Roles & Contributions

Since the establishment of UC Santa Cruz in 1965, the university has served as an “anchor institution” that has stimulated local economies while heightening inequality by driving gentrification, redevelopment, housing costs, intensified policing, and the displacement of working-class and ethnic communities. As the county’s largest employer, the university draws on south county workers as service labor to maintain its operations while doing little to address the crisis of unaffordability that plagues all of Santa Cruz. Education, alongside tourism, technology, weapons production, and agriculture, are the principal industries that drive the local economy while dividing local populations into pockets of invisibility and hypervisibility along racial and class lines. In line with major real estate and local political power holders, the university has played a role in creating an ongoing housing crisis and overpopulation, exacerbating pre-existing disparities and making the town unlivable for the very workers whom these industries rely on. Struggles of workers and residents reveals how inequities in public infrastructures all work to reduce economic mobility and stability. Specifically examining the last thirty years, this project explores the dissonance between community and corporate development as Santa Cruz County seeks to build itself up into another Silicon Valley. This research centers the people who materially build the wealth of this area in order to further their demands for a more livable Santa Cruz County. 

“Sanctuary Santa Cruz” focuses on the local history of the sanctuary movement from the 1980s to the present as a way of structurally analyzing the Cold War U.S. imperialist roots of migration and connecting Santa Cruz to the world. Sanctuary spaces emerged as critical zones where local communities directly challenged federal and state authority, creating arenas of refuge and protected environments for migrants displaced by genocidal and neoliberal U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. By tracing the evolution of local organizing that resisted draconian immigration policies during the Reagan era, this project asks how local migrant justice struggles have helped to lay bare the entangled geographies of U.S. imperialism. By adopting a transnational political lens toward migrant justice work in Santa Cruz and Northern California, connecting “here” to “there,” this research documents changes in the local movement over the years, exploring the role of U.S. foreign relations during and after the Cold War. Interviews with organizers provide this context while preserving the historical and cultural wealth of people’s struggles. 

The struggle for ethnic studies has fostered a culture of “third spaces” for communities of color. As sites of belonging for marginalized communities in the areas they inhabit and call home, third spaces provide youth with space to explore and build connection to their communities in sites outside the classroom. What do third spaces mean for youth of color in the greater Santa Cruz area? By critically analyzing the media’s portrait of Watsonville as gang-affiliated, this project uncovers how the congregation of youth of color has been criminalized in Santa Cruz County and spaces where they gather have been racialized. It sheds light on the cycles of racism which uphold structural violence towards youth of color in Santa Cruz County. In particular, Riley’s research highlights the experiences of Omar Diéguez, a youth mentor at Barrios Unidos Santa Cruz who has struggled locally for ethnic studies both in the past and the present, including student-led protests for Chicano studies at Aptos High School in the 1990s and community-organized grassroots freedom schools in Pajaro Valley today. 

“Sanctuary Santa Cruz” focuses on the local history of the sanctuary movement from the 1980s to the present as a way of structurally analyzing the Cold War U.S. imperialist roots of migration and connecting Santa Cruz to the world. Sanctuary spaces emerged as critical zones where local communities directly challenged federal and state authority, creating arenas of refuge and protected environments for migrants displaced by genocidal and neoliberal U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. By tracing the evolution of local organizing that resisted draconian immigration policies during the Reagan era, this project asks how local migrant justice struggles have helped to lay bare the entangled geographies of U.S. imperialism. By adopting a transnational political lens toward migrant justice work in Santa Cruz and Northern California, connecting “here” to “there,” this research documents changes in the local movement over the years, exploring the role of U.S. foreign relations during and after the Cold War. Interviews with organizers provide this context while preserving the historical and cultural wealth of people’s struggles.