Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is a cross-border scholar of Indigenous and Latinx histories, migration, and social movements. His research is driven by asking what a hemispheric Indigenous perspective can tell us about our shared pasts, and the worlds Native, racialized, and working people have struggled for and enacted. His interests in writing Indigenous histories stem from personal experiences seeking to learn more about his community’s past and their invisibility in historical narratives. Through conversations, study, and accompaniment, he came to comprehend how Indigenous communities made history on their own terms that informs his research today.

Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is assistant professor in the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to joining as faculty at UC Santa Barbara, he was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Indian Studies Center at UCLA (2023-2025). He was also a Society of Fellows postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies at Dartmouth College (2021-2023). Dr. Ramirez-Lopez received his Ph.D. in history at UC San Diego.

He is a member of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA histories of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), 2024-2028. At UC Santa Barara, Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is a member of the Cedric J. and Elizabeth P. Robinson Archive steering committee.

Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is Indigenous Triqui with cultural, social, and familial ties to the town of Putla. His family and roots are from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. He is a member of the board of directors for the Centro Binacional para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño (CBDIO) and an advisor for the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales (FIOB), California.