Busting boundaries
NM native’s career in law, journalism and academia takes her to prestigious post at UCLA
Laura Gómez likes to be part of many worlds. A social studies student who became a legal scholar, a sometime journalist who became an academic, she’s a law professor who recently became interim dean of the social sciences division at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“I feel like I’ve always been the kind of person that crosses boundaries. I don’t like to be stuck in one place,” said Gómez.
Gómez’s new position spans many boundaries. She will be the first woman to lead the social sciences division, the largest academic unit at UCLA with 270 tenured or tenuretrack faculty in 11 wide-ranging departments, including economics, political science, sociology, history, Chicano studies, African-American studies and geography.
“I think it’s going to be a great adventure, a great professional challenge,” she said.
Gómez, 51, was visiting her family in Albuquerque for the July 4 holiday after a six-month absence in Los Angeles, the longest time she has spent away in many years.
She has deep roots in New Mexico. One grandparent can trace back six generations to an ancestor living on Land Grant land near Tajique. She herself was born in Roswell where her parents met and married and, apart from a short period in Berkeley, Calif., she spent her childhood in Albuquerque.
Early interests
Those roots have influenced the prodigious body of writing she has produced during her 22-year academic career at the University of New Mexico and UCLA. Race and social justice are reoccurring themes in scholarly publications, opinion pieces and in her 2007 book “Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race,” which looks at the racial tensions that played out during the 19th-century Anglo-dominated American expansion westward into what was then part of Mexico.
Gómez traces her interest in the themes to her childhood. Her father, Antonio Gómez, was among a group of students who started a United Mexican American Students organization at the University of New Mexico when he was a student there in the 1960s. At the time, she said, Chicano college students around the Southwest were mobilizing for civil rights.
Her father and mother, Eloyda Gonzales Gómez, a registered nurse with Presbyterian Healthcare Services, were both supporters of the feminist movement.
“From my parents I had a real sense of social justice and politics, and pride in being Mexican-American, which was something my parents didn’t have the luxury of having, having grown up in a very racist town where it was a very rigid system,” said Gómez.
She went to Valley High School and credits her speech coach Bonnie Sheehan and her debating experience there with instilling the skills that propelled her toward her academic career as a professor at UNM and at UCLA.
“I feel like I had the best education there. The English department was incredibly strong,” Gómez said.
Sheehan recalls Gómez as a very quiet freshman who transformed into a confident young woman and a champion debater. In her 37-year teaching career, Sheehan said, Gómez was the most dedicated student she ever encountered.
“She worked harder and longer than anyone else because she was passionate. She was always an overachiever. The fact that she has gone on to be so successful in no way surprises me. I really thought Laura would be our first female president.”
Culture shock
Gómez was student body president at Valley in her senior year. She graduated in 1982 and left New Mexico for Harvard University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in social studies.
“(Harvard) was definitely a culture shock. For me it was so many things for the first time,” she said.
The “firsts” included a roommate from the Bronx who was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and meeting students so wealthy that their families owned homes on Central Park in New York City.
As a freshman she began writing for the college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, and was the only Hispanic woman on the staff. She also joined the very different world of the Mexican-American student’s organization.
Journalism initially appealed as a career and she did an internship with the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour Public Broadcasting Service program in 1985. The experience made her realize she preferred the slower pace and in-depth research involved in academic writing.
A year as a legislative aide for former Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, during the second Reagan administration tipped her decision to seek a career in academia.
“I saw some of the really negative side of politics,” she said.
She decided that pursuing the twin areas of sociology and law would give her more “connection with real world issues and social justice.” To that end, she earned a master’s degree and PhD in sociology and a law degree at Stanford University.
From 1994 through 2005 she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles becoming a tenured professor of law in 2000. During that time she also spent a couple of years as a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico Law School.
In 2005 she returned to New Mexico as a professor, dividing her time between law and American Studies. The return to New Mexico allowed Gómez and her young son, Alejandro Gómez, to be close to her extended family. She has one
brother, former Albuquerque city councilor Miguel Gómez, many cousins and her parents. “It was kind of idyllic,” she said. But UCLA kept trying to woo her back and she returned there in 2011. “Basically, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Despite the years working in Los Angeles, Gómez has always maintained close ties with New Mexico, enjoying family visits and her father’s New Mexican cooking.
Outside of work, she enjoys exercising at the gym — though she doesn’t aspire to be a hardcore athlete — and travel. In recent years, she has toured through Spain and visited Machu Picchu in Peru. One of the most fun things she has tried in recent years is surf fishing on the coast north of Los Angeles.
“You’re just standing barefoot on the beach at high tide. It’s so relaxing,” she said.