English Department
Padilla recently published a study of a 17th century Spanish colonial epic titled La Historia de la Nueva Mexico, 1610 (The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and La Historia de la Nueva Mexico), (University of New Mexico Press) that provides a reading of a 12,000 line poem within a context that considers the problematics of contemporary cultural representations of the first encounter between Spain and indigenous people in what is now the state of New Mexico. He argues that Villagrá’s epic poem of the 1598 Spanish colonial settlement reveals that the soldier was no mere chronicler but rather that his poem offers a subtle critique of the empire whose expansion he seems to be celebrating in the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneid.
Padilla now turns to a study early 20th century Anglo-American painters and writers who introduced a modernist aesthetic in Santa Fe and Taos that continued to objectify Mexican and Native people at the same time that these artists organized historical and arts societies dedicated to preserving “traditional”arts in the region. What I am trying to understand is the contradiction between these advocates and practicioners of modernity and, once again, a regional cultural hegemony that literally made it impossible for Native and Mexican American artists and writers to engage modernism on their own terms.
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
Professor, Sociology and Former Director for the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Martín Sánchez-Jankowski served on the LRC faculty advisory board in 2018-19 and 2019-20, and directed the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and is also Chair of the Center for Ethnographic Research has taught at Berkeley since 1984. He received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in political science. His research has focused on inequality in advanced and developing societies with a particular interest in the sociology of poverty. He has done fieldwork with gangs, in poor neighborhoods, schools, and the illicit underground economy, and is currently engaged in a ten-year study of social change among indigenous peoples in India, the Fiji Islands, and the US. His research has been directed toward understanding the social arrangements and behavior of people living in poverty and he has published a number of books on the topic including City Bound: Urban Life and Political Attitudes Among Chicano Youth (1986); Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society (1991); Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (2008); Burning Dislike: Ethnic Violence in Schools (2016); co-authored with five Berkeley colleagues Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth (1996); and co-edited The Management of Purpose: Lewis Anthony Dexter (2010); and Children in Crisis: Ethnographic Studies in Interanational Contexts (2013)