From Professor James McKeever Tomorrow (February 15) on https://www.sociologiststalkingrealshit.com/podcast. I sit down with activist intellectual Dr. Jose Zapata Calderon. We discuss the roots of migration and Biden’s proposed Immigration policies, community engaged scholarship, multiracial coalitions, and in the end some actual solutions for inequality. Jose Zapata Calderon is Emeritus Professor in Sociology and Chicano/a Latino/a Studies at Pitzer College and President of the Latino and Latina Roundtable of the San Gabriel and Pomona Valley. He received an A. A. from Northeastern Jr. College, a B. A. from the University of Colorado and a PhD in Sociology from UCLA. As the son of immigrant farm workers from Mexico, he has had a long history of connecting his organizing and academic work with community-based teaching, participatory action research, critical pedagogy, and engagement. He was a national founder of the URBAN-Based Research Action Network and the American Sociology Association Latino and Latina Studies Section. From 2013 – 2015, he served a two-year term as a board member of the Los Angeles County Board of Education. He was recently honored with the prestigious National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies Scholar Lifetime Achievement Award and has received numerous awards including: the Ambassador Nathaniel and Elizabeth Davis Civil Rights Legacy Award; the “Dreamkeeper Award” from the California Alliance of African American Educators; the California Campus Compact Richard E. Cone Award for Excellence and Leadership in Cultivating Community Partnerships in Higher Education; the Goddess of Pomona Award from the City of Pomona, the Michi and Walter Weglyn Chair in Multicultural Studies at Cal Poly University, Pomona; and the United Farm Worker’s Union “Si Se Puede” award for his life-long contributions to the farm worker movement. A recent TedX video, Finding Cesar Chavez: A Transformative Moment,” was chosen as an Editor’s Pick nationally. As a community-based public intellectual, he has published over sixty articles (with the most recent one “The Same Struggle: Immigrant Rights and Educational Justice” in the book Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out: Voices from the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement) and including the books: Lessons from an Activist Intellectual: Teaching, Research, and Organizing for Social Change, and Race, Poverty, and Social Justice: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Through Service Learning.
Jose Zapata Calderon Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Chicano/a and Latino/a Studies 1050 North Mills Avenue Claremont, CA 91711-6101 (909) 952-1640 Jose_Calderon@pitzer.edu Website: www.josezcalderon.com