An interdisciplinary team of professors at UC Berkeley coordinated the hiring process for the Latinxs and Democracy (LDC) cluster last academic year. The cluster's work is essential as it enriches the UC Berkeley community. The cluster members' teaching and mentoring benefit all students, and they are joining others in making UC Berkeley a critical national center for cutting-edge Latinx Research.
Dr. Jenny S. Guadamuz, an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Health, focuses on health inequities across immigration status. Her research has been published in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA, the American Journal of Public Health, and Health Affairs.
Her current research focuses on health inequities across immigration status. Immigration status is a critical yet overlooked factor influencing inequities – especially among Latinx adults and their families – because noncitizens endure significant barriers to legal and social protections, including systemic exclusions from health care.
As a health services researcher and pharmacoepidemiologist, Dr. Guadamuz uses an interdisciplinary approach to identify how structural determinants impact the use of healthcare, especially medications, among minoritized racial/ethnic populations. Her current research focuses on health inequities across immigration status. Immigration status is a critical yet overlooked factor influencing inequities because noncitizens endure significant barriers to legal and social protections, including systemic exclusions from healthcare. She also researches drug utilization among historically excluded populations, federal policies to mitigate drug risks, and the role of pharmacy accessibility in determining access to medications using electronic health records, administrative claims, surveys, and geospatial data. Her unique research perspective has garnered funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of their inaugural cohort of Health Policy Research Scholars. Her research appears in several high-impact journals, including JAMA, Health Affairs, and the American Journal of Public Health.
Dr. Kristina Lovato, is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare and serves as the Director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare (CICW) in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a member of the UC Berkeley cluster on Latinxs and Democracy.
Dr Lovato’s scholarly work and teaching is directly informed by her dedication to community-engaged social justice. She has spent the past 20 years working at the intersection of Latinx child wellbeing and immigration issues as a bilingual social work practitioner and researcher. Her research utilizes intersectional, qualitative approaches to examine the impact of immigration policy on immigrant child and family wellbeing. She aims to enhance culturally responsive maltreatment prevention strategies and improve child welfare and other social service system responses to meet the needs of immigrant youth and families. Dr. Lovato’s work has been funded by Casey Family Programs and the National Research Center on Hispanic Children and Families.
In her currently funded study, Dr. Lovato is examining the mental health and social service needs of unaccompanied transitional-age immigrant youth (TAY) 18-24, who were forcibly separated from their families and are navigating the precarious transition from childhood to adulthood. This study aims to highlight these youths’ strengths and lived experiences while working towards policy and practice-based interventions that are equity-informed, culturally responsive, and aimed at reducing entry into the foster care system.
Dr. Lovato earned a doctorate in Social Welfare from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), an MSW from San Francisco State University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology/Anthropology from St. Mary’s College of California. She arrives at UC Berkeley Social Welfare, after holding a tenure-track faculty appointment in the School of Social Work at California State University, Long Beach (2017-2022).
Dr. Laurent Reyes is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Welfare, a scholar in the Latinx and Democracy Cluster at UC Berkeley, and a member of the UCSF Emancipatory Sciences Lab. She comes to UC Berkeley from Rutgers University, where she received her MSW and PhD in Social Work with a focus on Aging and Latinx communities.
Dr. Reyes is committed to developing research that challenges current systems of inequality that directly affect older Black and Latinx adults. As an activist scholar and storyteller, Dr. Reyes leans on qualitative and visual methods to listen and elevate lifetime stories of resistance and solidarity among Latinx and Black elders to re-imagine a new framework of civic participation emerging from their lived experience.
Dr. Reyes utilizes qualitative and visual methods to elevate the ongoing resistance and solidarity among Latinx and Black elders as they struggle to access community and health services and develop opportunities and solutions to meet community needs and improve conditions. The goal of this research is to re-imagine civic participation and shift socio-political focus and resources to support the solutions and innovations that Black and Latinx communities have developed to survive and thrive in the context of systemic oppression and ethnoracial persecution.
Dr. Reyes works with community members, artists, and non-profit organizations to weave these stories and support the ongoing movement toward liberation.
Dr. Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz(link is external)is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is part of Berkeley’s Latinx and Democracy cluster. He has a PhD from Brown University, an MA from the University of Illinois-Chicago, and a BA from Northeastern Illinois University.
His first book, Figures of the Future: Latino Civil Rights and the Politics of Demographic Change(link is external) (Princeton University Press, 2021), examines contemporary political struggles and meaning-making processes through which individuals and societies come to envision and sense demographic change. The book is an extension of his award-winning dissertation.It has been awarded the best book prize from the American Sociological Association’s Latino/a Sociology section, Population section, and Cultural Sociology section and received an honorable mention from the Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section.
His work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology(link is external), American Journal of Cultural Sociology(link is external), Du Bois Review(link is external),among other outlets. His current research focuses on the following: 1) the afterlives of Puerto Rican diasporic anticolonialism and state repression; 2) the transformation of demographic imaginaries and contemporary population politics; 3) the racialization of political trust (with J. Dowling and C. Mora); and 4) the epistemic and methodological foundations of Du Boisian sociology. In addition, he is actively involved in the building of a Puerto Rican-focused community archive in Humboldt Park, Chicago.
Dr. Stephanie Zonszein, Assistant Professor, Political Science Department, studies the politics of immigration in advanced industrial societies, focusing on the behavior of immigrants and native-born, the policies that aim to shape immigrant integration, and the reactions to those policies.
Dr. Zonszein studies the politics of immigration in advanced industrial societies, focusing on the behavior of immigrants and native-born, the policies that aim to shape immigrant integration, and the reactions to those policies. One strand of her research considers what can be achieved by non-assimilationist policies — that is, policies that either remove structural barriers to integration without imposing cultural ones or make specific accommodations for cultural diversity. These are some of the research questions that motivate this strand of work: Can immigrants enter mainstream society (including proficiency in the host societal language and economic and political participation) without eliminating their cultural distinctiveness? Can institutional accommodation of cultural diversity promote political participation? A second strand of my research considers reactions from the native-born to immigrants' successful integration, examining both electoral and social responses to the accession of members of ethnic minority immigrant groups to political office.