Genevieve

Carpio

Assistant Professor of Chicana/o and

Central American Studies​

University of California, Los Angeles

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About Dr. Genevieve Carpio

Assistant Professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies.

Professor Carpio's research and teaching interests include race-making between diverse groups, how people make meaning in the places they call home, and the public humanities, particularly as related to the California Inland Empire and the digital world.

 

Carpio is the author of a book on racial formation in the multiracial suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire entitled Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race (University of California Press, 2019). Her second book project examines architectural forms shaped by California race relations, such as the Spanish and Maya revivals, and their movement across the Pacific World in the early 20th century.

 

She has also published in American Quarterly, Journal of American History, Journal of Urban Affairs, Western Historical Quarterly, Casden Annual Review, Boom California, the Arcadia local history series, and Information, Communication and Society, among other venues. She currently serves on the editorial board of Geohumanities, a journal of the American Association of Geographers, and as a reviewer for several academic journals. 

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Carpio is an interdisciplinary trained scholar who holds a doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. She also holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Pomona College, an M.A. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a graduate certificate in Historic Preservation from the USC School of Architecture. Before joining UCLA, Carpio was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History and the Program for Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.

 

She is the recipient of two Ford Foundation Fellowships, the Hellman Fellowship, and the UCLA Faculty Career Development Award. She has also received a USC Provost Fellowship and recognition as PAGE Fellow by Imagining America, a consortium of universities dedicated to public engagement.

Collisions at the Crossroads:

How Place and Mobility make Race

In Collisions at the Crossroads, Genevieve Carpio argues that restrictions on free movement and on settlement catalyzed racial formation in the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles and the Inland Empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining policies and forces as different as bicycle ordinances, immigration policy, incarceration, traffic checkpoints, and Route 66 heritage, she shows how regional authorities constructed racial hierarchies by allowing some people to move freely while placing limits on the mobility of others. Highlighting the ways that people of color have negotiated and resisted their positions within these systems, Carpio reveals a compelling and perceptive analysis of race through spatial mobility and the making of place.

Recipient of the Sally and Ken Owens Award 2020, Western Historical Association

 

REVIEWS

“Through close attention to the entanglement of race and everyday mobility, Genevieve Carpio shines a brilliant light on a previously unexplored aspect of the contested geographies of Southern California specifically and the American West more generally. Empirically rich, theoretically rigorous, and engagingly written, Collisions at the Crossroads connects the diverse experiences of Japanese citrus workers, Dust Bowl migrants, Latinx drivers of lowriders, and Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Filipino migrants to provide a counter-history of the role of mobility in the American West. For those interested in mobility studies, critical race theory, or the spatial histories of Greater Los Angeles, Carpio has provided a pioneering landmark text.”

—Tim Cresswell, author of Maxwell Street: Writing and Thinking Place