ABOUT
GONZALO

Gonzalo Santos is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the California State University in Bakersfield, California, where he taught for 30 years. He obtained his Ph.D. at Binghamton University in New York, where he studied the modern world-system with Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Terence Hopkins. His areas of teaching and scholarship are the historical sociology of peoplehood in the Americas (race, ethnicity, nation), international migration, social movements, and globalization.

 

Dr. Santos is a public intellectual, active in social movements since his college days in Mexico as a participant in the 1968 student movement. When he came to the U.S. in the 1970s, he participated in the peace movement against the Vietnam war, the Chicano movement, the solidarity movements with many Third World liberation movements, and since the 1990s, the modern immigrant rights movement. He was also active and led his faculty union - the California Faculty Association (CFA) - in various capacities, from chapter president to Board of Directors member, to founder and co-chair of the CFA Latino Caucus.

 

In the summer of 2022, Dr. Santos was awarded, along his friend and collaborator Prof. Armando Vázquez-Ramos, the Keys to Mexico City by now president of Mexico, Dr. Claudia Sheinbaum, for their life-long work on behalf of the Mexican diaspora in the United States. He is regularly invited to make educational presentations, interviews in the U.S. and Mexican press, and contributes op-eds. He administers a news & analysis site on Facebook, where he writes daily commentary.