Patricia Baquedano-López

Patricia Baquedano-López is Professor of Education at the Berkeley School of Education. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist and as an applied linguist at UCLA, she is a scholar with a long-standing interest in the education of racialized and minoritized students in schools. She draws from decolonial and Indigenous thought in her recent projects on transnational Indigenous sovereignty and education in the Maya diaspora Yucatan-California. She is a member of the Decolonial Knowledges and Pluriversal University working group at the Latinx Research Center at UC Berkeley which is dedicated to the study and engagement of the “pluriversal” philosophies within and beyond the U.S. with the goal of creating/supporting communities based on knowledge of difference, relationality, and  coalition building. Professor Baquedano-López is formally affiliated faculty in the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Linguistics, and she is co-founding and core faculty member of the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization. She was Chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research (prior to its transition to the Latinx Research Center) from 2007-2009 and from 2014-2017. She is the recipient of the 2021 Charles A. Ferguson award for Outstanding Scholarship from the Center for Applied Linguistics and Stanford University. In 2023 she received the Outstanding Mentor Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division G, Social Contexts of Education. From 2017-2023 she was a faculty mentor in the William T. Grant Scholars Program. Professor Baquedano-López was an inaugural recipient of the Graduate Assembly's Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award  at UC Berkeley (2005).

Professor Baquedano-López's  work has appeared in the Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education journal, the Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the Annual Review of Anthropology, the International Journal of the Sociology of Language,  the Review of Research in Education, Theory into Practice, the Bilingual Research Journal, Estudios Fronterizos, the Journal of Mind, Culture, and Activity, Linguistics and Education, and Text and Talk among others and in a variety of edited volumes. Her books include An Introduction to Language and Social Justice: What Is, What Has Been, and What Could Be (2024), On Becoming Bilingual: Children's Experiences Across Homes, Schools, and Communities (2023) and U.S. Latinos and Education Policy: Research-Based Directions for Change (2014).  She is currently working on a book project addressing transnational Indigenous sovereignty across time and space focusing on Maya families and youth living between Yucatan and California and contributes to theorizing a "languaging" aesthetics that bridges, resists, and transforms educational spaces.  

Professor Baquedano-López is a former Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow and she was a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. She was co-founding editor of the journal Language, Culture, and Society (John Benjamins) and served as editor from 2018-2024.  Professor Baquedano-López has collaborated with scholars in Mexico, France, and Sweden on issues of migration, education, and language in diaspora. Her research projects have been funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation, UC MEXUS-CONACyT, the National Science Foundation, the France-Berkeley Fund, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research among others. 

On sabbatical leave (Spring semester 2026).