The new academic chairs include both existing institute faculty and professors from other disciplinary departments at UCLA.
September 2026. The Luce Foundation recently held a multi-day immersion program in the Philippines for its cohort of 2025-26 Luce Scholars that focused on the work Stephen Acabado (UCLA Cotsen Institue, UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies) on the Ifugao rice terraces, which served as an illustration of the main themes of the foundation's work.
"Bêtes Noires ranks first as the most theoretically rigorous, intellectually ambitious and epistemologically disruptive of the 40 books reviewed by the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award Committee. … [It] dismantles colonial discourses that demonize Haitian and Dominican cosmologies as merely “superstitious” [and] approaches indigenous memory, the animal world, spirits, and colonial histories as legitimate archives of knowledge…"
The honor marks the second time the UCLA historian has received the rigorous Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award for her work.
The baka/bacá, errant spirits on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that turn humans into animals through sorcery, are the subject of Robin Derby's new book, “Bêtes Noires."
The new director of the Center for the Study of International Migration seeks to add new dimensions to center programming. She hopes to highlight such issues as the impact of increasingly aggressive immigration detention and deportation policies on local communities, including Los Angeles, as well as UCLA students' visceral experience of and research on these policies.
Jan 30, 2026. Speaking to La Opinión, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado (director, UCLA Center for Mexican Studies said, “[Recent] raids are not like the ones of years past. We haven't reached the levels of Mexican deportations under Obama.. but we are seeing the disproportionate and overt use of federal officers… employing heavy-handed tactics." Arrest numbers for Indigenous Zapotecs are tough to come by, but the majority CA arrestees have been Mexican. (In Spanish)
Jan 9, 2026. Speaking to La Opinión, Gaspar Rivera-Salgado (director, UCLA Center for Mexican Studies) said, "There is a real danger of a unilateral incursion [in Mexico]... The United States has the military capability and has been obtaining military intelligence, but what we already have in front of us is a real sign... that the president today [Trump] is willing to use force." (In Spanish)
Meet Jacqueline Torres, an Art teacher at San Fernando High School and current M.A. student in Latin American Studies at UCLA.
Meet Carmen Anders, a Spanish teacher who led a life-changing immersion trip to Oaxaca. Her program bridged cultures, deepened language learning and empowered students through authentic connections.