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Catherine Sue Ramirez (2021)

Catherine S. Ramirez is a Professor of Latin American and Latino studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a first generation college student.

Ramirez holds a PhD in ethnic studies, and a BA from The University of California, Berkeley. She is a scholar in migration studies, and Mexican American history. Catherine Ramirez has many notable works, and is the author of Assimilation, The Woman in The Zoot Suit, and is a co-editor of a new upcoming book, Precarity and Belonging. Ramirez holds many awards, one of them being The Excellence in Teaching Award, which is the highest teaching honor at UC Santa Cruz.

Bibliography

The Woman in The Zoot Suit

Ramirez’s book “The Woman in The Zoot Suit” explores the many ways that Mexican American women who were often overlooked, participated and contributed heavily to the WWII era Zoot Suit subculture. It closely inspects the significance that Pachucos and Pachucas had in Mexican American culture during the 1930s-1940s, as well as the ways that Mexican American women at the time resisted femininity, gender norms, and tradition. What drew Ramirez to The Pachuca was simple. “The pachuca attracted me because, quite frankly, I thought she was cool.” she explains in an interview with Olga Echeverria. She explains the similarities she had with pachucas when she was a teen in the 1980’s “my friends and I wore our hair big and high. We also favored black liquid eyeliner and dark lipstick. When my father told me that we looked like pachucas, the girls he used to fear when he was growing up in East L.A. in the 1930s and ‘40s, he piqued my curiosity.” Ramirez interviews different types of women in this book who were ‘zooterinas’, and found that they lived pretty mundane lives “All of my interviewees, for example, were students, workers, mothers, daughters, and/or wives. Despite the generation gap, they weren’t very different from many of my friends and me.” She finds the differences between the iconic Pachucas and female Zooters who have ‘shaped history and been shaped by history’ and decides to examine the inconsistencies within this.

Ramirez's wanted to investigate the lack of scholarly research and artwork on Pachucas. And by doing so she discusses the ways in which they were rejected by Wartime United states and the Chicano movement for refusing to follow gender norms. By doing so she wanted to demonstrate the ways in which pachucas challenge dominant beliefs within the Mexican American community and Chicano identity. Ramirez uses oral history, archival sources, and textual analysis to emphasise her argument.

Chicanafuturism

A term coined by Ramirez in her 2004 article “Deus ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Martinez.” the word Chicanafuturism is heavily inspired by Afrofuturism and Ramirez's love for science fiction. It refers to the cultural production of literature, visual art, music, and performance. Chicanafuturism explores the relationship between gender, race, technology, and science. “Chicanafuturist works excavate and retell histories of contact, colonialism, displacement, labor, migration, resistance, and social and cultural transformation in the Americas.”

Honors and Awards

Ramirez has received honors and awardssuch as a fellowship through Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) and leading Seminar(s) such as the Sawyer Seminar(s) within The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Along with this, Ramirez has the honor of being Principal Investigator at University of California, Santa Cruz and Co-Principal Investigator at University of California Humanities Network Multi-Campus Research Group. She has also received awards for her Teaching such as the Excellence in Teaching Award from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2010.

Media

Ramirez has had many virtual and in-person appearances in Mexican American issues, cultures, and culture through blog posts, op-eds, interviews and public talks. All media can be located through her own personal website. Catherine S. Ramirez has published works within online magazines such as The Atlantic, where she speaks on topics such as older Mexican Americans receiving benefits, higher wages, and Assimilation ; which she uses as a reference connecting her own Book “Assimilation: An Alternative History” . “Assimilation: An Alternative History”, brings Ramirez’s views on radicalization and assimilation. Catherine Ramirez develops an entirely different account of assimilation. Weaving together the legacies of US settler colonialism, slavery, and border control, Ramirez challenges the assumption that racialization and assimilation are separate and incompatible processes.

Photography

Ramirez shows her love and appreciation for Mexican American Culture through photography. Within her website, catherinesramirez.com , there are four sections; Mexican Food of the World, My UCSC, The World of Letters, and Murals & Street Art Ramirez uses photography as a way to become more personable to her readers and connect through familiarity. Mexican Food of the World is a section in which Ramirez connects through photography and a social media account where she expresses her love food and culture. My UCSC depicts the UC Santa Cruz Campus but not only the architecture, but the nooks and crannies of the campus including student and wildlife. The World of Letters captures Ramirez’s love for literature, she captures that love through photos of libraries, books, and artwork that connect literature to herself. Lastly, Murals & Street Art encompasses just that, a glimpse through a cell phone picture Ramirez showcases her love for the arts.