Education

• Ph.D.     History, University of California, San Diego                                                     
• M.A.      History, California State University, Sacramento
• B.A.       History and Spanish, California State University, Sacramento

Research Interests

Professor Lorena V. Márquez is a Chicana historian who interrogates issues of memory, trauma, identity, resiliency, history-making and community building within the framework of the Chicana/o movement in Sacramento, California.

As a trained historian, anchored in an interdisciplinary department has given her the creative and intellectual freedom not only as a scholar, but as a teacher to develop course materials that inform her interests. These include:  Chicana/o History, Chicana/o movement, Chicana/Latina feminisms, gender, transnationalism, Latina/o/x diaspora, immigration/migration, class, oral histories/testimonios, and race/ethnicity in the United States and Latin America. 

Biography

Born in Lodi, California to Mexican migrant farmworkers and raised in nearby Galt, Dr. Lorena V. Márquez has never forgotten her roots. In fact, as the fourth of seven children who grew up in poverty with hard working parents who made countless sacrifices, she credits her humble upbringing for the ganas (drive) to pursue her academic and activist goals. As a native Spanish-speaking daughter of immigrants and first-generation college student, she knows firsthand of the challenges many Chicanx and Latinx students face inside and outside of the classroom. In fact, as the first and only member of her family to go to college, she is keenly aware of educational inequities and is committed to making college truly accessible to all—regardless of citizenship or socio-economic background.

Dr. Márquez is the Project Director of the Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Project Oral History Project, a collective of Sacramento Chicana/o movement elders and organizers whose mission is to record and preserve the oral histories of Sacramento Chicana/o Movement activists from 1965-1980. To date, there are 98 video-recorded oral histories. These interviews are housed at the Sacramento State Special Collection and University Archives. https://library.csus.edu/collection/9851. In summer 2023, the Project will conduct an additional 27 interviews, bringing the community archive to 125 oral interviews.

The findings of the interviews serve as the basis for her second book, In their Voices: Chicana/o Movement Elders Reflections on the Civil Rights Era. The book will will delve into important historical inquiries on identity and political agency during the Civil Rights Era, but also frame it in the context of racial and language trauma as experienced by this generation.

Selected Publications 

• La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2020.
• “Recovering Chicana/o Movement Historiography Through Testimonios,” in Community-Based Participatory Research: Testimonios from Chicana/o Studies, Natalia Deeb-Sossa, ed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. 
• “Reinscribing the Voices of La Gente in the Narrative of the Chicano Movement,” in The Chicano Movement: Perspectives from the 21st Century, Mario T. García, ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Awards

• National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) Book of the Year Award, Honorable Mention, 2022.  
• Certificate of Recognition and Appreciation “for your instrumental assistance in the successful completion of the goals in the first phase of the oral history interview process,” Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Project Oral History Initiative, June 7, 2014. 
• Nomination for the 11th Annual ASUCD Excellence in Education Award, 2013. (This award honors instructors in their outstanding undergraduate teaching, and it is completely funded, nominated, and selected by UC Davis students.) 
• Service to the Community Award, College Assistant Migrant Program, California State University, Sacramento, 2011.