G. Cristina Mora
Cristina Mora is Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines immigration attitudes, racial classification, and political behavior in the United States, and has helped shape scholarly and public understanding of how race and ethnicity are constructed in American life. Her first book, Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American, offers the first historical account of the emergence of the Hispanic/Latino category in the United States and has become a foundational text in the field. Her most recent book, Normalizing Inequality: How Californians Make Sense of the Growing Divide, explores how residents of the nation’s most diverse state reconcile rising income inequality with growing racial diversity.
Mora’s scholarship has earned numerous honors from the American Sociological Association, and her work has been featured in national media outlets including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, and Latino USA. In 2021 and 2022, she received the UC Berkeley Graduate Mentoring Award and the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Excellence and Equity, and she led UC Berkeley’s first social-science cluster hire focused on “Latinos and Democracy.” In 2023, she was awarded the nation’s first Latino Social Science Pipeline award from the U.S. Department of Education to expand research opportunities in Latino social science at Berkeley. In 2025, the California State Assembly issued an official commendation recognizing her research contributions to understanding inequality in California.
