Saúl Sarabia

Courses Taught, Areas of Interest, Selected Publications and Biography

          
         Courses Taught:

                   Law 266: Critical Race Theory

                   Law 375:  Latinos/as and the Law


         Areas of Interest:

         · Role of Ideology in Law and Public Policy

         · Comparative Subordination of Disfavored Identities and Social Groups

         · Cross-Group Solidarity, Multi-Issue Organizing and Coalition Building

         · Multi-Racial Literacy and Leadership Development

         · Intersection between Personal Transformation and Social Change

         · Gay Rights in Minority Communities and Racism in the Gay Community

         · Transnational Communities and the Globalization of Social Movements

         · Progressive Social Movements in Los Angeles, California

       
Selected Publications:

"From Rodney King to Barack Obama: America Confronts another Racial Moment" KoreAm Magazine, April 2008

"Los Errores de Padilla." La Opinion, July 2002

"The World's Greatest Vanishing Act: 10 Years after the LA Civil Unrest," KoreAm Magazine, April 2002

"Will we Govern by Reproduction? Latinos and the Debate over the Selection of the New LAPD Police Chief," La Gente de Aztlán, January 2002

"The Victory of the Janitors is a Sign of Things to Come," St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 2000

"Los derechos humanos de los migrantes en los EE.UU." Brecha, April 1998
(Re-published in French in September 1998)

"End of war in Guatemala can mean peace of mind for the United States" for Knight-Ridder,
December 1996

"Racism by Degree: Protesting the end of Affirmative Action." Los Angeles Daily News, May 1996

"Genocide without Bullets: End of affirmative action at UCLA Law School" Daily Bruin, May 1996

"The Red Herring of Illegal Immigration" Miami Herald, January 1996

"Chicano Studies Fight Involves a Bigger Issue" LA Times, Spring 1993

    Biography:

    Saúl Sarabia’s work focuses on community-based social justice advocacy, strategizing with community residents to include their voice in law-making and public policy reform.  Saúl’s personal and professional interest is to support efforts that result in concrete changes in the day to day lives of everyday people.  He believes that supporting the self determination of individuals and communities forms the basis for social movements that can strengthen democratic institutions, ensure respect for human rights and secure economic and social equity. A graduate of UCLA (BA ’93 and JD ’96), he returned to UCLA in 2003, to contribute to the leadership development of students interested in civic engagement, anti-poverty work, and multi-racial social justice advocacy.

     Saúl currently serves as the Program Director of the UCLA School of Law’s Critical Race Studies Program (CRS). In this capacity, Saúl works with the leading scholars on race and the law to train the next generation of civil rights lawyers and social justice advocates. He helps recruit students committed to racial justice scholarship and practice, to structure learning opportunities for students that simultaneously support lawyers and organizations working for social change, and teaches courses about racism and the law.

     Saúl has facilitated the CRS program’s participation in legal and community efforts to secure an equitable Reconstruction in the Gulf Coast and collaborations with LA-based organizations dedicated to policy reform and community empowerment. Between 2006-2008, he was the campus partner on a UCLA in LA grant to partner law students and formerly incarcerated people to address employment discrimination against ex-prisoners working to rebuild their lives. As a collaborative partner in the Social Change Across Borders Institute, he contributes to a  leadership development program between immigrant labor leaders and hometown association leaders in Los Angeles, aimed at enhancing their efforts to improve conditions and change policies in the US and their home countries.

     Saúl serves as the Board Chair of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, which is dedicated to archiving the history of progressive movements in Los Angeles. He joined the SCL Board in August 2006 to help document the success of social movements for equality and organized resistance against oppression in Los Angeles. The Board is also exploring new possibilities to build a more humanized solidarity among activists, such as developing alternatives to traditional non-profit decision-making structures, dismantling hierarchies in movement organizations, and preventing burn-out among progressive activists. He is also a member of Special Services for Group’s institutional review board, which supports community-based research and protects individuals in proposed research projects from the type of abuses committed in the Tuskegee experiments conducted by the US government.

     Since graduating from the UCLA School of Law in 1996, Saúl has worked in a range of capacities to serve socially and economically marginalized communities. From 1999 to 2003, Saúl was a program director at the Community Coalition, a grassroots organization dedicated to community organizing in South Los Angeles.  As director of the Coalition’s Prevention Network, he developed the leadership skills of social service providers and community residents who led direct action campaigns to improve LA County’s social service delivery system, focusing on foster care and welfare reform.  During this time, Saúl directed a successful campaign to increase resources and influence for grandmothers and other relatives caring for their family members’ children in the foster care system. 

     As a case advocate, Saúl overturned hundreds of wrongful denials of public benefits after the implementation of the 1996 welfare reform law and trained staff members of community-based organizations and welfare recipients to do the same.  In 1999, Saúl helped the Coalition’s "People on Welfare" project launch, execute and monitor a successful campaign to increase the equipment and personnel in South LA welfare offices to deal with violations under the new welfare to work requirements. As a result of his efficacy in bringing everyday people into the policy-making process, Saúl was asked to advise the LA County Children’s Planning Council in its efforts to solidify the network of County neighborhood planning bodies (called SPA Councils) to increase the community’s voice in shaping social services and impacting the decisions of the LA County Board of Supervisors.

     In addition to providing advocacy skills and developing capacity building trainings for social service providers, Saúl worked for the emergency food and advocacy center of Harbor Interfaith Shelter in San Pedro.  In this capacity, Saúl worked with homeless families and individuals to prevent and correct the denials of fundamental rights, such as access to food, shelter and dignity.  As a result of his work, he became an active board member of the San Pedro Enterprise Council (SPEC), a citizens’ group that successfully fought to stop local and federal agencies from demolishing all of the surplus military housing in the Harbor area. SPEC’s efforts ensured that some of the homes were used to provide transitional housing for homeless families, veterans, and women recovering from substance abuse and domestic violence.  During that time, Saúl also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Fair Housing Council of the San Gabriel Valley, a non-profit group that uses education, testers, advocacy, and litigation to fight discrimination in housing and to enforce the Fair Housing laws. 

     Between 2003-2005, Saúl served as a program director at the UCLA Center for the Study of Urban Poverty.  His work at CSUP focused on strengthening grassroots efforts to reduce poverty and impact policy by bridging research, community based advocacy and student leadership, including serving as a research associate on the Immigrant Organizatons Survey. Saul also served as co-director of CSUP’s initiative to increase the capacity of Oaxacan hometown associations in Los Angeles, in partnership with the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB) and Special Services for Groups.  He continues to serve as an advisor to the FIOB in Los Angeles.

     Saúl has a passion for international social justice and worked as a human rights advocate with the Central American Human Rights Commission in San José, Costa Rica in 1997.  He has also volunteered with the Immigration Law unit of Public Counsel, a non-profit organization that provides free legal services in Los Angeles. There, he focused on political asylum issues and Haitian refugee issues. Saúl is a graduate of the "Summer Institute for Social Change Across Borders," a Spanish-language Institute that brought together U.S-based and Latin American social justice activists at UC Santa Cruz. 

      Saúl was involved in student activism as an undergraduate at UCLA, where he graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and with college honors in Communication Studies in 1993.  After volunteering as writer, translator and general staff member for La Gente de Aztlán for more than four years, Saúl served as Editor-in-Chief in 1992-93, during the historic hunger strike for a Chicana/o Studies Department at UCLA. Ten years later, as a Lecturer to undergraduate students in that Department, he taught courses on Latinos/as and the Law and transnational organizing by Central Americans in Los Angeles.  

     As a law student, Saúl served as co-chair of the La Raza Law Students Associationat UCLA.  As co-chair, he coordinated a get-out-the vote effort against a voter initiative (Proposition 187) that sought to legally prohibit undocumented children from attending public schools and families from being treated in hospitals in California.  Saúl then served as a summer law clerk at the ACLU of Southern California working on the lawsuit that invalidated Proposition 187. He also worked as a Summer Law Clerk in the Voting Rights Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. As a third year law student, he helped draft a student admissions plan to preserve racial diversity at UCLA Law, when the law school voted to dismantle its affirmative action admissions program in response to a UC Regents directive and in anticipation of another California Proposition (209), which bars the consideration of race and gender oppression in university admissions. Saúl currently supports student activism, student free speech rights at UCLA, and diversity in the campus media, as a member of the ASUCLA Communications Board, which oversees UCLA’s student-run news media, including its newspaper, newsmagazines, television, print, online, radio and yearbook press.  He has served as a Visiting Lecturer at UCLA’s César Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Chicana/o Studies and as an Adjunct Professor of Law at Loyola Law School in Downtown Los Angeles.     

     As an undergraduate student, Saúl was selected as part of a national group of writers for the Progressive Media Project, which has published his op-ed pieces on current events in national newspapers since 1993.  He has also written articles regarding cross-racial unity, social justice activism and racism for a range of publications. (See Selected Publications List above).  Saúl was a co-host on a radio show for social justice activists called "Radio Active" on the Los Angeles affiliate station of Pacifica, K-PFK, and has served as a commentator on "Enfoque Latino," a Spanish-language community program on the same station.

     Saúl has a personal stake and professional commitment to fighting for the equal rights of LGBT people. He is a graduate of Catársis, a writer’s workshop for LGBT Latinas/os sponsored by Impacto! the Spanish language magazine of AIDS Project Los Angeles. In 2008, he became a member of the LGBT Section of the Hispanic National Bar Association.   He collaborates with Queer student activists, scholars and organizers to address the interconnections between racism, homophobia, and class oppression.
  
     The youngest son of Mexican immigrants from the state of Durango in northern México, Saúl was born in East Los Angeles. He grew up poor in the northeast Los Angeles neighborhoods of Cypress Park and Highland Park and is a graduate of LA’s public schools. To get out of poverty, he benefited from social programs, such as the federal free lunch program, food stamps, Medi-Cal, Upward Bound, affirmative action admissions programs in the University of California, and state and federal grants to finance his college education.  He graduated from Baldwin Park High School in 1988 and currently lives in the City of West Hollywood, CA.


Contact Information:

Saúl Sarabia, Program Director
Critical Race Studies Program
UCLA School of Law
405 Hilgard Avenue
Box 951476
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Sarabia@law.ucla.edu