Dr. Angela Gutierrez (PhD University of California – Los Angeles; MA California State University –  Northridge; BA University of Southern California) a Provost’s Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department and the PRE Lab. Her research focuses on Latino identity and political participation in the United States. Her dissertation focuses on the activation of Latino identity in the United States. 

Guitierrez argues that political threat may be one way in which an identity can become salient and politicized. The first section of her dissertation examines identity in  California during the 1990s as an example of how identity can become politicized due to the political climate. The second section of her dissertation examines three common identity measures in the political science literature; group consciousness, identity centrality, and linked fate and seeks to answer how these measures relate to the political attitudes and behavior of Latino voters, and examines if  threat mediates or moderates the relationship between identity and political participation. 

Her work has been published in Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics and Political Research Quarterly.