Professor Emeritus, Urban Planning and Public Policy
School of Social Ecology

Critical Urbanism, the State, Class Structures, Studies in Racism and Inequalities, and Poverty & Social Policy

Rodolfo D. Torres is professor emeritus of Urban Planning and Public Policy, where he also served as the founding director of the Latino Urban Theory Lab. He is also an Affiliate Scholar in the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. He received the Adam Smith Foundation Fellowship at the University of Glasgow where he held a non-residential visiting professorship in the Department of Sociology for several years. Torres has a long-standing interest in heterodox political economy, the impact of climate change on refugees and asylum seekers, Mexican American Labor and Class politics, racism, U.S. urban economic restructuring, cooperatives, and Los Angeles Studies. His first book, Latino Metropolis (with Victor Valle) was published in 2000. The book was reviewed in more than 20 academic journals and newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. He is author and editor of more than 15 books and 100 book chapters and articles. He is co-author of the Choice Book Award Selected Writings of Ernesto Galarza published by the University of University Press. One of his most recent books (co-authored with Armando Ibarra and Alfredo Carlos) is the American Political Science Association’s award-winning book, The Latino Question: Politics, Laboring Classes, and the Next Left published by Pluto Press in 2018. Torres is currently co-editing with William I. Robinson a revision and expansion of the award-winning American Political Science book and Mexican American Studies classic of the 20th century Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality published by University of Notre Dame Press and published in 1979 with the new edition to be published by Routledge-Taylor & Francis in 2025. Torres is also conducting research on a sole authored book with a working title of Mexican American Studies: A Retreat from Class. For more than a generation now the so-called Latinx academic community has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn,” although claims attached to it vary across disciplines and its practitioners. In other words, it is a diverse intellectual community. However, they have rendered capital invisible and in a nuanced manner have argued that a retreat from class is essential. The proposed book will interrogate and critique this current orthodoxy. I will argue the need to rescue class and capital from the Cultural turn in Mexican American Studies to address the social-economic problems facing Mexican Americans today as well as all people in the United States and around the globe.

Torres is available as an emeritus professor to meet with graduate students in urban planning, Latina-Latino Studies and other related fields. He can be reached at rudolphd@uci.edu.

Among Professor Torres' books:
* New American Destinies (Routledge, 1997)
* Latino Social Movements (Routledge, 1999)
* Race, Identity , and Citizenship (Blackwell, 1999)
* Latino Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
* Latino Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003)
* Savage State: Welfare Capitalism & Inequality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004)
* After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism (NYU Press, 2004)
* Racism & Capitalist Modernity (Polity Press) In Progress

Race and Class in the Southwest and Other Essays; Studies in Political Economy (Routledge, 2025)

Research Initiative on Inequality and Social Justice

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=4865

Last updated
05/09/2025