I teach at UCLA where I am affiliated with three diverse academic units: my primary appointment (and all of my teaching) is in the Law School.  In 2000, I became only the second Latina tenured at a top-20 law school in the U.S.  I hold joint appointments in the Sociology Department, a department consistently ranked in the top-10 nationally, and the Department of Chicana & Chicano Studies and Central American Studies which offers the nation’s only PhD in Chicana/o Studies.

Personal

I was born in 1964 in Roswell, New Mexico, where both of my parents were born in the 1940s. My mothers’ parents were born in Texas and moved from West Texas to Roswell with my maternal grandmother’s large extended family in the late 1930s. My paternal grandmother was the descendant of many generations of mestizo New Mexicans some of whom migrated from Tóme (a Mexican land grant community re-settled in 1739, after being abandoned due to the Pueblo Revolt). My grandmother and her parents were born in Lincoln County, moving to Roswell in 1921, likely because White newcomers pushed out Hispano farmers and ranchers who had settled the region after the U.S. Army had killed and subdued Apaches who controlled the area until the 1860s. My brother and I grew up in Albuquerque’s North Valley where we attended public elementary, middle, and high schools. Today I live in Brentwood with my 23-year-old son though I travel frequently to New Mexico.

Academic Studies, Capitol Hill & Federal Clerkship, 1982-1994 

After five long winters on the East Coast, I chose to attend Stanford University for my legal and doctoral studies, which I completed concurrently in six years. After obtaining my J.D. in 1992 but before writing the dissertation, I clerked for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — a 13-month experience that remains a highlight of my professional life. While working with the wonderful Judge Nelson, I interviewed for assistant professor jobs at several top law schools, but I had yet to hear from UCLA when the Judge, UCLA Class of 1953, happened to run into UCLA Dean Susan Prager at an evening event. The next day I received a call from UCLA, and I’m lucky that the rest is history.

Research & Publications

I was honored to receive the 2021 Outstanding Scholar Award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation (ABF). The Outstanding Scholar Award has been presented since 1957 by the ABF which is one of the world’s most eminent independent organizations for empirical and interdisciplinary study of the law. Previous honorees include UCLA Law Professors Richard Abel and Kimberlé Crensha, as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Broadly speaking, my scholarship focuses on the intersection of law, race, politics, and inequality both historically and today, and I have published numerous articles, book chapters, op-ed commentaries, and authored several books. My latest book Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism was published in 2020 by The New Press.

Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race, first published in 2007, is at once a work of New Mexico history and a study of how law and racial ideology intersected to create new racial groups and re-structure the turn-of-the-twentieth century racial order nationally. The book is widely taught in ethnic studies and history courses, leading New York University Press to issue a new edition in celebration of the book’s tenth anniversary in 2018.

My 1997 book, Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure, documents the career of the “crack baby”/”crack mother” social problem in the media and public policy, situating it at the nexus of the abortion debate, the drug war, and competing discourses of criminalization and medicalization in the late 1980s. Likewise, my book Mapping “Race”: Critical Approaches to Health Disparities Research, co-edited with sociologist Nancy López, considers the social construction of race in the context of health policy.

I frequently lecture to groups of all sizes and in venues across the country, including the University of Florida’s Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations and as the Richard Castro Distinguished Visiting Professor at Metropolitan State University at Denver.

Teaching & Administrative Experience

As a law professor, my teaching falls into two primary buckets: required 1L courses and upper-year electives. The former include Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Introduction to Legal Analysis. The latter have included Critical Race Theory, Latinos/as & the Law, Comparative Racialization & the Law, Law & Society, Race and Racism in American Law, and seminars such as Gender & Crime. After receiving tenure at UCLA, I was a visiting professor of law at the University of New Mexico. I made the decision to leave UCLA permanently in order to raise my young son amidst a large extended family. At UNM, I became the first professor with a joint appointment between the School of Law and the College of Arts & Sciences, where I held a 25% appointment in the American Studies Department.

In 2011, UCLA proved too strong a draw, and I returned to Los Angeles where I expanded my career into senior administrative domains. Most recently, I was Interim Dean of UCLA’s largest academic unit, the Division of Social Sciences in the College of Letters & Science, overseeing 15 academic departments and 300 tenured/tenure-track faculty. From 2013-2015, I was Vice Dean of the UCLA School of Law. I was the first person of color elected President of the Law and Society Association, a multi-disciplinary organization of scholars who study law, legal actors and legal institutions in cultural and social context. At UNM, I was Associate Dean for Faculty Development and founding co-director of the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice with Dr. Nancy López. Currently, I serve as Faculty Director of UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program, the first specialized program of study on race and law for law students in the nation and an intellectual hub for Critical Race Theory. I co-founded CRS in 2000 with several colleagues and was co-director for its first two years of existence.