Specialization:
Indigeneity and Im/migration, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x history, North American West History, Border Studies, Social Movements, Relational and Comparative Studies of Race, Labor Studies, transnational US and Mexican history, Oral History
Education:
Ph.D. History, UC San Diego, 2021
M.A. History, UC San Diego, 2017
B.A. Black Studies and Sociology, UC Santa Barbara, 2014
A.A. Santa Rosa Junior College, 2011
Bio:
Dr. Jorge Ramirez-Lopez is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an interdisciplinary historian of Indigenous migration in North America. He studies the crossings of Indigenous people from the Global South with the Global North and how their lives intersect with Indigenous and Immigration history, Chicanx and Latinx history, US and Mexican history, and the cross-border social movements attentive to race and labor. He teaches courses on global Indigenous struggles, global borders, and social movements around the world who redefine and enact new worlds around them.
Previously, Dr. Ramirez-Lopez was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA (2023-2025). He was also a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at Dartmouth College (2021-2023). Dr. Ramirez-Lopez received his Ph.D. and M.A. in History at UC San Diego. He received his B.A. (High Honors) in Black Studies and Sociology (Distinction in the Major) at UC Santa Barbara where he was trained within the Black Radical Tradition and obtained an associate’s degree from Santa Rosa Junior College.
In his current book manuscript, Democracy from Below: The Communal Worlds Indigenous Migrants Created, he follows the lives of Indigenous people from southern Mexico who were among the first significant generation to labor along the US and Mexican Pacific Coast during the 1980s and early 1990s. Drawing on oral histories, traditional and community archives, government records and data, and personal collections in Mexico and the United States, Dr. Ramirez-Lopez highlights the emergence of a cross-border grassroots movement centered on Indigenous rights, autonomy, and multi-ethnic and multi-racial solidarity to confront the neoliberal economic changes of the time. The book is attentive to the strategies, ideologies, and actions of some of the most visible, political, and cultural efforts by Oaxacan migrants that gained transnational momentum while building alliances with one another and those pitted against them. Democracy from Below situates Indigenous migrants’ protracted struggle in the late twentieth century as part of larger story of Native American, Chicanx/Latinx, United States, Mexican, and labor histories.
Dr. Ramirez-Lopez’s scholarship has been generously supported by the Blum Center’s Central Coast Regional Equity (CCRE) research award, the Mellon Foundation/UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program UC-HSI Humanities Initiative, the Fulbright-García Robles U.S. Student Program, the Social Science Research Council-DPDF, UC San Diego's (UCSD) Chancellor’s Research Excellence Scholarships, Friends of the International Center Fellowship (UCSD), the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies (UCSD), and the Emerging Scholars of Program at the University of Houston Downtown. His research has also received national recognition. He was awarded the 2025 Carlton C. Qualey Memorial Award by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society for the best journal article of 2024 in the Journal of American Ethnic History. He received the 2024 UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research. His dissertation was awarded the 2022 W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, the 2022 Latinx Studies Section Dissertation Award of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and an honorable mention for the 2022 LASA/Oxfam America Martin Dissertation Award. During his undergraduate training at UC Santa Barbara, he received the 2014 Paul Robeson Award “Recognized by the Black Studies faculty for excellent scholarship and community service.”
Dr. Ramirez-Lopez also writes about current Mexican Indigenous politics, immigration, and labor issues in the United States and in Mexico. He is currently working on a project about twenty-first century Indigenous land struggles and human rights violations in Oaxaca and a second on a transnational social movement that interconnected the Pacific Coast between Mexico and the United States in 2015. Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is Indigenous Triqui with cultural, social, and familial ties to the town of Putla and the larger Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. He is a member of the board of directors for the Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO) and an advisor to the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales - California (FIOB-CA).
Agrarian and Indigenous Studies Research Group:
Along with Ricado Jacobs and Paul Kohlbry, I am part of the Agrarian and Indigenous Studies Research Group. We are a group of faculty in the Department of Global Studies committed to supporting undergraduate and graduate research in the fields of agrarian and indigenous studies. Our research covers the US/Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East and explores topics including borders, class, food systems, labor, migration, political ecology, race, rural/urban relations, social movements, techno-science and territory. We work within decolonial and Marxist traditions, and use historical (archival and oral histories), sociological, and ethnographic methods to understand the political horizons of contemporary agrarian and indigenous struggles. For current or prospective students interested in exploring agrarian and indigenous studies at UCSB, please check our course offerings and to get in touch with us with any questions
List of Publications:
- “Our Dark Hands and Sore Backs: The Comité Cívico Popular Mixteco and the New Grassroots Activism by Indigenous Mexican Migrants,” Journal of American Ethnic History 43, no. 2 (2024): 5-33. 10.5406/19364695.43.2.01
- “Why Oaxaca? Why Now? The Political Currents of Indigenous Oaxacan Migrants in the Twenty-First Century,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 48, no. 2 (Fall 2023): 179-193. 10.1525/azt.2023.48.2.179
- “Epilogue: We Provide Food for Your Table: Triqui Farmworkers Organizing for Change,” co-authored with Seth Holmes, in Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, Updated with A New Preface and Epilogue (University of California Press 2023). https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520398634/fresh-fruit-broken-bodies
- “Indigenous Harvest in Oaxacalifornia,” in Carissa Garcia and Yenedit Mendez, eds, Boom Oaxaca: Conversaciones de Campo a Campo (The Press at California State University, Fresno 2022). Co-authored with Xóchitl Flores-Marcial.
- “Archives of Indigenous Self-Activity: Capitalism, Violence, and Indigeneity in the Americas,” Radical History Review, Special Issue on Militarism and Capitalism 133 (January 2019): 149-162. 10.1215/01636545-7160126
- “In Memoriam: Cedric Robinson, Modest Audacity, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 3, No. 2 (Fall 2016): 288-297. Co-authored with Jonathan D. Gomez and Ismael F. Illescas. 10.15367/kf.v3i2.108
Courses:
Global 110: Global Culture & Ethics (Spring 2027)
Global 140: Global Racial Justice (Not teaching for 2026-27)
Global 152: Global Indigenous Movements (Fall 2026)
Global 197: Global Borders (Spring 2027)