This year, four CLA faculty reached major scholarly milestones for work that centers Latinx/e histories, identities and communities across disciplines. Their achievements reflect the culturally enriching scholarship that defines Cal Poly's commitment to becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution.

Uncovering the American Dream

G. Aron Ramirez | Assistant Professor, History

G. Aron Ramirez's doctoral dissertation, “The Death of the American Dream, en Español: The Problem of Latine Homeownership in the Late Twentieth Century,” earned the Edwin W. Small Prize from the Yale Department of History, the Theron Rockwell Field Prize from the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a 2026 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to develop the work into a book.

Completed at Yale in 2024, the dissertation draws on national archives, presidential libraries and community repositories to trace three decades of housing policy. “The problem of Latine homeownership was really a problem of low-income homeownership,” Ramirez writes, using Latine history as a lens to reveal how the entire political economy of housing was remade: the federal government retreated from public investment, nonprofits tried but couldn't fill the gap alone, policymakers shifted from building new homes to bundling existing mortgages into securities for Wall Street investors and homeownership itself was redefined as high-risk debt on older properties in segregated neighborhoods.

Ramirez brings that same commitment to recovering overlooked histories in the classroom, teaching courses in American history that challenge students to see how policy decisions of the past continue to shape communities today.

A Play Almost Twenty Years in the Making

Ramón Esquivel | Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance

Ramón Esquivel’s play “Dulce,” won the 2025 Distinguished Play Award from the American Alliance for Theatre and Education. The play, which Esquivel first wrote for a playwriting class in 2005, went through more than 10 drafts over nearly two decades before reaching its current form.

“Dulce” tells the story of Memo, a 10-year-old boy who returns from a family trip to discover that his abuelita has died. When his grandmother appears to him with an uncanny mission to find her most precious treasure, what follows is a story full of magical realism, physical comedy and the pain of a first- and second-generation immigrant family holding onto its roots. The treasure turns out to be a quinceañera dress connecting three generations of women.

“The whole story of the play is really about how family is a treasure,” Esquivel said, “and we remember those we’ve lost in the faces of those who are still with us.”

Esquivel teaches playwriting, script analysis and Latinx theater, assigning Latino playwrights while encouraging students of all backgrounds to find connections to their own family histories and identities.

The Science of Unique Identities

Ivan A. Hernandez | Assistant Professor, Psychology and Child Development

Ivan A. Hernandez earned the 2025 SAGE Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), recognizing an early-career body of work that includes 18 publications, more than 400 citations and over $1 million in research funding.

Hernandez investigates how social environments shape people's life trajectories through identity and motivation. His research challenges traditional frameworks of academic achievement by exploring what students bring to the classroom rather than what they lack. As his nomination for the SAGE award describes, “Students exhibit positive identity development, persistence and performance when educational environments acknowledge the unique strengths that they have acquired from their otherwise stigmatized experiences.”

Hernandez’s work has influenced youth development programs, educational interventions and policies designed to support positive student outcomes. A recently awarded $999,292 National Science Foundation grant is extending Hernandez’s efforts even further, to investigating how students' access to opportunities is shaped by interactions with educators.

As a first-generation Latinx scholar from a working-class immigrant family, Hernandez draws on personal experience in his commitment to broadening participation in higher education. He teaches Multicultural Psychology and Advanced Social Psychology and serves on the department's diversity committee.

Bearing Witness in Guatemala

Martha Galván-Mandujano | Associate Professor of Spanish, World Languages and Cultures

Martha Galván-Mandujano co-authored “Women and Genocide in Guatemala: Justice and the Politics of Memorialization” with JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2026. The book examines the post-genocide memorialization process in Guatemala, where more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared — including some 45,000 victims of forced disappearance — during the country's 36-year internal armed conflict, which ended in 1996.

“At many memory and genocide conferences I attended, Guatemala was rarely mentioned or even known,” Galván-Mandujano said. “We felt it was urgent to highlight the efforts of survivors, activists and organizations working to preserve historical memory, pursue justice and educate future generations so that such atrocities are never repeated.”

Part of the book is dedicated to the Abuelas of Sepur Zarco, Indigenous Maya Q'eqchi' women who survived domestic slavery and systematic rape during the conflict. Galván-Mandujano was invited to accompany these women as they celebrated the first anniversary of a landmark legal victory: In 2016 a national court prosecuted military leaders for wartime sexual slavery for the first time.

Galván-Mandujano's research informs her teaching in Spanish language, culture and Latin American studies, connecting students to histories that remain underrepresented in global scholarship.

Photo credits: Rintaro Sato.