CSRC Fellows & Visiting Scholars 2010-2011

Carlos Manuel Haro, assistant director emeritus of the CSRC, has a BA, MA, and PhD from UCLA. His research interests include Chicano education and the history of Chicanos and the schools, oral history research, and comparative and international education. From 1983 through 2001 Dr. Haro served as the assistant to the director and then as assistant dean of UCLA’s International Studies and Overseas Programs. He also served as the program director of the CSRC from 1975 through 1983 and then as assistant director from 2002 through 2007. Dr. Haro is responsible for the CSRC’s annual Latina/o Education Summit series at UCLA, which assesses the critical issues facing Latina/os in the educational pipeline from kindergarten through graduate studies. The 2006 summit, “Falling through the Cracks: Critical Transitions in the Latina/o Educational Pipeline,” was organized by Dr. Haro and Professor Daniel Solorzano. The 2007 summit, “California Community College Students: Understanding the Latina/o Transfer Experience through All Segments of Postsecondary Education,” focused on the importance of the transfer process from community colleges to four-year institutions. “K-12 Education: What Can School Board Members and School Superintendents Do to Assure Student Success?”—the 2008 summit—explored the importance of governance and policy making. The 2009 summit, “Critical Issues for Immigrant and Undocumented Students in the Latina/o Education Pipeline,” focused on how policy and practices affect Latina/o students by looking at the obstacles that limit their opportunities and their access to education, the programs that serve them, and their academic success. Dr. Haro’s publications include Criticisms of Traditional Postsecondary School Admissions Criteria: A Search for Alternatives; Mexicano/Chicano Concerns and School Desegregation in Los Angeles; and The Bakke Decision: The Question of Chicano Access to Higher Education. He also co-authored Mendez v. Westminster: Paving the Way for School Desegregation and co-edited International Education in the New Global Era: Proceedings of a National Policy Conference on the Higher Education Act, Title VI, and Fulbright-Hays Programs.

 

Alvaro Huerta is a doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include immigrant workers and their social networks. At the CSRC Mr. Alvaro is completing his dissertation, which focuses on the negative and positive aspects of social networks among immigrants, with a special emphasis on the informal labor market. He is examining immigrants’ strong ties (within cohesive groups) and weak ties (outside cohesive groups). The objective of his research is to better understand how marginalized immigrant workers, who lack human capital and financial resources, utilize their social networks to navigate this country’s informal economy. Mr. Alvaro has been a research associate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty and a community scholar at the UCLA Program in Urban Planning. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, the latest being a 2007–08 Chancellor’s Award for Public Service in the civic engagement–graduate student category. He has published as a scholar and as a creative writer.

 

Sandra de la Loza is a member of the research team for LA Xicano. Ms. de la Loza is the curator of the exhibition, is "Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza." Research conducted at the CSRC is deeply informing these exhibition efforts. L.A. Xicano comprises four interrelated exhibitions developed by the CSRC. All five exhibitions are part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980, an initiative organized by the Getty Foundation. Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, which are coming together for six months beginning in September to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world. Ms. de la Loza received her MFA from California State University, Long Beach.

 

Alvaro Ochoa-Serrano is a professor of history at El Colegio de Michoacan. During his stay as a visiting scholar Dr. Ochoa-Serrano expanded work on his project, titled A Mexican Tradition in the United States: Mariache Music and Musicians 1910–1960. The central focus of the research is Mexican popular music and the first mariachi recordings. Dr. Ochoa-Serrano has published the findings of his survey of  musical ensembles from 1906 to 1960 (orquestas típicas, duos, and mariacheros) in Mitote, Fandango y Mariacheros (2005, 3rd ed.); “El Mariache resuena: Tradicion e identidad del occidente mexicano en California,” in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 27, no. 2 (2002); and “María cumbe che: Mestizo charros, and Mariacheros,” in Musical Cultures of Latin America: Global Effects, Past and Present, edited by Steven Loza (Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, vol. 11, 2003). Dr. Ochoa-Serrano received his PhD from UCLA.

 

Deborah Vargas is the CSRC Los Tigres del Norte Post-Doctoral Visiting Scholar. She is an assistant professor in Chicano and Latino studies at at the University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in sociology, with an emphasis in feminist studies, from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Vargas’s research focuses on Chicana/o identity, particularly the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and region (predominantly South Texas) and how these are expressed through popular culture. Her dissertation, “Las Tracaleras: Texas-Mexican Women, Music, and Place,” examined the lives of Texas-Mexican women who made important yet unrecognized contributions through the public culture of music. While a visiting scholar at the CSRC, Dr. Vargas worked on “Dissonant Divas: Mejicanas, Music, Nation,” the first interdisciplinary scholarly analysis of Chicana/Mexican-American women singers to pay critical attention to the ways in which popular music stages discourses of citizenship, nationalism, and family through non-normative constructions of sexual agency, gender, and desire. The manuscript is being reviewed for publication. As visiting scholar this year, Dr. Vargas is working on a project titled “Geography, Gender, and Genre: Gloria Rios Reina del Rocanrol.” In this project Dr. Vargas draws on the music archives of the CSRC to explore understudied women in rock music from the 1950s to early 1960s.

 

Karen Mary Davalos, associate professor and chair of Chicana/o studies at Loyola Marymount University, is pursuing two important projects in conjunction with “L.A. Xicano,” which explores the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican American and Chicano artists to contemporary art and to Los Angeles's artistic development since 1945. Dr. Davalos is working on an essay that documents the Goez Gallery, an organization that has not been systematically described or analyzed; the essay will appear in the catalog for L.A. Xicano, a set of four interrelated exhibitions being developed by the CSRC. She is also working on a book manuscript titled “Chicana/o Art: Improbable Subjects and Political Gestures.” Both projects draw from the Latino Art Survey, which comprises more than 125 hours of oral history interviews with L.A. artists. Dr. Davalos is a researcher and co-coordinator for this Getty-funded project; she is also a member of the advisory council.

 

Jennifer Rose Najera is the IAC Post-Doctoral Visiting Scholar; she has been an assistant professor in ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside since 2006. Dr. Najera is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the contradiction between immigration acculturation and racial marginalization among Mexican Americans in southern Texas. At the CSRC she is completing revisions on a book manuscript titled “The Borderlands of Race: Mexican Segregation in a South Texas Town,” which presents a uniquely complex rendering, and analysis, of segregation processes that affect people of Mexican origin in a South Texas community during the first half of the twentieth century.

 

Ramon Garcia is a professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge. He is conducting research on the documentary photographer Ricardo Valverde (1946–1998) for a monograph that will be published by the CSRC Press as a volume in the A Ver series. Professor Garcia is making use of the archives of the Chicana/o Studies Research Center and other relevant archival materials at UCLA.