By Shelly Leachman • UCSB Rodolfo Hernandez is the eighth of nine siblings in his family. And on June 16, he’ll become the first among them to finish college. That he has reached this point — graduating from UC Santa…
By Shelly Leachman • UCSB In the late 1960s, so few other Latinos attended his college, Cástulo de la Rocha could find and personally call them all in a matter of days. And as a student activist in a growing…
Symposium, presented by UCSB’s Asian American Studies and the Department of Chicano and Chicana Studies at Cal State Northridge, will kick off a global public history project on migration and environmental justice. By Jim Logan • UCSB If we consider…
By Shelly Leachman • UCSB Carlos Marquez wasn’t too long returned from a four-year stint with the U.S. Army and looking for steady work when his brother referred him to his own employer, UC Santa Barbara. It’s a solid job,…
SANTA BARBARA — “Hailing Cesar,” a documentary on Cesar Chavez by grandson Eduardo Chavez, will be presented at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 30 at the UCSB Multicultural Center Theatre. The grandson of civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, Eduardo Chavez, embarks…
By Andrea Estrada • UCSB . The migrant caravan that traveled from Central America to the United States last month generated headlines — and angry rhetoric — long before it arrived. The situation reached fever pitch the Sunday after Thanksgiving when…
By Jim Logan • UCSB Father Luis Olivares had it made. As treasurer of the Claretians, a congregation of Catholic missionaries, he was wined and dined by the titans of Wall Street. They flew him to New York first class, put…
November 29, 2018 Top News Elevating Voices The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center pairs student translators with non-native English-speaking parents for parent-teacher conferences at local elementary schools. Read More The Ambitious Dragon A new book examines China’s drive to become the world…
By Harrison Tasoff • UCSB Recognized for their outstanding contributions to the advancement, use and communication of mathematics, UC Santa Barbara Professors Hector Ceniceros and Zhenghan Wang have been named 2019 fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The association of mathematicians promotes mathematical research and…
Exhibition explores the ways Latinos and Latinas use artistic expression to create their sense of identity and belonging By Talya Myers • UCSB In the silkscreen print “Rio Por No Llorar” (“I Laugh to Keep from Crying”), Carmen Miranda’s famous fruit-laden headdress…
By Andrea Estrada • UCSB SANTA BARBARA — In its 2019 listing of the “Top 30 Public National Universities,” U.S. News & World Report has ranked UC Santa Barbara No. 5. Among “Best National Universities,” which includes both public and private institutions, UC Santa…
By Jim Logan • UCSB For the United States, the demographic terminator — the line that separates night from day — is the Immigration Act of 1965. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on Oct. 3 of that year, it eliminated…
By Talya Meyers • UCSB The third time’s the charm for populist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. After unsuccessful campaigns in 1994 and 2006, he has now become Mexico’s newest president, winning 53 percent of the vote. Considered an unconventional…
By Jim Logan • UCSB The photos are chilling: Giant swathes of devastation in the Brazilian Amazon. Men hip-deep in the brown muck of the gouged and flooded earth. They are the scenes of illegal gold mining in “Garimpeiros: The Wildcat…
By Jim Logan • UCSB Over the course of his distinguished career at UC Santa Barbara, Francisco Lomelí has been the focus of innumerable accolades. Now, as he wraps up 40 years on campus, he has been honored once again. HispaUSA, an…
By Suzanna Ackroyd • UCSB Noe Galvan knows what it means to forge his own path. Born in the United States, the UC Santa Barbara senior moved to Mexico with his parents when he was only three months old. Now…
Ana Guerrero Gallegos, who is graduating with bachelor of art degrees in Chicana/o studies and in sociology, will receive the Luis Leal Social Sciences Undergraduate Award for outstanding interdisciplinary achievement in the social sciences. By Suzanna Ackroyd • UCSB Four…
By Jim Logan • UCSB SANTA BARBARA — For their scholastic achievement, their extraordinary service to the university and the community, and their personal courage and persistence, three graduating seniors at UC Santa Barbara have been named winners of the university’s…
OXNARD — Rio School District (RSD) is partnering with the South Coast Writing Project (SCWriP) at UCSB to fund a summer writing program for up to 75 students entering grades 3-9 in the district in September 2018. When: June 18-June 29, Monday…
By Karen Lindell • UCSB “For my people the word is truth, feeling, memory, symbol of struggle, of resistance, of identity. To possess it and to re-create it is a way of knowledge, a form of communion with the sacred,…
By Jim Logan • UCSB Few issues in the current U.S. political climate sparks more fervent debate than the role and fate of undocumented immigrants. A new series at UC Santa Barbara, “Changing Faces of U.S. Citizenship,” will explore immigration…
SANTA BARBARA — The UC Santa Barbara Multicultural Center—along with Academic Initiatives, Chican@ Studies, and the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education—will host Dr. Gina A. Garcia on Thursday, January 17th at 6 pm in the MCC Theater giving the talk “Decolonizing…
By Jim Logan • UCSB For Suzanne Jill Levine, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara, translating a book into English is more than swapping words from Spanish. It’s an art, a bit of mind reading and…
By Jim Logan / UCSB UC Santa Barbara, as an official Hispanic-Serving Institution, has long been committed to the needs of its Latino students. Now, three new faculty members in the campus’s English department are taking that support to even higher levels.…
By Andrea Estrada • UCSB Norma Elia Cantú has worn many hats over the course of her career. She is adding another next month when she comes to UC Santa Barbara to receive the campus’s 14th annual Luis Leal Award for…
SANTA BARBARA — Dr. Stefanie K. Johnson will speak on “Overcoming biases that affect the evaluation of women and minorities” at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 5 at UCSB, Broida 1640. It is difficult not to make immediate, unconscious, inferences about people…
By Nora Drake • UCSB For students who are the first in their families to pursue higher education, the unfamiliar rituals and routines of daily college life can seem downright foreign. Research shows that dropout rates are higher among these first-generation students,…
By Andrea Estrada • UCSB Diversity matters. It plays a key role in all university endeavors, and a series of multilevel programming organized by the Graduate Division is designed to emphasize just that. “The goal of the Diversity Matters programming is to…
SANTA BARBARA — La Santa Cecilia to perform from 8 to 9:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 3 at UCSB’s Campbell Hall. Click here for tickets and more information. “La Santa Cecilia spreads joy every time its members plug in to do a…
By Jim Medina • UCSB Asking the right question is key to producing an accurate survey. Not only must the question be right — it must be asked in the right way. Consider the first-ever tally of Mexico’s black population. To…
By Jim Logan • UCSB Luck is often more than random good fortune; it’s the product of vision and planning. Just ask Ruben Maldonado. A few years ago he worked for General Motors as a manager, putting in nearly 20…
By Nora Drake • UCSB When UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology Victor Rios was in the eighth grade, he temporarily abandoned his education. Each morning, he would sling his backpack over his shoulders, wave goodbye to his mother and…
Winners include Paola Dela Cruz-Perez, Kelli L. Forman, Felipe O. Infante, Alejandra Martinez-Ramos By Shelly Leachman • UCSB For their scholastic achievement, their extraordinary service to the university and the community, and their personal courage and persistence, three graduating seniors at UC Santa…
By Andrea Estrada • UCSB In the third annual College Access Index published by The New York Times, UC Santa Barbara has ranked No. 2 for its commitment to economic diversity. The ranking is based on a combination of the number of…
SANTA BARBARA — On May 11 at noon in Cheadle Hall, the UCSB campus administration building, Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Margaret Klawunn issued a statement on behalf of Chancellor Henry T. Yang both endorsing the fossil fuel divestment campaign, Fossil…
SANTA BARBARA — The exhibit “Recuerdos de Rosario (Memories of Rosario)” will be presented through 5 p.m. Friday, June 30 at UCSB Library. Stop by the UCSB Library’s Ocean Gallery to see our exhibition of Christopher Cardinale’s illustrations of Rosario, Mexico, the…
By Jim Logan • UCSB Alicia Escalante was an unlikely hero. A poor single mother of five, she became one of the leading activists of the Chicano Movement in the 1960s. She founded the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization…
By Andrea Estrada • UCSB The Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP) at UC Santa Barbara will hold a series of UC Success Night events April 19-28 to celebrate the academic success of seniors from UCSB’s EAOP partnership schools who have been admitted to the…
By the Gevirtz School — Graduate School of Education at UCSB Richard Durán of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School was a member of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report titled Promoting the Educational Success of Children…
SANTA BARBARA — Che Malambo will perform at 7 a.m. Sunday, April 23 at Campbell Hall, UCSB. “A thrilling display… 14 stomping, drumming, roaring men pounded rapid-fire rhythms into the ground with many surfaces of their feet – heels, toes, inside…
By Jim Logan / UCSB For his latest book, “La Virgen de los Boleros” (Isla Negra), Jorge Luis Castillo decided to step outside his literary comfort zone. In the collection of eight short stories, the professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Santa Barbara…
By Shelly Leachman • UCSB As a scholar, Aída Hurtado has marked multiple firsts in her study and teaching of Chicana/o studies and feminist theory. And now she’s made history of another kind, as a featured speaker at the recent…
By Sonia Fernandez / UCSB If you’re a college undergrad, you know full well your third year is your moment of truth. Gone are the days of tentatively exploring your major; gone is much of the flexibility you had to…
By Amy Bentley / UCSB Many miles away from the popular Mexican seaside resort towns of Puerto Vallarta and Cabo San Lucas lie the poor, rural villages of Mexico’s Mixtec people, also known as “the People of the Land of…
By Shelly Leachman / UCSB It’s a long way from Wilmington to London. But Georgina Aguilar will soon make the trek from her home city of nine square miles and 57,000 people to 600-square-mile London, nine million people strong. And…
By Jim Logan / UCSB Few scholars have done more to document the lives and activism of Mexican-Americans than Mario García. For more than four decades the professor of Chicano and Chicana studies and of history at UC Santa Barbara has given voice to the…
By Jim Logan / UCSB You might say there was something lost in translation when Santa Barbara named a street Canon Perdido. It should have been Cañon Perdido, after a cannon that disappeared on the beach in 1848. Without that…
By Sonia Fernandez / UCSB In 18th-century Mexico, casta paintings were all the rage, as the bloodlines of Spanish colonizers and of the colonized indigenous, black and mixed-race populations mingled and American-born Spaniards sought to define themselves apart amid increasingly blurry racial…
SANTA BARBARA — Professors Suzanne Jill Levine and Jorge Luis Castillo will present a bilingual reading of Tides, at 4 p.m. Tuesday, May 31 at the McCune Conference Room. The reading is a translation of a chapbook of poetry by Pedro…
By Jim Logan / UCSB Miroslava Chávez-García, who has done groundbreaking studies on race, gender and power in California, is taking her scholarship in a new direction: Germany. A professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara,…
SANTA BARBARA — UCSB Arts & Lectures will present ‘Juan Felipe Herrera An Evening with the 2015-16 United States Poet Laureate’ at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 1 at UCSB’s Campbell Hall. U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera is the first Latino…
By Jim Logan / UCSB History has not been kind to the Maya, an indigenous people of Mesoamerica. They’re usually portrayed as the hapless victims of European colonialism who collapsed and disappeared as a result of overpopulation and environmental degradation. A…
SANTA BARBARA — Award-winning author Reyna Grande will be presented with UCSB’s 12th annual Luis Leal Literature Award during a ceremony at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 4, in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building at UCSB.…
By Shelly Leachman / UCSB Determined to position herself for a successful future, Esmeralda Cruz is about as dedicated as teenagers come. Working hard and studying harder, she’s laser-focused on getting into college and, ultimately, forging a solid career. Asked…
By Andrea Estrada / UCSB The Chicano movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was the largest and most widespread civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican-Americans in U.S. history. But without strong and dedicated leadership, it might not have…
Read de Alaniz will showcase his research in chemistry when he delivers the annual Plous Lecture next spring By Andrea Estrada / UCSB Javier Read de Alaniz, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa…
By Andrea Estrada / UCSB Three remarkable graduating seniors at UC Santa Barbara have been named winners of the university’s top awards for their scholastic achievement, their extraordinary service to the university and the community, and their personal courage and…
By Jessica Fenton / UCSB UC Santa Barbara undergraduate María Prado has been named one of nine new Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund Foundation (WW-RBF) Fellows for Aspiring Teachers of Color, university officials reported in a media release. Selected through a…
By Andrea Estrada / UCSB The Early Academic Outreach Program (EAOP) at UC Santa Barbara will hold its annual spring Higher Education Week, a four-day event beginning on Tuesday, March 10. Representatives from universities, colleges and other institutions of higher…
SANTA BARBARA — The UCSB Multicultural Center will present the Cup of Culture film screening of “La Mission” at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 4 at the MCC Theater. Growing up in the Mission District of San Francisco, Che Rivera has always had…
