The Latinx and Democracy Cluster (LDC) is co-directed by new senior faculty members Lorena Oropeza, leading professor of Chicanx history and former Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity at UC Davis, and Nicholas Vargas, leading professor of Latino classification and measurement and former Director of the Latinx Studies graduate specialization at the University of Florida. Professors Oropeza and Vargas recently joined UC Berkeley’s Chicanx/Latinx Studies Program in the Department of Ethnic Studies and are passionate about advancing pipelines for Latino scholars in the social sciences.
Delighted to join Berkeley as a member of the Latinx and Democracy Cluster, Lorena Oropeza is a professor of Ethnic Studies and historian of the Chicanx/Latinx experience. Since arriving at Berkeley in 2022, she has been deeply involved in elevating Latinx Studies across campus by supporting faculty career success and programmatic development while pursuing an active research agenda dedicated to harnessing the subversive potential of history to interrogate received wisdom and simplistic narratives.
Currently, she is writing A Mexican History of the United States, a sweeping examination of the ethnic Mexican experience north of the present-border. Trained as a scholar of U.S. foreign relations, her work investigates the overlapping themes of race, gender, and empire. A scholar of the Chicano Movement as well, her most recent book, The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina, Lost Prophet of the Chicano Movement, unlocked the personal and political dimensions of a controversial 1960s leader who was once seen as the militant alternative to Cesar Chavez. The book presents Tijerina as a scholar and a thinker whose brilliant analysis inspired a movement in New Mexico to regain ancestral lands lost after the American takeover in 1848 while at the same time noting that his political success depended upon the exploitation of women in his family. Oropeza is also the author of ¡Raza Sí!¡Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Vietnam War Era, which interrogates the emergence of Chicano anti-war politics that culminated in the massive Chicano Moratorium march in August 1970 in Los Angeles. It places the evolution of ethnic group politics from what she calls "the politics of subordination," a masculinist civil rights strategy among Mexican Americans that since World War II had relied upon unflinching patriotism and battlefield valor to the Chicano movement's daring "politics of confrontation."
At a time when California's population hovers at 40% Latinx, Oropeza is also honored to be part of Berkeley's quest to be a Latinx Thriving Institution. In addition to co-leading the Latinx and Democracy cluster, she is the coordinator of the Chicanx Latinx Studies Program within the Ethnic Studies Department. In that role, she is charged with supporting and strengthening a program that emerged from Berkeley's Third World Strike in 1969 and has been the historic heart of Latinx studies on campus ever since.
Finally, after several years of organizing faculty writing programs that reach across the UC system, she is thrilled to be selected as the faculty lead of a campus-based faculty writing program that will launch in 2025 under the auspices of the Office of Faculty Equity and Welfare. She is especially interested in supporting the research of faculty, including Latinx faculty, who have demonstrated a remarkable record of service.
Dr. 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, and Race, Ethnicity and Education, among others.