Welcoming Visiting Scholar Nancy Morales to CSI (2025–26)

We are excited to welcome Dr. Nancy Morales as a Visiting Scholar at the Chicano Studies Institute for the 2025–2026 academic year.

Dr. Morales is the proud daughter of Indigenous (Zapotec) migrants from San Bartolomé Zoogocho, Oaxaca, Mexico, who resettled on Tongva-Gabrielino lands. As an Indigenous (Zapotec) queer feminist scholar, Native ethnographer, and organizer, she draws on Black and Native/Indigenous feminist theories, Indigenous knowledge systems, and frameworks of settler colonialism. Her work centers on the diverse place-based practices of Indigenous (Mixtec and Zapotec) women and Indigiqueer youth across California’s Central Coast and Central Valley—practices that reject heteropatriarchy and imagine Indigenous queer futures.

Dr. Morales is a UCSB alumna and former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She previously served on the committee for the Oaxaqueñx Youth Encuentro (OYE) and co-founded the Collective of Pueblos Originarios in Diaspora at UCSB, a student organization that uplifts Indigenous visibility on campus. During her appointment, she will be working on her first book manuscript, Coming into Sovereignty: Oaxacan Women and Indigiqueer Youth Refusing Heteropatriarchy.

We’re proud to welcome her back to UCSB and CSI.