Professor Robert Chao Romero considers himself fortunate to be able to study himself for a living. With a Mexican father from Chihuahua and a Chinese immigrant mother from Hubei in central China, Romero’s dual cultural heritage serves as the basis for his academic studies. His research examines Asian immigration to Latin America, as well as the large population of “Asian-Latinos” in the United States.
His first book, The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 (2010), tells the forgotten history of the Chinese community in Mexico. For his next project, Romero has begun research on the history of Mexican segregation in the United States and the important, but much overlooked Mexican desegregation cases of Doss v. Bernal (1943), Lopez v. Seccombe (1944), and Mendez v. Westminster (1946). His two most recent books are "Mixed Race Student Politics: A Rising 'Third Wave' Movement at UCLA (2019) and "Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology, and Identity (2020).