Outstanding achievements
Outstanding achievements
- April 23, 2015
- Vicki Ruiz earns Lauds and Laurels Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award
As a graduate student at Stanford University, Vicki Ruiz spent a life-changing summer with Latino civil rights and labor leader Luisa Moreno.
“I was transfixed by her stories. On the last day of my stay, I blurted out, ‘I know what I’m going to do for my dissertation. I’m going to write about you,’” Ruiz tells. “But Moreno shook her head and said, ‘No, no. You are going to write your dissertation on the cannery workers in southern California. You find these women.’”
Ruiz did, and that’s how her life work in Chicana history began. An expert in 20th century U.S. history, the soft-spoken historian has spent her nearly 40-year academic career reclaiming the stories of Latinas who have quietly fought for civil and labor rights. And what a ride it has been.
“We all know stories about neighborhood women, but if you look at the panorama of their stories, their names are often hidden in organizational minutes, government documents, in diaries, in newspapers,” says Ruiz, UCI Chicano/Latino Studies and history Distinguished Professor. “Once their stories emerge, you often get a sense of their quiet courage.”
She told their stories through her research on Mexican-American women in the U.S. Southwest, and in the process, pioneered the field of Chicana/Latina history. She began with the direction Moreno set, publishing Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 in 1987. Since then, she has written or edited several more books, including Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, which she co-edited in 2006. The three-volume set with more than 600 entries and 300 photographs documents contributions by women of Latin American birth or heritage to the economic and cultural development of the United States. It is the first comprehensive gathering of scholarship on Latinas, and it was named a 2007 Best in Reference book by the New York Public Library, and an Outstanding Title by the American Association of University Presses.
In 2000, Ruiz was named “Woman of the Year in Education” by Latina magazine and in 2009, she was inducted into Stanford’s Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame, established in 1995 to recognize distinguished alumni of color. In 2012, she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and in 2013, she was named Distinguished Professor of Chicano/Latino studies and history at UCI, an honor considered the highest campus-level distinction for faculty.
She serves on an advisory board for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and on the board of Imagining America: Scholars and Artists in Public Life, the national action research consortium. She has served as president of four major scholarly associations, including the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association.
The first in her family to earn an advanced degree, Ruiz joined the UCI faculty in 2001 and was named dean of humanities in 2008 until she completed her term in 2012. She now chairs the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies in the School of Social Sciences. The 2015 Faculty Achievement award from the UCI Alumni Association adds another outstanding accomplishment to Ruiz’s growing list.
And throughout her wildly successful run, she hasn’t lost sight of her initial plan: to tell the story of civil rights and labor leader Luisa Moreno.
“She’s one of the most famous Latinas no one knows about,” Ruiz says. With her Stanford mentor Albert Camarillo, she’s now writing Moreno’s biography, bringing the historian full circle to what she sought to write at 23.
Ruiz will receive the UC Irvine Alumni Association’s Lauds & Laurels Outstanding Faculty Achievement award at the May 14 gala, honoring her many accomplishments.
-Heather Ashbach, Social Sciences Communications and Annabel Adams, Humanities Communications
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