CSRC Fellows & Visiting Scholars 2006-2007

Horacio Roque Ramirez, Assistant Professor, Department of Chicano Studies, UC Santa Barbara

His research is multidisciplinary (Ph.D. in ethnic studies from Berkeley) and centers on oral histories of the LGBT community throughout California. He has published in this area, including in oral history journals. During 2006-07, as part of his IAC fellowship research, “Re-Membering Bodies: Oral Histories, Public Memory, and LGBT/Queer Latina and Latino Sexualities,” he will analyze his collection of 55 oral interviews, conducted in San Francisco and Los Angeles, from 1995 through 2003. He will look more closely at several dimensions, including gender, nationality, and class, and continue to produce historically-grounded scholarship on LGBT/queer culture and history. These are areas that are not often studied for communities of color through oral history.

 

The seminar class he will offer at UCLA is based on his course, “Oral Histories: Theories and Methods,” offered at UCSB, and he will provide the class with the theme, “Memories of the Body: Oral Histories as the Ground for Theory.” The seminar will broaden the relationship between memory and the body to make room for all genders and sexualities to be expressed. Ideally, students who successfully complete, analyze, and write on their life-history research would have the opportunity to participate in a one-day student symposium in spring 2007 to present their work.

 

David Hernandez, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, 2006-07. PhD (2005), Comparative Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Dr. Hernandez’ second year as a visiting scholar at the CSRC, he will continue work and preparation of a publication based, in part, on his dissertation. Dr. Hernandez has accepted an appointment with the UCLA Chicana/o studies Department to begin 2007-08.

 

His dissertation, "Undue Process: Immigrant Detention, Due Process, and Lesser Citizenship" historicizes the racial profiling of immigrants and the development of immigrant detention policies in the United States since the inception of the Bureau of Immigration in 1891. The central thesis is that contemporary detention policies emerge from the historical dialectic between immigrant detention and the racialization and "othering" of noncitizens. Post-9/11 detention, for example, is merely the latest episode in this process. The analysis contributes to the larger fields of immigration, ethnic, and legal studies, and demonstrates how race functions historically in the statutory production of lesser citizenship through a systematic denial of due process. The project also illustrates how broadly defined "wars" unveil new categories of lesser citizens, while simultaneously buttressing existing inequalities. Moreover, the dissertation demonstrates that the immigrant is an important but often ignored figure in current studies of the prison industrial complex, or what Angela Davis terms the "punishment industry."

 

As a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, Dr. Hernandez will revise the genealogical analysis of immigrant detention in the U.S. that he presented in his dissertation by extending the study in two related areas: 1) the competing authorities of the three federal branches of government over the creation and administration of detention policy; and 2) the relationship between detention facilities and federal prisons. Arising out of an absence in the literature encountered during his dissertation research, this new investigation will broaden the implications of his original thesis by providing a more complete account of how immigrant incarceration affects detainees and their families, as well as immigrant and citizen co-ethnics. Whereas his dissertation assessed the episodic devaluation of immigrants' due process rights, his postdoctoral research will incorporate an analysis of how immigrants are punished differently in the federal justice system as well. With these new lines of inquiry, Dr. Hernandez will transform the consolidated project into a publishable book manuscript for a university press.

 

Irene Vásquez, Associate Professor and Chair, Chicana/o Studies Department, CSU Dominguez Hills

Professor Vasquez devoted summer 2006 to finalizing her digital research project on student activism at UCLA and continuing her work on completing a draft of a co-authored book on the Chicana/o Movement. Her current research project is a social history of Chicana/o Student Activism at UCLA from the 1960s through the 1990s. Dr. Vasquez is the editor of the Youth, Power Change: A Documentary Website of UCLA Student Activism, which can be accessed at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/YPC/contact.html. The UCLA Chicana/o Studies Department currently hosts the website. Her summer research included updating and expanding the website and examining additional archival materials housed in the CSRC library. In addition, she also worked on a publication project entitled Aztlan Making: The Chicana/o Movement From the Ground Up, 1966-1977. This is a co-authored manuscript emphasizing grass roots organizing by diverse constituencies of the Chicana/o Movement. Moreover the manuscript will include chronological and archival references that will be of interest to scholars and general audiences.

 

C. Ondine Chavoya, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Latina/o Studies, Williams College

Professor Chavoya will be with the Chicano Studies Research Center fall 2006. During 2006-07, he is on sabbatical and in residence at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a Research Fellow in American Modernism. His sabbatical and research were supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as a Career Enhancement Fellow. During his visiting scholar appointment at the CSRC, he is focusing on preparing a manuscript for publication on Chicano art in southern California, based on his Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2002. The finalization of the manuscript and its acceptance for publication are principle objectives before tenure review at Williams in 2007.

 

Richard T. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor, English and Latina/Latino Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Professor Rodriguez was appointed as a CSRC visiting scholar for the fall 2006 academic term. Currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and in the Latina/Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, his scholarship and pedagogy emphasizes literary studies, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies in a Chicano/a studies frame.

 

Martha Rivas, PhD candidate, UCLA Graduate School of Education

Ms. Rivas has been awarded several prestigious academic fellowships, including a University of California Regents Fellowship and a Year of Engagement Departmental Fellowship. In preparation for her teaching career, she has served as co-instructor of a graduate seminar at California State University, Northridge, instructor for the Statewide Migrant Student Leadership Institute, and teaching assistant for numerous Chicano Studies courses here at UCLA. Pertinent to her current research project on Chicanas in the community college system, she is the lead graduate researcher for Daniel Solorzano’s Chicana/o Doctorate Productions project and as a researcher for an important study on the graduate college choice process of Chicana students.

 

Rivas’ dissertation examines Chicanas who passed through the community college on the road to the doctorate. She employs a mixed methodology, including quantitative analysis of the NSF survey of earned doctorates and qualitative interviews of Chicana students who passed through the community college system en route to graduate studies. Her methodology is rigorous, sophisticated, and well-conceived. In addition, her research is unique insofar as it explores the community college as part of the undergraduate origins of Chicana doctorates. This research builds nicely upon the recent scholarship of Professor Solorzano which highlights the important role played by community colleges in the educational development of Chicana/o academics.

 

Rivas has strong research experience related to her proposed topic. She was second author of a CSRC policy brief titled, “Community College as a Pathway to Chicana/o Doctorate Production.” Her prior experience as co-author of a longitudinal qualitative study of the graduate college choice decision-making process of Chicana students and related essay publication is also strong evidence of prior research/expertise related to her dissertation research.

 

Steven R. Lopez, Professor, Department of Psychology, UCLA

Project: "Socio-Cultural Processes and Mexican American Families’ Care-Giving"

 

Patricia M. McDonough, Professor, UCLA Graduate School of Education

Project: "Understanding Latina/o College Choice: A Chain Migration Perspective"

 

Lindsay Perez Huber, PhD candidate, Graduate School of Education, UCLA
Project: "Que Siquan Adelante: The Educational Goals and Aspirations of Latina/o AB 540 Students in California"

 

Rita Kohli, PhD candidate, Social Science and Comparative Education, UCLA
Project: "Deconstrucking Racial Perceptions: Internalized Racism and Preservice Teachers of Color"

 

Roberto Emilio Montenegro, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology, UCLA
Project: "Parent Expectations, Spanish-Speaking Doctor-Parent Communications, and Inappropriate Antibiotic Prescribing for Pediatric Upper Respiratory Infections"

 

Vanessa Jeanette Ochoa, PhD candidate, Graduate School of Education, UCLA
Project: "What’s OK at Foshay? A Case Study Analysis of an Academically Effective High School’s Contribution to Latino Collegiate Access"

 

Miguel Zavala, PhD candidate, Graduate School of Education, UCLA
Project: "Charting the Education and Labor Trajectories of Migrant Students in California: Citizenship, Racialization, and Access to Education"