Caroline Martínez
Assistant Professor
Office: NH-211
Email: [email protected]
Caroline Martínez received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine and her M.A. from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Ecuador. Her areas of expertise include race and ethnicity in Latin America and the United States, migration, social movements, and mixed methods. As someone who grew up in Ecuador and the United States, Martínez seeks to create greater understandings between distinct racial ideologies that emerged in South, Central, and North America and that inform how we think about racial categories and boundaries, and, thus, determine the allocation of resources and rights. Martínez’s research agenda is driven by her commitment to making visible the racial inequality between groups that are often overlooked, such as Indigenous Latinxs. In her research, she focuses on how Indigenous peoples identify and how they are racialized by others, as well as the consequences of this racialization in Latin America and the United States. Martínez’s research has been featured in the American Journal of Sociology and Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and has received awards from the Sociology of Indigenous Peoples and Native Nations Section of the American Sociological Association and UC Irvine’s School of Social Sciences. Her research has also been funded by several grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.
Recent Publications
- Martínez, Caroline. 2025. “Indigenous Identity and Struggles for State Recognition in Ecuador.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, online first.
- Polletta, Francesca, Debra Boka, Caroline Martínez, and Mutsumi Ogaki. 2025. “Social Movements in the Commercial Public Sphere: How Women’s Magazines Popularized Second-Wave Feminism.” American Journal of Sociology 130(5): 1263–1314.