The director of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center is working to promote Latino civic engagement across the UC.

Veronica Terriquez was selected to lead the center – which supports research and advocacy for Chicano, Latino and indigenous communities – in 2021, after she worked as a UC Santa Cruz sociology professor. Since her appointment, Terriquez has encouraged scholars across California to initiate new research into local Latino communities, she added.

“The CSRC provided an extraordinary opportunity to have impact not only on a large UC campus, but to have impact in higher education and in the community more broadly,” Terriquez said.

Over the past five years, Terriquez has expanded the center’s Faculty Advisory Committee – which provides guidance to the center’s director – from 30 to 90 members, said César Oyervides-Cisneros, CSRC senior administrator of campus initiatives.

Before working at the CSRC, Terriquez launched the Central Valley Freedom Summer project in 2018, which encourages community research and civic engagement among young adults in the Central Valley. Through the initiative, she organized local beautification efforts and advocated for youth voter registration.

Terriquez launched a statewide version of the CVFS – called the California Freedom Summer – in 2022 after she established new connections as the director for the research center, she said.

Terriquez studies grassroots organizing among young people and movements to address healthcare access and Latina wage gaps in immigrant communities.

Under Terriquez’s leadership, the CSRC surveyed more than 8,000 young adults about their careers and social priorities after the COVID-19 pandemic, said Chantiri Abarca, the center’s senior officer of community-engaged research.

The research center trained more than 100 high school, community college and university students in research methodologies and data reporting for the study, Abarca added.

“We don’t only work with Latino students,” she said. “We work with a diversity of the students of the State of California, the diversity of young people of the State of California. That is part of her vision, and that is part of what shapes this portfolio, too.”

Terriquez also launched the Latina Futures 2050 Lab in partnership with UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute. UCLA received $15 million in 2022 from the California State Legislature to establish the lab, which collects economic data about Latinas and offers a research and leadership development program.

The program supported more than 50 postdoctoral scholars’ research on Latinas in California and her own research on gender and inequality, Terriquez said.

The research center has collaborated with the Latinx Success Center for the Latinx Welcome and Your Future Starts Here admissions events, Oyervides-Cisneros said.

Terriquez said while faculty hiring is on hold at UCLA, she hopes to continue growing the university’s Hispanic-Serving Institution faculty network. UCLA paused new faculty hiring in August 2025 after the federal government suspended $584 million in the university’s federal research grants.

But Abarca said Terriquez is known for navigating these kinds of obstacles.

“She always shows up,” Abarca said. “She’s very real about the challenges that are ahead, but she does not operate from a place of fear. She operates from a place of hope. She operates from a place of courage, and she’s a very tenacious leader.”