Dr. Ariana Valle is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Before joining UC Davis, she completed a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at New York University, and received her PhD in Sociology from UCLA.

Valle’s research intervenes in (im)migration, race and ethnicity, Latina/o/x sociology, and Latina/o/x politics. She uses qualitative methodologies to examine how members of distinct Latino groups experience migration, the structural conditions that shape their political, socioeconomic, and racialized incorporations into the U.S., and how Latinas/os/xs transform their local, state, and national contexts through individual and collective agency. She has explored these topics through three case studies, Puerto Rican/Latino migration and politics in Florida, Central American identity and ethnoracial group formation in California, and collective responses to (un)natural disasters and displacement. In her current and future work, she aims to uncover and document Latinas’ invisible, hidden, and visible transformative acts of leadership in civic organizing, political engagement projects, and advancing a solidarity politics. Valle’s research is published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture. My public sociology has been featured in the Natural Hazards Center and the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s Disaster Literature.

Valle was born and raised in Los Angeles and is the daughter of a tenacious and fierce Salvadoran single mother. Her experiences growing up in an immigrant family surrounded and nourished by matriarchs, as a Latina raised in LA, and as a first-generation college student inspired her educational trajectory and continue to inspire her research and writing. Valle’s journey has been made possible by a village of exceptional and generous mentors; she aspires to pay it forward!