Caroline Martínez, a sixth-year UCI sociology graduate student, is the 2025 recipient of the A. Kimball Romney Award for Outstanding Graduate Paper. The honor recognizes her work examining the legal struggle of a community in Ecuador to be recognized as Indigenous to access land rights and successfully expel a mining company from its territory in 2018. Below, the soon to be graduate from Ecuador shares more about her work and post Ph.D. plans as an Assistant Professor of sociology at San Diego State University.

Give us some background on your educational journey. Where did you earn your undergrad and grad before coming to UCI? What drew you here?

I earned my B.A. from Bowdoin College where I majored in sociology and gender and women’s studies and minored in Latin American studies. I earned an M.A. in gender and development from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO)-Ecuador and an M.A. in sociology from UCI.

I enrolled in the sociology Ph.D. program at UCI because of the expertise of its faculty members on race and ethnicity in Latin America and the United States, immigration, and social movements.

Tell us about your research. What problem will your findings help solve?

As a sociologist of race, indigeneity, and migration, I focus on how Indigenous peoples identify and how they are racialized by others, as well as the consequences of this racialization in Latin America and the United States. I highlight processes of Indigenous identification, struggles for Indigenous state recognition, and Indigenous Latinx discrimination. My dissertation is part of my ongoing work on ethnoracial classification systems and Indigenous identification in Latin America and the United States. Using Census data and interviews with first and second-generation Indigenous migrants, I show how the category of Hispanic/Latino and American Indian has been constructed and has changed in the past four decades in the U.S. Census, who this population is according to the Census, and how Indigenous Latinxs make sense of ethnoracial categories used in the United States to count populations. My dissertation contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the transnational identities of Indigenous peoples in overlapping colonial contexts, such as the United States and Latin American countries. With my research I seek to improve how Indigenous peoples from Latin America are counted in the United States and how resources are distributed based on state understandings of this population and their needs.

Where can your work be found if someone wanted to learn more about your research?  

Martínez, Caroline. 2025. “Indigenous Identity and Struggles for State Recognition in Ecuador.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, online first.
Polletta, Francesca, Debra Boka, Caroline Martínez, and Mutsumi Ogaki. 2025. “Social Movements in the Commercial Public Sphere: How Women’s Magazines Popularized Second-Wave Feminism”. American Journal of Sociology 130(5): 1263–1314.
Martínez, Caroline, Edward Telles, and Florencia Torche (Revise and Resubmit). “From Language to Self-Identification: Indigenous Identity in the Americas”.
Telles, Edward and Caroline Martínez. 2024. “Racial Inequalities in the Americas”. Pp. 80-99 in Handbook on the Sociology of Education, edited by Berends, Mark, Barbara Schneider, and Stephen Lamb. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE.
Martínez, Caroline. 2017. “Formation of Female Indigenous Leaders in the Highlands of Ecuador.” The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal 2016. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

What organizations, foundations, etc. have funded your research while you’ve been at UCI? 

External

2024: Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Dissertation Grant, Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
2024: Junior Summer Institute Fellowship, Latinx Research Center, University of California, Berkeley.
2024: Graduate Studies Enhancement Grant, Social Science Research Council.

Internal (University of California, Irvine)

2024, 2023, 2020: Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies Research Grant.

Give us a quick rundown on your activities and awards earned as an Anteater.

• Graduate Student Article Award (2025), Indigenous Peoples Native Nations, American Sociological Association.
• Student Representative (2024- Present), Latino/a Studies Section, American Sociological Association.
• Member of Planning and Advisory Committee (2023- Present), Social Science Research Council-Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program.
• Pedagogical Fellow (2022-2024).
• Latino Excellence and Achievement Award (2023).
• Cascading Mentorship Fellowship (2021-2023).

Who have been your faculty mentors while here, and what impact have they had on your graduate career?

I am incredibly grateful to Ann Hironaka who has been my mentor since my first-year at UC Irvine. Ann is an empathetic mentor who helped me not give up when I was overwhelmed by the challenges in academia and who asked me critical questions about my research that helped me grow as a scholar.

When do you plan to complete your Ph.D.? What are your plans thereafter?

I will be graduating on June 14, 2025. I will be an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department of San Diego State University starting in the fall of 2025.

Any unique life experiences that have guided your educational journey?

I grew up in Ecuador with an acute awareness of race because my mestizo Ecuadorian father faced discrimination due to his Indigenous features and poverty, and my mother held special privileges as a white woman and United States citizen. My racial consciousness grew from observing how my parents were treated and from realizing the structural disadvantages Indigenous people faced through my involvement from a young age in the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country’s largest Indigenous organization. Through marches and meetings of the CONAIE I learned about Ecuador’s colonial history, Indigenous uprisings, and struggles for Indigenous rights in a country that celebrated Indigenous peoples of the “distant past” while erasing their current existence and silencing their demands. My involvement with the CONAIE and experience living in Ecuador and the United States as a biracial Latina motivated me to become a sociologist and further my understandings about racial hierarchies and classification systems. As someone who grew up in Ecuador and the United States, I seek to create greater understandings between distinct racial ideologies that emerged in South, Central, and North America and that inform how we think about racial categories and boundaries, and, thus, determine the allocation of resources and rights.