Dr. Ramirez-Lopez is a historian of Indigenous migrations in North America. Specifically, he studies the crossings of Indigenous people from the Global South as a new labor force in the United States, linked with the worldwide economic restructuring of the late twentieth century. His scholarship intersects modern US and Mexican/Latin American histories, alongside Indigenous, Immigration, Labor, and Chicana/o and Latina/o histories. Moreover, 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 created.

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 U.S. 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.