The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

Isabella Garcia (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where she is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship and the Katherine Sweeney Fellowship. Isabella received her B.A. in History and English & Creative Writing from Wellesley College in 2022 and was also a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.

Isabella’s research aims to look at the roles Chicana and Chicane youth activists played in the broader Chicano Movement in the late twentieth century in the United States, and carefully consider why their marginalization in movement histories matters. She argues that addressing their marginalization is important to understand the effects scholarly and cultural texts have on the production of young Chicanes’ identities. She hopes her work will provide young Chicanes with key information regarding the relative obscurity Chicana activists maintain within Chicane histories, and will continue to supplement their identity formation.

Isabella is a proud Chicana and first-generation college student from Southern California. She attributes her project inspirations to her family’s lived experiences and lively story-telling.