The Race & Oral History project is comprised of faculty, librarians, staff, graduate and undergraduate students at UC San Diego and several community partners in the greater San Diego region.


Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has published extensively on Asian American panethnicity, critical immigration and refugee studies, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. She is a founding faculty member of the Race and Oral History project, and co-teaches the course.

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.

Cristabel Otero Castaneda is 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 was a summer intern for the Race and Oral History Project, has assisted in archiving oral histories and re-designing the website. She is currently helping with the upkeep and design of the Race and Oral History Project website.