Education:

Ph.D., Chicana/o and Central American Studies, UCLA, 2020

M.A., Chicana/o Studies, UCLA, 2017

Graduate Concentration Certificate, Gender Studies, UCLA, 2017

M.A., Latin American Studies (Sociology Concentration), UCSD, 2012

B.A., Sociology and Latin American Studies, UCR, 2009

A.A., Liberal Arts, Santa Monica College, 2006

Dr. Brenda Nicolas (Zapotec) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her work looks at the transborder communal experiences of Zapotecs between Los Angeles and Oaxaca. Specifically, she looks at women’s and U.S.-raised generations who have participated in their pueblo’s sociocultural and political organizing across the U.S. and Mexico for the past fifty years. Dr. Nicolas’s book project titled, Pueblo Autonomy: Indigenous Communal Practices Across Settler Colonial Borders, examines four generations who have continuously politically and culturally organized through their hometown associations, traditional dances, and Oaxacan brass bands. As a trained interdisciplinary and area studies scholar, Dr. Nicolas uses Indigenous thought and voices from the global south to bring into dialogue Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous studies.

 Dr. Nicolas is the recipient of several fellowships, including: the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the UC Office of the President Award, the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship, a Eugene V. Cota-Robles Fellowship, and many more. She is a former research assistant to UCLA’s Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles (MILA) project— a digital storymapping archive that collaborates with Indigenous communities to capture the many Indigenous histories of Los Angeles.

Dr. Nicolas currently serves in her community’s council in Los Angeles. In 2015, she co-founded the Oaxacan College Initiative (OCI) to provide mentorship to the growing Indigenous diaspora from Latin America entering U.S. colleges and universities where she continues to provide mentoring, arrange campus tours, and provide feedback to high school and undergraduate students’ admissions application to undergraduate and graduate school. She has also organized and been invited to a series of community events as a former board of directors of the Indigenous Oaxacan non-profit in California, the Centro Binacional Para el Desarollo Indígena Oaxaqueño/Binational Center for the Development of Oaxacan Indigenous Communities (CBDIO) and as a former community member for the Frente Indígena de Organizaciones Binacionales/Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations  (FIOB) in San Diego and Los Angeles. In addition, Dr. Nicolas has been a co-host for the Senderos de Oaxaca in Pacifica Radio KPFK, a community station that touches on political, social, cultural, and educational topics by inviting community members and critically-engaged scholars.

She was born and raised in Los Angeles where she grew up deeply immersed to her Indigenous Oaxacan community doing traditional dances since the age of seven by participating with her pueblo’s hometown association, the Los Angeles La Guelaguetza, and other Oaxacan dance groups.