Laura Chávez-Moreno

Assistant Professor, Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and Department of Education

Laura Chávez-Moreno is an award-winning researcher, qualitative social scientist, and assistant professor in the Departments of Chicana/o & Central American Studies and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prof. Chávez-Moreno researches, writes, and teaches about Chicanx/Latinx education. She works at the intersections of education, pedagogy, language, literacy, and ethnic studies, particularly Chicanx/Latinx Studies. Her research has been published in top-tier journals such as Review of Educational Research, Educational Researcher, American Educational Research Journal, Research in the Teaching of English, and Journal of Teacher Education.

Her award-winning book, How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America, is available at Harvard Education Press.

Departments

Department of Education

Titles and Positions

Assistant Professor, Department of Education
Assistant Professor, Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies

Education

PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison; School of Education; Curriculum & Instruction
Graduate Certificate, Boston College; School of Education; Curriculum & Instruction
MA, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; School of Education; Literacy, Language, & Culture
BS in Education, Northern Arizona University; College of Education; Spanish, Secondary-level Education, and Latin American Studies

Awards, Honors and Fellowships

2025 Early Career Award from the Critical Race Studies in Education Association
2025 Book of the Year Award by an Early Career Scholar, American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, “How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America” (Harvard Education Press).
2023 Alan C. Purves Award from the National Council for Teachers of English for her article in Research in the Teaching of English, “The continuum of racial literacies: Teacher practices countering whitestream bilingual education.”
2022 National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
Fellow of 2020–2022 cohort of NCTE Research Foundation’s Cultivating New Voices among Scholars of Color
Recognized with awards from American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division G Social Contexts in Education; AERA Latinx Research Issues Special Interest Group (SIG); AERA Bilingual Education Research SIG; American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education; and National Association of Bilingual Education.

Select Publications

Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2025). Conceptualizing Latinx vis-à-vis Race in Education Research. Educational Researcher.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2025). How Schools Make Race: Teaching Latinx Racialization in America. Harvard Education Press.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2023). Examining race in LatCrit: A systematic review of Latinx critical race theory in education. Review of Educational Research.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2022). Critiquing racial literacy: Presenting a continuum of racial literacies. Educational Researcher (51)7, 481-488.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2022). The continuum of racial literacies: Teacher practices countering whitestream bilingual education. Research in the Teaching of English, 57(2), 108-132. Recognized with the 2023 Alan C. Purves Award.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2021). Dual language as white property: Examining a secondary bilingual-education program and Latinx equity. American Educational Research Journal, 58(6) 1107-1141.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2021). U.S. empire and an immigrant’s counternarrative: Conceptualizing imperial privilege. Journal of Teacher Education, 72(2) 209-222.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2024). A Literature Review of Raciolinguistics in Dual-language Bilingual Education: A Call for Conceptualizing Racialization. In J. Friere, C. Alfaro, & E. de Jong (Eds.), The Handbook of Dual Language Bilingual Education (pp. 254–265). Routledge.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2022). Race reflexivity: Examining the unconscious for a critical race ethnography. In S. May & B. Caldas (Eds.), Critical Ethnography, Bi/Multilingualism, Race(ism) and Education, p. 91-107. Multilingual Matters.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2021). Racist and raciolinguistic teacher ideologies: When bilingual education is “inherently culturally relevant” for Latinxs. The Urban Review, 54(4) 1-22.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2021). The problem with Latinx as a racial construct vis-à-vis language and bilingualism: Toward recognizing multiple colonialisms in the racialization of Latinidad. In E. G. Murillo, Jr., et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Latinos & Education (2nd ed., pp. 164-180). Routledge.