NATIONAL HISPANIC/LATINX HERITAGE MONTH
EL MES DE LA HERENCIA HISPANA

Héctor Tobar
Associate Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies and Literary Journalism

Latino people from all 50 states shape American culture and politics, but despite their diversity, they are too often viewed as belonging to a single category. That diversity appears across the U.S.: In New Mexico, where hispanos have deep connections to Spanish culture; in South Texas, where some Mexican-Americans express disdain for the country just a few miles south; in Miami, where cubanos differentiate themselves from Hispanics; and in New York City, where Puerto Rican immigrants have been linked with with the local Black community.

This Hispanic Heritage Month, Héctor Tobar, an associate professor of literary journalism and Chicano/Latino studies at UCI, joins the UCI Podcast to discuss the origins of the term “Latino,” the various Latinx cultures he encountered during a road trip across America for a story he published in Harper’s Magazine, and how the lives of all Latinx people are influenced by U.S. imperialism.

Glenda Flores
Associate Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies

Chicano/Latino studies associate professor Glenda Marisol Flores knows a thing or two about Latina educators. She’s the author of Latina Teachers: Creating Careers and Guarding Culture, the award-winning book in which she examines the role Latina educators play in promoting educational success and cultural identity for their Latinx students, often through practices that challenge norms about culture’s place in the teaching profession.

But Flores doesn’t just study Latina educators—she is one. She joined the UCI Department of Chicano/Latino Studies in 2012 and quickly made a name for herself as a top teacher in social sciences. She’s earned the school’s Outstanding Teaching Recognition for five different courses on topics ranging from labor and intersections in education to qualitative methods, theoretical foundations in Chicano studies, and Chicanas in the U.S. She helped launch UCI’s First Gen program for students—like her—who are the first in their family to go to college. And in 2019, she was named the Social Sciences Dean’s Honoree for Celebration of Teaching, putting her in like company with 20 of UCI’s most outstanding instructors across campus.

Now, she's turned her attention to the undervalued yet critical role Latina physicians play in U.S. healthcare. Latina physicians—who comprise less than 2 percent of the total population of medical doctors in the U.S.—often play an outsize role as translators and caregivers compared with Latino and non-Latinx peers. These unpaid gendered and cultural taxes can be silent career killers and cause for burnout, says Flores, and COVID-19 has exacerbated the problem.

Latina physicians deliver culturally competent care that’s indispensable to the communities they serve, yet these skills are routinely uncompensated, tokenized and taken for granted, she says. Their work beyond the traditional doctor-patient relationship has been a critical lifeline for their pandemic patients as Latina physicians have served as cultural support systems when families aren’t allowed to be physically present with their sick loved ones.

The resulting mental, physical and career exhaustion, and possible remedies, are topics Flores explored in two recently published pieces appearing in the journals Contexts and Gender & Society, the latter co-authored with Maricela Bañuelos, UCI sociology and Chicano/Latino studies emphasis graduate student.

We need to recognize the bilingual and cultural abilities that prime Latinas for uncompensated work while also being more cognizant of biases we, as patients and peers, have for people we perceive to be in positions of power, she says. And we need to make sure students from undergrad on up understand sociocultural biases that are ingrained in systems and how, through mentorship, we can work together to address and fix them.

Belinda Campos
Professor and Chair, Chicano/Latino Studies

Relationships can bring happiness and protect health. It's now well established that high quality relationships are linked with better health and longer life, whereas poor quality relationships or a lack of relationships is as risky to health as cigarette smoking. What's less understood, though, is how people arrive at high quality relationships that bring happiness and protect health.

Belinda Campos, Chicano/Latino studies professor and chair, studies factors and processes that characterize high quality relationships, including positive emotions and their expressive displays. A key question she seeks to answer is whether sociocultural contexts that emphasize prioritizing others before the personal desires of the self-shape relationships in ways that benefit psychological and physical health.

Her research—done in the Culture, Relationships and Health Lab here at UCI—measures and observes subjective experience, behavior, and physiology, specifically the levels of stress hormones circulating in our bodies and how our heart responds to social situations. She's found that sociocultural contexts that emphasize prioritizing others before the self, such as is commonly done in Latinx and East Asian cultures, can be beneficial for relationships and protective of health. Among Latinos, there are Spanish language words that describe how social relationship should be—debemos de convivir, we should have a certain amount of togetherness—and it turns out, that sociocultural contexts that have these ideals are protective of health.

I’m fascinated by the ways people think, feel, and behave. That’s why I wanted to become a psychological scientist she says. I also grew up recognizing that some of the cultural ideals and norms that my family regarded as the way the world should be, were distinct and often devalued. 'You need to be more separate from your family' was something I heard often, especially in college and after—or the unique features weren’t represented at all in the classes I was taking.

Her own lived experience told her that important knowledge was missing, and it needed to be better understood.

People might be right that I needed to be more separated from my family, but they might also be very wrong. And as it turns out, these ways of doing relationships have a lot of things right. And now it’s my privilege to shine a light on these ways of doing relationships that are really important—to the people living these cultural ideals that should be celebrated as sources of strength and resilience, and to the broader U.S. culture that prioritizes the personal desires of the self-more than ever before. Plus, what we if we all see in this work ways to be happier and healthier?

Melissa Molina
Undergraduate, Chicano/Latino Studies, Political Science and Education Science

UCI undergraduate Melissa Molina has not one, not two, but three majors. The senior is studying political science, Chicano/Latino studies, and education science - all while holding down two jobs and pursuing award-winning research. (In June, she won first place in the UCI School of Education’s 2021 Undergraduate Research Symposium.) As if all this wasn’t enough, she was a regional organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops and is in the process of hosting her own K-UCI radio show focused on neo soul music.

Latinx Heritage Month, as I prefer to call it, calls on us to critically think about why we only choose to celebrate Latinx communities during a certain period of time, and who is being centered at these celebrations. I hope that we can use this time of celebration to also honor the Black, Indigenous, queer, and trans Latinx folks who are always erased from these narratives, but continue to resist colonialism and other systems of oppression today and always, she says. Disrupting these narratives requires us to sit with the discomfort we may feel through this critical thinking to think about how we are best showing up for these historically marginalized groups even within the Latinx community. I hope to continue learning and unlearning during Latinx Heritage Month and all throughout the year.

Read more about her UCI and advocacy experience and how the pandemic provided her a new perspective:

Leo Chavez
Distinguished Professor and Chair, Anthropology

Leo Chavez, anthropology chair and Distinguished Professor, has been a member of the UCI anthropology faculty since 1987. His research on transnational migration, particularly among Latinx communities, is the focus of four books, including The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens and the Nation, which earned the American Anthropological Association’s 2009 Latina and Latino Book Prize. He’s authored more than 100 academic articles, produced two films, and penned numerous op-eds on the uphill battle undocumented immigrants face in American society with status affecting everything from physical and mental health to access to education and housing. His work has helped debunk stereotypes of the Latinx threat narrative echoed by politicians, pundits and journalists for which he consistently provides expert commentary.

Many of the stereotypes about Latinx people have existed since the 1800s. Today, these misrepresentations are everywhere in the media and in political rhetoric, he says. It is important to recognize that the targets of anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric can suffer real emotional and psychological harm. Such rhetoric perpetuates a view of them as outsiders and perpetually foreign.

His latest work, published in the journal Aztlán, illuminates the inaccuracies and emotional fallout of anti-immigrant and anti-Latinx political rhetoric. Co-authors include UCI colleagues Belinda Campos, Chicano/Latino studies professor and chair, Karina Corona, ’19 psychology and social behavior Ph.D. and Pomona College visiting assistant professor, and Daina Sanchez ’18 anthropology Ph.D. and UCSB assistant professor. He's also author of Latina Fertility, White Demographic Decline, and Immigration Reform, a chapter in a soon-to-be published book, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramon Gutierrez (University of California Press).

Most recently, Chavez was named the recipient of the Distinguished Career Award, given by the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists. The biannual prize recognizes a senior anthropologist who has made outstanding contributions by way of research, teaching, service and public engagement efforts that enhance understanding of Latinx lives and communities in the U.S.

Karissa Sorenson
Director, Social Sciences Academic Resource Center (SSARC)

For Karissa Sorenson, director of the UCI Social Sciences Academic Resource Center, a college education represents generations of sacrifice dating back to her strong grandmothers. Both single moms - one from Cuba who finished high school and one from Mexico who finished first grade - raised their children to value education and the opportunities it affords. Her parents, in turn, both graduated high school. And when Karissa was born, they made many sacrifices to put her and her siblings through private school – a move that opened previously closed doors and possibilities.

Their sacrifices set me on a track that made college possible, she says. She went on to earn both a bachelor’s and master’s, becoming the first person in her family to graduate college. And the pathway she paved guided her two younger siblings to follow suit. She shares this story often with the students she mentors in the SSARC and in the school’s First Gen, First Quarter Challenge—many of whom similarly identify as Latinx and Hispanic—so they know they’re not alone.

Representation matters. When students see themselves in someone who has accomplished what they hope to achieve, it humanizes the experience and helps them find their sense of belonging, she says. They know then they, too, can succeed.

On campus, Sorenson strives to create community and an inclusive culture in all that she does – from her work with FGFQ and SSARC as an academic, graduate school and career-minded mentor to her advisory role with the Dean’s Ambassadors Council. And whenever she gets a phone call, email or drop in from a former student who landed a job or graduate school admission offer she helped facilitate, Sorenson feels a deep sense of pride that always brings memories of her grandmothers.

I dedicate so much of what I do in higher ed to them and their legacy that inspires future generations, she says.

Rocío Rosales
Associate Professor, Sociology

For Angelenos traveling along Venice Boulevard, Santee Alley and other iconic city routes, street vendors pushing carts of delicious food and unique wares are a staple in the city’s informal, hustle economy that supports many undocumented workers. As a graduate student at UCLA, Rocío Rosales would frequent the rainbow umbrella carts where she’d enjoy fruit salad and casual conversation with the vendors about daily life. She became intrigued with their stories of hope and heartache as she came to understand the complex structure of their paisano social networks that both helped and hindered their new lives in the U.S.

Now an associate professor of sociology at UCI, she’s detailed their stories in Fruteros: Street Vending, Illegality, and Ethnic Community in Los Angeles where she examines the hometown links that can be lifelines for entry to the U.S. as well as exploitive networks for an already marginalized population. The work was named among this year’s American Sociological Association Distinguished Book Award winners from the Latinx Sociology Section.

Many immigrants settle in large cities across the United States and some, especially those who are undocumented, find their first jobs in the informal sector of these urban centers. Most of us have a vague understanding of immigrants in cities, but we don’t always understand what a vital role they play in city life, she says. From within the informal sector, they create so much industry, generate so much income and not only for themselves but for many others. Any serious study of city life and urban space must take into account the role that immigrants play in creating that life and space.

Josue Ruedas
Undergraduate Student, Political Science and Chicano/Latino Studies

For UCI political science and Chicano/Latino Studies major Josue Ruedas, childhood experiences with law and institutional racism shaped his trajectory as an Anteater advocate for change. Political science is fantastic for addressing institutional systems. Chicano/Latino studies helps remind me of historical inequities and that my experiences aren’t isolated, but are part of a greater phenomenon, he says.

The classes he's enjoyed most are the ones that have focused on the intersection of race, gender, law, and politics. He’s found that instead of his questions being rebuffed, like they were in high school, they’re encouraged. Ruedas describes his first critical race theory class with delight.

Given my past experiences with law and institutional racism, I came to find out that the field I was really interested in, what I’ve been looking for my whole upbringing, is the field of critical race theory. My first politics of protests class with professor Claire Kim in the School of Social Sciences was reaffirming and empowering to an indescribable degree, he says.

After that class, Ruedas became a member of the Latinx Resource Center Advisory Committee and a discussion leader for the Freshman Edge/ Summer Bridge programs, where he talked about academic success and navigating university life for first-generation students of color. He was also selected by the Associated Students at UCI (ASUCI) to lobby in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. for the University of California Hill Day and the University of California Student Association, Student Lobbying Conference. He advocated for the expansion of mental health services, for financial aid for undocumented students, and for the extension of the Pell Grant.

Ruedas’ internship with UCI’s Cross-Cultural Center proved to be another formative experience. One of his duties at "The Cross" was putting together weekly discussion groups for students on topics ranging from the militarization of the U.S. border to healthcare access.

When he graduates, Ruedas plans to apply to law school. And as he gets ready for his next chapter, he knows education will continue to be a critical component along his path for justice and empowerment.

Laura Enriquez
Associate Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies

UCIChicano/Latino studies associate professor Laura Enriquez is working hard to illuminate how undocumented immigration status shapes the opportunities and relationships of young adults. She’s explored the topic from multiple angles, including education, family, relationships and health. Her award-winning book, Of Love and Papers: How Immigration Policy Affects Romance and Family, details how family life and romantic relationships are complicated and compromised by documentation status. Other award-winning studies have taken a hard look at how immigration laws create multigenerational punishment as the challenges of undocumented status are shared with citizen family members in mixed-status families. For the past two years, she's led the 18-campus UC PromISE comprehensive study to understand and document the extent to which undocumented status disrupts students’ education and wellbeing across California's state universities, and how individual student actions, campus resources, and institutional context may help reduce inequalities. The findings, Enriquez says, paint a complex picture of a largely first-generation student population—a vast majority of whom migrated from Latin America—compromised by immigration status.

Academic performance conceals the struggles these students face on a daily basis, she says, pointing to the rate of students who reported being distracted in class or losing study hours—76 percent and 64 percent, respectively—because they were dealing with or thinking about an issue related to their immigration status. Roughly half reported weekly concerns about parental/guardian deportation, and more than a third thought as frequently about their own possible deportation. Her work earned her the 2020 UCI Academic Senate Early-Career Faculty Award for Research, spotlighting the young scholar’s outstanding disciplinary contributions, which colleagues describe as both groundbreaking and policy relevant.

Katia Necoechea Madriz
’21 psychology and education science

Katia Necoechea Madriz's C.V. reads like a laundry list of accomplishments, extra-curricular involvements, and scholarships. The '21 psychology and education science alumna served as a UC Irvine Peer Academic Advising Program coordinator. She was a discussion leader for the Summer Bridge Program, a teaching assistant for bilingual education, and she helped teach high school students in the Upward Bound program. She interned in various capacities for the Student Alumni Association, was a notetaker for UCI’s Disability Center, and a SAGE Scholar, just to highlight a few of her activities. In spring, she was named a Fulbright Scholar and is currently in the middle of a nine-month stint teaching high school students in Madrid. But her own academic successes come second to her real passion, and what she hopes to do once she returns from Spain: foster others' academic accomplishments as an elementary school principal.

The mentorship I received is why I'm so passionate about bringing that support to other students, she says. It changed the trajectory of my education, career opportunities, and life in the best way. I want to have that impact on others too.

School was a challenge for her in her youth, due completely to circumstances out of her control. Her mother worked days and nights as a cleaner to make ends meet for Katia and her sister, but there were still moments of instability that led to the family having to stay in shelters and move around often. Katia attended six different elementary schools while learning English as a second language. In spite of the difficulties, she persevered and was a star student. Later on as a high-school student and prospective first-gen college student, she relied on organizations like Chula Vista Promise Neighborhood, a local mentorship program, to provide her the advice, resources, and confidence to pursue college and financial aid to make it possible. The power of mentorship provided by CVPN, my teachers, and counselors was crucial in me pursuing my dream to attend college, she says. They showed me the opportunities that were out there, and helped me believe that I was deserving of these scholarships that made it possible for me to afford college.

Katia made it a priority to return the gift of mentorship, even as she worked through a full university schedule. She volunteered to deliver her own workshops on college applications and financial aid through Upward Bound, and even provided support to local high school students in her hometown of Chula Vista. She says that, ultimately, it’s her goal to provide the same confidence she was given, and make other students feel connected, worthy, and supported.

And that’s why her sights are set on a career as a principal - so she can enact programs and school cultures that encourage and support students from all backgrounds. She hopes that her time teaching in Spain will give her experience with high school students and provide some new perspective on how education is approached in other cultures so she can bring new ideas and a fresh perspective to her future school.

Latinx Heritage Month for me means a time during the year dedicated to uplifting the voices of those before us who impacted our communities today, she says. The month of September is dedicated to not forgetting those we continue celebrating; Latinx history and culture should be appreciated and celebrated beyond a month, it should be part of our history conversations and spaces 365 days a year.

Anita Casavantes Bradford
Associate Dean, Social Sciences Faculty Development and Diversity & Associate Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies and History

Educator, researcher and mentor. For Anita Casavantes Bradford, the roles are inseparable, each serving as fuel for the others. The first in her low-income family to go to college, she experienced early on the lifechanging power of having academic advocates in her corner. Now, as a professor of Chicano/Latino studies and history at UCI, she’s paying it forward to make sure students like her have the opportunity to thrive.

Casavantes Bradford is a historian of immigration, critical refugee studies and childhood, and the author of the books The Revolution is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959-1962 (2014) and Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States (2022). The recipient of multiple teaching awards, her classes introduce UCI students to comparative and transnational Latinx histories, the history of immigration, race and ethnicity, the history of childhood, and critical refugee studies. She is perhaps best known, however, for her advocacy for students, a passion that earned her the 2019-20 Academic Senate Distinguished Faculty Award for Mentorship. This honor punctuates the countless hours she’s dedicated to helping first-generation, low income, underrepresented minority and undocumented Anteaters through programs like the First-Generation Faculty Initiative and the First-Generation First Quarter Challenge.

I want our first-gen students to recognize how their experience has shaped their ideas of education and how that can motivate, rather than limit, their aspirations, she says, reflecting on an experience with which she’s intimately familiar.

She’s also deepening her engagement with another UCI student community she’s long been interested in supporting: veterans. Drawing on her firsthand knowledge as the daughter and spouse of military veterans from very different eras, she created the curriculum for UCI’s first course on veterans in history and society. In 2019, alongside social sciences dean Bill Maurer, she helped launch a three-course veterans studies certificate program open to undergraduates—veterans or not.

Too often, veterans are portrayed as either heroes or damaged, she says. Drawing upon critical insights from disciplines like Chicano/Latino studies and gender & sexuality studies, our curriculum critically and compassionately explores the complexity of diverse veterans’ experiences, past and present.

Orlando Lara
Graduate Student, Anthropology

Heritage months always bring conflicting feelings for me. On the one hand, they create an opportunity to celebrate the various communities, but they also remind us of how far we are from truly valuing and equitably treating these communities the rest of the year, even during the celebrated months, says Orlando Lara, UCI anthropology graduate student. I'm thinking here about the treatment of Haitian migrants on the border, for example, or even my friend's U-visa case, which has recently come to my attention. The U-Visa represents a 'pathway to citizenship' for her but is being stalled by an incorrect interpretation of the law by local law enforcement. In recent years, even legal pathways to entry (political asylum) or citizenship (U-visas) have been blocked or restricted.

Before Lara came to UCI to earn a Ph.D., he had dedicated years to grassroots community organizing, been a faculty member at a community college, served as the inaugural associate director of the first ethnic studies department in Texas, and helped establish a traveling multimedia art installation (now in its sixth year). Lara began his journey at Stanford University, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Chicana/o studies; he then got a master’s in anthropology at New York University and an M.F.A. in fiction at Cornell University.

His academic career has shaped his identity as a teacher, activist and artist. And now, as a doctoral student at UCI, he is refining his role as a scholar.

Lara uses his skills in art, creative writing, ethnography and community organizing to advocate for immigrant rights. He has been focused on the experiences of undocumented people since he was an undergraduate exploring the intersection of ethnic studies and anthropology. When he was at Stanford, he had read Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society, by Leo Chavez, UCI anthropology professor and Lara’s current adviser. It was one of the first in-depth analyses of the undocumented population in the U.S., and it resonated on a personal level.

Lara belongs to a mixed-status family. Although he grew up in Texas, his parents were undocumented for much of the 1980s, until the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 – the last amnesty law to provide a path to citizenship for a large swath of immigrants. However, other branches of his family who arrived in the U.S. later weren’t so lucky. The disparities in privilege were shocking to him, even as a toddler.

My interest in immigration started from my first memory, honestly, Lara says. I realized that legal status was an issue, that it created bizarre distinctions between family members that were not – in my mind – rational. I thought, ‘Why do I have all these rights that my cousins don’t have when I don’t deserve them any more than they do?’

Jeanett Castellanos
Associate Dean, Social Sciences Undergraduate Studies, and Teaching Professor, Social Sciences

Her list of “kids”—more than 215 Anteaters long—reads like a Who’s Who at the nation’s top graduate schools, from Harvard University to The Ohio State University to UC Berkeley, to name a few. They’re also in high level posts at esteemed institutions throughout the U.S. as professors, psychologists and administrators. For Jeanett Castellanos, or Dr. C as she’s commonly known around campus, these former students aren’t just people who passed through her classes. They and her current charges are her mentees, her academic family, her kids—and a majority are first generation, underrepresented college students. From the time they enter UCI until they leave, she commits years of her time to developing them as young professionals vested in their communities. And when they leave, they take with them an edict from the social sciences professor of teaching and associate dean of undergraduate studies: Pay it forward.

Good mentorship fosters purpose, public service, and social change. My mentees are taught the importance of community and social responsibility - the role of giving back, she says. I connect the degree to their role in the community and consequently the degree is viewed with greater value. Specifically, it is not simply a diploma that will guarantee extra money and social mobility (which are important) but a degree that leads to a meaningful career path that will facilitate social change and a valuable social contribution to society.

It’s a lesson she learned more than 25 years ago from her own mentor, Joseph White, UCI psychology professor emeritus, and it’s one she’s been putting into practice ever since.

Castellanos grew up in southeast Los Angeles. The only child of Cuban refugees, she was raised to value education, something neither of her parents had a chance to pursue. She graduated from UCI with majors—and honors—in psychology and sociology. She went on to earn her master’s in education with a focus on counseling psychology, and her doctorate in education with a focus on higher education and student affairs. Her approach and attitude about the importance of mentorship come through in her research. Her nationally recognized work merges the fields of counseling and higher education with a particular focus on Latina/os. She has published widely on the topics including two books entitled: The Minority in the Majority: Expanding the Representation of Latina/o Faculty, Administrators and Students in Higher Education and The Latina/o Pathway to the Ph.D.: Abriendo Caminos.

Over the course of her 20+ year career as a leader on the Irvine campus, she’s racked up 5 awards highlighting her service beyond the classroom, including UCI’s 2016-17 Academic Senate Distinguished Faculty Award for Mentorship and the 2020 Society for Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race Distinguished Career in Service Award. The honor from the American Psychological Association Division 45 recognizes the outstanding UCI mentor for her continued dedicated service to communities of color through research, mentorship and work in the field of psychology and higher education.

Salvador Zárate
Assistant Professor, Anthropology

As officials seek out new solutions to intensifying wildfires around the world, Salvador Zárate, anthropology assistant professor, urges consultation with an unlikely source: weed abatement workers. His research aims to elevate the stories and experiences of these critical front-line workers who play an increasingly important role in improving fire prevention policy.

I grew up working in Orange County’s canyons and foothills alongside my late father, Juan Zárate, and his crew of Latino migrant weed abatement workers. The Santa Ana winds organized the economic and social life of my family for over three decades. Now the winds and chaparral organize my research. As an anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, I’m collecting ethnographic data to inform the future of county wildfire policy by talking with county officials, homeowners, independent weed abatement crews, and those that work for the Orange County Weed Abatement Program (OCWAP), the very program for which I worked every spring growing up and until my early 30s.
 
In fire-prone areas in densely forested parts of the western United States, authorities and landowners can sometimes rely on other methods, such as prescribed burns, to lessen the threat of wildfires. But in Orange County and other coastal parts of Southern California, these methods don’t always work.
 
The expansion of WUI private development in the region since the 1980s has meant that manual weed abatement efforts have become increasingly important, particularly because of the abundance of low-to-the-ground oily shrubs and grasses in this populated area. Only workers can maneuver deep in the canyons and close to property lines to eliminate fire threat. For about four weeks in the spring, these small weed abatement crews scale the hills, canyons, and slopes of Orange County, jumping from one overgrown parcel of property to the next. They expertly thin out the biological fuel, both the non-native and highly flammable buckwheat, pampas, and mustard grasses, and the dried growth of the native chaparral biome.
 
Why, some readers might be wondering, have they never heard of weed abatement crews? In sharp contrast to the familiar images of firefighters and aerial displays of water and Phos-Chek fire retardant being dumped onto the hills just feet away from canyon estates, weed abatement workers’ labor happens months before the broader society is reminded, viscerally, of Southern California’s flammable geography.
 
To appreciate the work of migrant workers as first first responders, we must attune our attention not to the fire season, a term that has entered into the mainstream, but to this earlier weed abatement season. That means recognizing the fact that life in the canyons means living intimately with fire year-round for the foreseeable future.
 
It also means reckoning with the unequal distribution of risk: In Orange County, while the most affluent communities tend to be the ones nestled in the WUI and at most risk of fire, they depend heavily on the ecological and technological knowledge of predominantly working poor Latino migrant weed abatement workers to keep them safe. As these risks grow with the impacts of climate change, so do the social and economic disparities between the communities who are protected and those who do the protecting.

Alana LeBrón
Assistant Professor, Chicano/Latino Studies and Public Health

Alana LeBrón, Chicano/Latino studies and public health assistant professor, is working to illuminate the processes that shape social inequalities, its implications for inequities in health, and opportunities for intervention.

Her research has found that racial discrimination can have serious health consequences. A study she co-authored that appears in the journal Ethnicity & Health found that more self-reported incidents among Black and Latinx adults corresponded to higher blood pressure levels, putting these populations at greater risk for cardiovascular disease. In another study, published online with Public Administration Review, she and coauthors found a decline in overall trust in the government as a source of health information for Latinxs who live in counties with high levels of immigrant policing.

Another study, published in the online journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, found that Black, Latina, and American Indian or Alaska Native women had lower odds of receiving adherent treatment for endometrial cancer.

She also has two forthcoming studies in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. The first, based on interviews with Mexican-origin women, highlights the important ways that Mexican communities find agency in responding to multiple restrictive immigration policies and treatment and ways to affirm, protect, and resist their racial identities, which are often stigmatized. In the second, a conceptual piece, LeBrón and a colleague highlight the connection between police violence against Black communities and the COVID-19 pandemic as dual public health crises linked with structural racism. The outline a research agenda that can strengthen understanding about racism and health inequities.

If we are to improve the health of our society and eliminate health inequities, we must invest in undoing and eliminating racism, nativism, classism – all of the ‘isms,’ she says.

Bethany Urbano
'21 Political Science and Education Science

Tu puedes hacer todo lo que tu te propongas. (You can do whatever you set your mind to.)

 
Bethany Urbano and her sister heard these words often while growing up in their Santa Ana home. Their mother, who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico before they were born, didn’t have an opportunity to continue school beyond first grade. Her mom’s experience gave Bethany a very personal understanding of the connection between poverty and literacy, and served as a driving force in her decision to pursue an education. With her mom and a few key mentors in her corner, Bethany blazed a new path as a first-generation Anteater at UCI—an experience she packed with as many opportunities as she could. In June, she was one of only two social sciences undergrads who got to address the 2021 graduating class. While the ceremony was remote, the sense of accomplishment and sacrifice it took her to get to there was every bit real, and something Urbano celebrated with her family proudly at her side and her team of mentors cheering from afar.

While Urbano considers herself extremely fortunate to be have earned a college degree, she acknowledges the path hasn’t been easy. With that in mind, she made a point throughout her time on campus to uplift the voices and experiences of low-income and racial ethnic minority students through formal research, first via the School of Social Sciences Summer Academic Enrichment Program and then as an honors student. Her senior honors thesis—advised by faculty mentors Jeanett Castellanos and Caesar Sereseres—examined organizational barriers that limit low-income students from participating in internships. Widely considered as gateway opportunities for future careers, Urbano’s research found that many internships are completed without pay and therefore limit the ability of low-income students to participate.

The decision to accept an unpaid internship is difficult for low-income students who are unable to financially support themselves throughout an extensive period of time or pay out of pocket expenses. This issue makes unpaid internships a serious and pressing problem for social mobility, she says. Specifically, for low-income students, unpaid internships can become barriers that limit both obtaining a decent occupation after college and climbing the socio-economic ladder. She hopes that by illuminating this critical gap, more employers and universities will work to close it through funded opportunities.

In her final year at UCI, Urbano was named the recipient of a $7,000 Barnes and Noble Scholarship to support international literacy. Her on-going project is a very personal one that connects her research with action in her mom’s hometown in Michoacán, Mexico. Urbano is using the funds to set up a library in an empty room of the community school where students can check out books, have access to needed supplies and pursue enrichment opportunities in an afterschool program. She's now planning to pursue a career in corporate social responsibility after completing her master's so she can help guide philanthropic money to this cause.

I’m passionate about helping countries become more sustainable through development of better education systems because I know how much it’s has changed my life and the opportunities it’s now opened for my whole family, she says. Education is the key to a better future.

Read more about Bethany’s UCI experience and the powerful role mentors played in her path: