The LSSPI carries out its goals with the leadership of Professors G. Cristina Mora, Nicholas Vargas, and Michael Rodríguez, three leading scholars in the Latino Social Sciences, with the support of UC Berkeley's Latinx Research Center and the College of Letters & Science.
G. Cristina Mora, PhD
LSSPI Co-Director
G. Cristina Mora is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies (by courtesy) and the Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies 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 provided the first historical account of the rise of the “Hispanic/Latino” pan-ethnic category in the United States. This work and related articles have 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. Her work has been published in venues like the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Latino Studies, and the Du Bois Review
She is working on two new book projects funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. The first, California Color Lines: Racial Politics in an Era of Economic Precarity (with T. Paschel), examines the contradictions of racial politics in the nation's most diverse and seemingly progressive state. The second, Race and the Politics of Trust in an Age of Government Cynicism (with J. Dowling and M. Rodriguez-Muñiz), provides the first mixed methods examination of race and political trust in the U.S. In April 2020, Mora oversaw the most extensive survey on California’s Covid-19 economic and health impacts.
Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz , PhD
LSSPI Co-Director
Michael Rodríguez-Muñizis an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is part of Berkeley’s Latinx and Democracy cluster. He has a PhD from Brown University, an MA from the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a BA from Northeastern Illinois University.
His first book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines contemporary political struggles and meaning-making processes through which individuals and societies come to envision and sense demographic change. The book is an extension of his award-winning dissertation.It has been awarded the best book prize from the American Sociological Association’s Latino/a Sociology section, Population section, and Cultural Sociology section and received an honorable mention from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section.
His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Du Bois Review, among other outlets. His current research focuses on the following: 1) the afterlives of Puerto Rican diasporic anticolonialism and state repression; 2) the transformation of demographic imaginaries and contemporary population politics; 3) the racialization of political trust (with J. Dowling and C. Mora); and 4) the epistemic and methodological foundations of Du Boisian sociology. In addition, he is actively involved in the building of a Puerto Rican-focused community archive in Humboldt Park, Chicago.
Nicholas Vargas, PhD
LSSPI Co-Director
Nicholas Vargas is an Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is co-lead of the Latinxs and Democracy Cluster at UCB and sits on the U.S. Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee. Prior to Berkeley, Vargas was Coordinator of Latinx Studies at the University of Florida’s (UF) Center for Latin American Studies for eight years where he led the state’s only Latinx Studies graduate specialization. And before that, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Vargas completed his B.A. in 2006 at Bloomsburg University, and earned his PhD in 2013 at Purdue. As a Latinx Studies scholar, Vargas’ research is situated within the social sciences, and focuses on ethnoracial classification, identification, and stratification. He is keenly interested in issues of race and measurement and seeks to explore how data can help people understand and undermine embedded systems of ethnoracial inequality. Vargas has published over 20 peer-reviewed research articles that have garnered awards from multiple sections of the American Sociological Association and can be found in journal outlets like Latino Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Du Bois Review, Social Forces, andRace, Ethnicity and Education, among others.