Team

Luis Alvarez is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Academic Personnel and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at UC San Diego, where he has also served as Director of the Chicanx Latinx Studies Program and inaugural Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities.  His research and teaching interests include race, popular culture, and social movements in Chicanx, Latinx, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands studies.  He is a founding faculty member of the Race and Oral History Project, and co-teaches the course.

Simeon Man is Associate Professor of History and the inaugural Director of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies Program and Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego. His research and teaching centers on race and US imperialism in Asia and the Pacific. He is a founding faculty member of the Race and oral History Project and co-teaches the course.

Alanna Aiko Moore works with faculty, staff and students across the UC San Diego campus as the Librarian for Sociology, Ethnic Studies and Critical Gender Studies, where she has also served on the Critical Gender Studies Executive Committee and the LGBT Resource Center Advisory Board. Her research focuses on equity and access to information and diversity and social justice in librarianship. She has worked with the Race and Oral History Project since its inception and has guest lectured in the course.

Cristela Garcia Spitz is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the UC San Diego Library and collaborates across areas of the library, campus, and community on projects to ensure the long-term accessibility, use, and preservation of the University’s unique collections freely available in UC San Diego’s Digital Collections website, library.ucsd.edu/dc.  For the Race and Oral History project, she worked with the team to teach about conducting oral histories, carry out the oral history submission process, and build the Knit website technical infrastructure.

Kyleen Martin (she/her) is a recent graduate of University of California San Diego, receiving her B.A. in Ethnic Studies with a minor in Black Diaspora and African American Studies. Kyleen took the Race and Oral History class during the Spring of 2022 and joined the project as a digital production assistant during the 2023-24 school year and the Summer of 2024. While working with the project, she assisted with preparing oral histories for the UCSD archives and updating the website’s Course Instructions pages that will guide future students who participate in the class. Post-graduation, Kyleen will be joining the San Diego Hunger Coalition through Americorps’ VISTA program and plans on continuing archival work through volunteer work.

Alex Dinh (he/his/him) is a current doctoral student examining the intersection between Critical Food Studies and Critical Refugee Studies in the  UCSD Department of History. His prior academic work includes earning a M.Ed from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and teaching Biology and Physiology in historically-marginalized areas of Los Angeles. Alex was honored to join the ROHP team in 2022. He helped build the Our Approach section and organize oral history files in preparation for transfer to the UCSD Digital Collections. His proudest achievement was working in a collaborative space between UCSD departments, united in their shared aim to preserve the unique and enriching stories of marginalized San Diego communities. Go team!

Cristabel Otero Castaneda was an undergraduate student at the University of California, majoring in Cognitive Science – Design and Interaction and minoring in Ethnic Studies and Chicanx/Latinx Studies. She assisted in archiving oral histories and re-designing the website as a summer intern for the Race and Oral History Project in 2020. She continued from Fall 2020 to Summer 2021 working on Course Instructions.