Jose Zapata Calderon is Emeritus Professor in Sociology and Chican@ Latino@ Studies at Pitzer College, President of the Latino and Latina Roundtable, and a recent member of the Los Angeles County Board of Education. He received an A. A. from Northeastern Jr. College, a B. A. from the University of Colorado and a PhD in Sociology from UCLA. As the son of immigrant farm workers from Mexico, he has had a long history of connecting his organizing and academic work with community-based participatory action research, critical pedagogy, and social movement activism. After graduating from the University of Colorado, he devoted thirteen years of organizing students, farm workers, meatcutters, and immigrants in Northern Colorado. While working on his PhD at UCLA, he helped organize multi-racial coalitions in the city of Monterey Park. As a professor at Pitzer College and a community organizer in the Inland Empire region, he has advanced the building of community-based leadership in the development of a day labor center, the defense of immigrant rights, the support of unionizing efforts, and the continued building of human rights coalitions. He has received numerous awards including: the Ambassador Nathaniel and Elizabeth Davis Civil Rights Legacy Award; the “Dreamkeeper Award” from the California Alliance of African American Educators; the California Campus Compact Richard E. Cone Award for Excellence and Leadership in Cultivating Community Partnerships in Higher Education; the Goddess of Pomona Award from the City of Pomona, the Michi and Walter Weglyn Chair in Multicultural Studies at Cal Poly University, Pomona; and the United Farm Worker’s Union “Si Se Puede” award for his life-long contributions to the farm worker movement. A recent TedX video, Finding Cesar Chavez: A Transformative Moment,” was chosen as an Editor’s Pick nationally. As a community-based activist intellectual, he has published over sixty articles and studies including the books: Lessons from an Activist Intellectual: Teaching, Research, and Organizing for Social Change, Allyn and Bacon, 2015 and Race, Poverty, and Social Justice: Multidisciplinary Perspectives Through Service Learning.
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