University of California, Los Angeles

Faculty Member, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies

About

David Gumaro García

    I am an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.  I just completed a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Sociology at UC-Santa Barbara, working under the mentorship of George Lipsitz. I earned my Ph.D. in U.S. History at UCLA, emphasizing 20th Century social and cultural history. 

    My interdisciplinary research documents the evolution of the Chicano-Latino performance group Culture Clash as a vehicle to analyze knowledge production.  I am particularly interested in how their critical race theater functions as a form of public revisionist history, asserting counternarratives, cultural resilience, and community resistance.  I argue that their work broadens our understandings of the teaching and learning that takes place in commercial and popular cultural productions around the social constructs of race, gender, class, language, and immigrant status. 

    I am also the principal investigator on a collaborative history project documenting struggles for educational equity in Oxnard, California from 1900-1970s, with a particular focus on the desegregation case Soria v. Oxnard School District Board of Trustees (1971).  Our examination of school board minutes from the 1930s confirms the roots of intentional segregation and disparate treatment of Mexican and Black children.  Our oral history interviews testify to the ways Oxnard School District relied on segregated housing patterns in establishing "Mexican" schools and maintaining segregated spaces for Mexicans within otherwise White schools.  We are currently analyzing Spanish and English language newspapers and Soria case materials at the National Archives to shed further light on the roots and branches of racial segregation in Oxnard schools. Our preliminary findings on this local educational history reveals links between Mexican American efforts to challenge school segregation, the labor movement, and the NAACP.

    The University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity has recognized my research with a citation as an Exemplary Diversity Scholar.