About:

The LESMC vision is to promote the advancement and implementation of well designed Ethnic Studies courses and programs for the purpose of advancing students’ academic achievement, educational equity, community activist scholarship, and community leadership skills.  ​

Our Leadership Team

Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona
LESMC Lead and High School Educator

Guadalupe Cardona has been an Ethnic Studies, English, Social Studies and Journalism educator for 20 years and has taught in three states; California, Arizona and Texas.  She is dedicated to developing critical curriculum and facilitating a student-centered classroom environment based on mutual respect, critical thinking, and collaboration. She accomplishes this by fusing her classroom instruction with community cultural knowledge and a focus on auto-biographical counter narrative.  
Guadalupe is the Praxis chair of The Association of Raza Educators (Los Angeles chapter), co-founder of XOCHITL Los Angeles,  a member of LAUSD’s Ethnic Studies Curriculum Committee, a member of Ethnic Studies Now Coalition’s Coordinating Committee, California Teachers Association/Stanford’s Instructional Leadership Corps, the co-chair of the 50th Chicano Moratorium Commemoration Committee, and a founding member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Coalition. 
Guadalupe has earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Chicanx Studies and Latin American Studies from UCLA and a Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction, Language and Literacy from ASU.  Guadalupe has spent her personal life and career re-membering herself and helps others on their quest for self-identity and the tools for telling their own stories. She will continue this work as a doctoral student beginning in Fall 2020.

Dr. Theresa Montano 
LESMC Lead & Professor of Chicana/o Studies at CSU Northridge

Theresa began her teaching career as a middle School para-educator in Northeast Los Angeles. She became a middle and high School Social Studies classroom teacher and taught for 15 years in Los Angeles, CA and Denver, Co. An active unionist, Montaño was also on the staff of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), where she worked as a professional development specialist and as an area representative for nine years. Theresa was the first coordinator of the Helen Bernstein Professional Development Center. While at UTLA, she helped establish a program for teachers interested in securing their National Board certification and helped secure a stipend and retirement benefits for those teachers. In partnership with LAUSD, she engaged in program and curriculum development for Dial-a-Teacher, Multilingual Teacher Academies, the New Teacher Academy, and SB 1969/CLAD certification. She also served on the Board of Directors, House of Representatives, and CTA State Council. 
15 years of experience as a middle and high school teacher in Los Angeles, coupled with more than decade in higher education, gives Theresa a special understanding of issues facing educators in California’s public schools. In 2000, she left the UTLA to work for the UCLA Teacher Education Program as a faculty advisor and in 2003, I accepted a position at Cal State Northridge in Chicana/o Studies, area of emphasis: Education. As a union activist, she continues her involvement in CFA (California Faculty Association), where she leads the public education work. At CSUN, Theresa teaches courses on Equity and Diversity In Schools, The Chicana/o Child, and is an advisor to students enrolled in the Masters’ Program. Dr. Montaño has articles, texts and book on issues like teacher activism, educational injustice and educating the Latino/a and Chicano/a student.  She previously served for six years as an NEA board director, the president of the National Council for Higher Education and CTA Vice President. She has also served as president of educational rights organizations such as the National Association for Multicultural Education and the California Association of Mexican-American Educators. 

Dr. Stevie Ruiz
LESMC Lead & Professor of Chicana/o Studies at CSU Northridge

Professor Ruiz is an interdisciplinary teacher and scholar whose research interests lie at the intersections of comparative ethnic studies, environmental law, and land conflict in rural counties such as Southern California's Imperial Valley. His current book project entitled, Empire Under the Sun: Racial Capitalism and Land Conflict at the U.S.-Mexico Border, complicates our understanding of the history of property ownership and capitalist development by analyzing conflicts among white pioneers, Asian growers, Mexican immigrants, and Native-Americans in what is now Imperial County. American westward expansion is typically conceived as a conquest over uncivilized land and peoples, leading to greater political and economic freedom for English-speaking settlers, a process that reached its peak with the U.S.-Mexico war (1846) and the ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), when the U.S. seized the northern territory of Mexico and Native American lands. Claims of land loss have sparked debates among Chicana/o Studies and Native-American Studies scholars. While the former debate rights to ancestral lands, the latter deny any break among settlement, colonialism, and the rise of the state. His work focuses on these struggles in a little-studied yet significant geographical region-the rural West- an approach that allows us to understand the full impact of American expansionism. His exploration of rural political economies in Imperial County uncovers the centrality of land subsidy programs to supporting and expanding Manifest Destiny as practiced at the U.S.-Mexico border in the twentieth century.