Dr. Abigail Rosas

Dr. Abigail Rosas

California State University, Long BeachDr. Abigail Rosas
Chicano & Latino Studies Department

1250 Bellflower Blvd.
Tel. (562) 985-4640
Fax (562) 985.4631

E-Mail: Abigail.Rosas@csulb.edu

Abigail Rosas is Associate Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Dr. Rosas received her Ph.D. from the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and B.A. in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and Sociology from Stanford University. Prior to joining the faculty at CSULB, she was Co-Director and Assistant Professor of the Ethnic Studies Program at California State University, Stanislaus.

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, the activism of resilient Latina/o and African American neighbors and friends have been formative to her scholarly pursuits. Her research has been supported by a Rice University’s Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Postdoctoral Fellowship, a UCLA Institute for American Cultures Post-Doctoral Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the OAH Nathan Huggins-Benjamin Quarles Award, and a Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. These fellowships have allowed for an examination of the relational community formation of Latina/os and African Americans in South Central Los Angeles. Dr. Rosas book manuscript, South Central Is Home: Race and the Power of Community Investment in Los Angeles (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019), showcases that African American and Latina/o interactions are charged yet rife with opportunities to craft something anew, as they constantly negotiate their relationships through evolving economic, political, and social policy that perpetually demonize and prosecute poor families color. Dr. Rosas has published two book chapters in anthologies that discuss the complexity of African American and Latina/o relations. The book chapter, “Banking on the Community: Interracial Interaction in a Historically African American Bank, 1947-2007,” in Laura Pulido and Josh Kun, editors, Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), focuses on the ways that business leadership and racial enterprise grapples with demographic change. In addition, “Raising a Neighborhood: Informal Networks between Latina and African American Women in South Central Los Angeles” in Brian D. Behnken, editor, The Struggle in Black and Brown: African American and Mexican American Relations During the Civil Rights Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), captures how South Central residents, most especially as parents raising youth in a multiracial community, pursue working cross-racially to assert an inclusive approach toward race and gender relations to confront the entrenchment of poverty.

Dr. Rosas served as a special issue editor for Kalfou: Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. She wrote the introductory article to a collection of essays the discussed the interracial dynamics of laboring lives and experiences in midst of the COVID-19 pandemic (“Introduction: Enduring Dangers of Essentializing Labor and Laborers,” Special Issue: The Enduring Dangers of Essentializing Labor and Laborers, Abigail Rosas and Ana Elizabeth Rosas, eds.. Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies Vol. 8, No. 1-2 (2021)).

At CSULB, Dr. Rosas teaches Chicano History, Chicana/o and Latino/a California History, Introduction to Chicano and Latino Life, and Introduction to Ethnic Studies. She serves as the Faculty Coordinator to Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF), a position she wholeheartedly enjoys as she, too, was an undergraduate MMUF fellow.