Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies
School of Humanities

Affiliate Faculty Member, Graduate Program in Culture & Theory
School of Humanities

Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies; Asian American History; Chicanx/Latinx History; US History and American Studies (Long Nineteenth Century/Post-1848); race, gender, work, space, borderlands, and empire

Isabela Seong Leong Quintana is a teacher and scholar of the interconnected histories of Asian Americans and Chicanxs/Latinxs, and the multiple overlapping borderlands spaces they inhabit. Her work in Relational and Comparative Ethnic Studies focuses especially on women and children in the US West and Southwest whose visibility, voices, and knowledges are often unspoken and undocumented in the conventional archival record. Profe Quintana is also Co-Director of a collaborative community-based research project entitled The Five Chinatowns Project with William Gow (Sacramento State University), Kelly Fong (UCLA), and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. The Project includes a peer-reviewed edited volume featuring a variety of voices (community historians, students, community elders, journalists, creative writing, and scholars), a community history mentorship program for high school and college students, and a digital exhibit. Prior to her appointment at UC Irvine, Profe Quintana taught courses in US History and Chicanx/Latinx Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and was the Honors College Assistant Professor of History at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. Profe Quintana has also held appointments as a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow, a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associate in Latina/Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and a Visiting Research Fellow in Asian American Studies at UCLA's Institute of American Culture.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Book
Urban Borderlands: Neighborhood and Nation in Chinese and Mexican Los Angeles, 1870s-1930s. (Book manuscript under contract with UNC Press.)

Edited Volume
The Five Chinatowns: Chinese Americans and the Creation of Multi-Ethnic Los Angeles. Co-edited with William Gow (CSU Sacramento), Kelly Fong (UCLA), and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. (UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press)

Articles and Book Chapters
“Embodied Authenticity: Mexican and Chinese Girlhood in 1930-40s Los Angeles,” New Directions in Latinx History Eds. Verónica Martinez-Matsuda and Luis Alvarez. (book chapter in-progress)

“Fronteriza Imaginaries,” AAPI Voices. Eds. David Yoo and Thuy Vo Dang. New York: Oxford University Press. (book chapter in-progress)

PUBLISHED RESEARCH

"Asian American Youth and Mexican American Youth in Los Angeles before WWII." In the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Ed. David Yoo and Jon Butler. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

“Making Do, Making Home: Borders and the Worlds of Chinatown and Sonoratown in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles.” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 1 (2015): 47-74.

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6583

Last updated
03/12/2024