Biography

Chris Zepeda-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Chicana/o & Central American Studies, Public Policy, Political Science, Sociology and Labor Studies, as well as a faculty affiliate of the Latino Policy & Politics Institute (LPPI) at UCLA.

Born and raised in the East Los Angeles barrio of Boyle Heights, Professor Zepeda-Millán was the first Chicano to receive a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Cornell University. His research on social movements, immigration, and Latinx politics has been published in top political science and interdisciplinary academic journals. Professor Zepeda-Millán’s first book Latino Mass Mobilization: Immigration, Racialization, and Activism (Cambridge University Press 2017) received multiple national book awards. He recently finished a second book (co-authored with Sophia Wallace) titled Walls, Cages and Family Separation: Race and Immigration Policy in the Trump Era (Cambridge University Press 2020).

As a publicly engaged scholar, Professor Zepeda-Millán has worked with local and national community organizations, been interviewed by local, national and international media outlets, published op-eds in newspapers across the country, and has been an invited contributor to NBC News, Latino Decisions, the London School of Economics’ USA blog, The Progress magazine, and The Huffington Post. He has also been involved in various social movements related to environmental and global justice, labor, student, immigrant and indigenous rights issues.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Professor Zepeda-Millán was a Provost Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago, and held faculty positions in the Department of Political Science at Loyola Marymount University and the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley.