Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department.
She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship.
At the age of ten, her family settled in Ontario in Southern California where there were more Mexican-Americans in her classrooms; this triggered her critical thinking about race relations and the Spanish language.
During August 1970 Zavella participated in the Chicano Moratorium along with approximately 25,000 other activists who protested in East Los Angeles against the Vietnam War.
Zavella was one of the first scholars to analyze the intersections of race, gender, class for Chicana women workers, a research approach that emerged from feminist of color activisms of the late 1960s and 1970s.
She is also interested in the movement for reproductive justice, family, poverty, sexuality, transnational migration by Mexicans, Chicana-Latina studies, feminism, ethnographic research methods.