Dr. Jorge Ramirez-Lopez is an assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He teaches courses on global Indigenous movements, borders, and social movements. He is a scholar of Indigenous migration, politics, and borderlands. 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, his B.A. (High Honors) in Black Studies and Sociology (Distinction in the Major) at UC Santa Barbara, and 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 grassroots movement centered on Indigenous rights, autonomy, and multi-ethnic and multi-racial solidarity across borders 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 alongside building relations with Mexican, Chicanx, Latinx, Native, and white allies in both countries. In doing so, Democracy from Below situates Indigenous migrants’ protracted struggle in the late twentieth century as part of Native American, Chicanx/Latinx, United States, Mexican, and labor histories.

Dr. Ramirez-Lopez’s scholarship has been generously supported by 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. Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is Indigenous Triqui with cultural and familial ties to the mestizo 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).