Luis Alvarez

Luis Alvarez is associate professor in the UC San Diego Department of History who serves as the inaugural director of the university’s Institute of Arts and Humanities and the Chicana/o Latina/o Arts and Humanities program. Their research and teaching interests include relational race and ethnicity, popular culture, and social movements in the history of Chicanas/os, Latinas/os, African-Americans, and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Alvarez is the author of “The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II” and co-editor of “Another University is Possible.” Their publications also include essays in Latino Studies, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Popular Music and Society, Perspectives, French Review of American Studies, OAH Magazine of History, and Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. They have published essays in “Mexican Americans in World War II,” “Transnational Encounters: Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border,” “The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations during the Civil Rights Era,” “Globalization and Culture: Volume II” and “Latinos and World War II: Mobility, Agency, and Ideology.”

Alvarez’s current projects include “From Civil Rights to Global Justice: Popular Culture and the Politics of the Possible,” an investigation of race, pop culture, and social movements in the Americas since World War II, and “Latino Soldiering: Ethnic Politics and Military Service in World War II,” which explores the multiracial, gender, and transnational politics of Mexican American and Afro Latino soldiers from boot camp to combat to post war life. Alvarez is also co-editing (with David Gutierrez) “A History of Mexican America.” They have won numerous awards for research, teaching, and service including fellowships from the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Ford Foundation, the University of California’s Office of the President, the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University, the Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Houston, and the Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award from UC San Diego.

With professors in the Department of History and Department of Ethnic Studies, Alvarez is a founding faculty member of the UC San Diego Race and Oral History Project, a student-focused initiative to develop a living archive of ethnic- and racial-minority histories in the San Diego region.