Catherine S. Ramírez, chair of the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a scholar of Latinx literature, history, visual culture, and performance. Her expertise includes immigration and assimilation, historical memory and erasure, Mexican American women’s history, zoot suits and style politics, and Latinxfuturism.
She is the author of Assimilation: An Alternative History and The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory. She is a co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship and Public Books. And she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.
In addition to being awarded UC Santa Cruz’s Excellence in Teaching Award, Professor Ramírez has won fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Over 2025-26, she is a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar.
From 2013 until 2018, she directed UC Santa Cruz’s Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas. In 2014, she helped launch UCSC’s doctoral program in Latin American and Latino Studies.
A first-generation college graduate, Professor Ramírez holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She enjoys travel, swimming, photography, flamenco, house music, and shopping in thrift stores. She is originally from Monterey Park, California. Before moving to Santa Cruz, she lived in Madrid, Seoul, Albuquerque, and Reno.