Laura E. Gómez

Laura E. Gómez is a Professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles where she also holds appointments in Sociology and the Department of Chicana & Chicano Studies and Central American Studies.^[1]

Education and Career[]

Gómez received her B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University in 1986 where she was a Harry S Truman Scholar. She received her M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University in 1988. She later received her J.D. with Honors from Stanford Law School in 1992 and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University in 1994.^[2]

Following law school, Gómez clerked on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for Judge Dorothy W. Nelson. Before going to Stanford, she worked as a legislative aide to U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman.

At UCLA, Gómez co-founded and served as the first co-director (with Jerry Kang) of UCLA's Critical Race Studies Program from 2000-2002. The program is the first specialized program of study on race and law in any U.S. law school.^[3]

Gómez was a Professor in School of Law & American Studies at the University of New Mexico from 2005 to 2011.

From 2009 to 2011, Gómez served as president of the Law and Society Association. Gómez is the first minority scholar and one of the youngest ever elected to head this global organization of university scholars who study law in its cultural context.

Gómez is active in several national scholarly organizations, including the Law and Society Association (where she has served as Treasurer and on the Board of Trustees), the American Sociology Association's Sociology of Law Section, the Association of American Law Schools Minority Section, the Critical race theory Workshops, and LatCrit. Gómez has also served as an Associate Editor of the Law & Society Review. Gómez has been a peer reviewer for several other journals in legal studies, gender studies, Chicano/a studies, legal history and sociology, and she has been a member of the editorial boards of SIGNS and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. Gómez has held prestigious residential fellowships at the School for American Research in Santa Fe and the Stanford Humanities Center, where in 1996-97 she was the last Rockefeller Fellow in Legal Humanities.^[4][5]

Gómez as the former Dean of Social Sciences has faced the accusation in the media of discriminating in hiring practices against conservatives.^[6] She opted not to promote Keith A. Fink to Continuing Lecturer, effectively ending his employment with the Department of Communication Studies on June 30, 2017.^[7]

Publications[]

Gómez has lectured widely and has published numerous articles, book chapters, and op-ed commentaries, as well as three books. Her scholarship has focused on the intersection of law, politics and social stratification in both contemporary and historical contexts.

In Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (1997), she documented the career of the "crack baby"/"crack mother" social problem in the media and public policy, situating it at the nexus of the abortion debate, the drug war, and competing discourses of criminalization and medicalization as they played out in the late 1980s.

In her 2007 book, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (released in paperback in September 2008), Gómez examines how law and racial ideology intersected to create new racial groups and to re-structure the turn-of-the-twentieth century racial order in the U.S. In a new project with sociologist Nancy López (funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico), she will explore the contemporary legacy of that racial order for the scientific study of "race"; how has the right's co-optation of the fact that race is socially constructed promoted the reigning color-blind ideology and what does that mean for how scholars and policymakers operationalize race?

In August 2020, her latest book, Inventing Latinos: A New Story of American Racism, was published. In a book review, Howard Winant writes, "About 20% of the US population is Latinx. As Laura Gómez explains, their identity is a fundamentally racial question, because the Latinx experience in the US includes both racial domination and racial mobilization. Both as colonized peoples and as migrants, Latinx people have built this country. Now more than ever, they are making their voices heard and exercising their political power, challenging White supremacy in numerous ways, and also suffering its violence… In the process, Latinxs’ understanding of themselves is also changing: the “quest for Whiteness” is diminishing, and linkages/overlaps with Black and Indian identities is on the rise. Written with exceptional clarity and drawing on deep research, Inventing Latinos presents not only a brilliant account of the changing position of Latinxs, but also a nuanced theoretical and legally-based understanding of racism in the US today."^[8]

Personal life[]

Gómez was born Roswell, N.M., where her parents, Antonio Gómez, a UNM retiree, and Eloyda Gonzales Gómez, an oncology nurse. Her brother is Miguel Gómez, a former Albuquerque city councilor and graduate of Notre Dame University.

Gómez lived in Albuquerque’s North Valley with her 12-year-old son Alejandro. She is the descendant, via her paternal grandmother, of Cayetano Carrillo, one of the original settlers of Tularosa, New Mexico. Gómez was raised in Albuquerque, where her parents moved in 1966 when her father began attending UNM on the G.I. Bill. Her volunteer activities have included serving on the governing council of the South Valley Academy, serving on the board of directors of the ACLU of Southern California, and serving on the MALDEF scholarship committee.

References[]