Six Things You Should Know About Professor Dennis Lopez
He was a lobbyist for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a national civil rights organization. He was also a consultant to the state’s former California Post-Secondary Education Commission (CPEC) and later served as a consultant to the Intersegmental Coordinating Committee (ICC), an organization that supports access to higher education.
He teaches in a high school in addition to Cal Poly Pomona. Since fall 2016, he has taught a CSU Long Beach ethnic studies course at El Rancho High School in the El Rancho Unified School District. As such, he supported AB 2016, a law that allows ethnic studies to be taught in California high schools.
He was a Southern California regional director for the Puente Project. The Puente Project is an intersegmental program that utilizes Chicano/Latino literature in high school college preparation English courses and pre-transferable and transferable community college English courses to improve college-going rates among participating students. The Puente Project model creates teams of English instructors and counselors to collaborate to meet the needs of Puente Project student participants. As the Southern California regional director, he supervised Puente Project partnerships in 23 high schools and 23 community colleges.
He has spent much of his career advocating for undocumented immigrant students. As a grant writer for the Inland Empire Scholarship Fund (IESF), he assisted in raising scholarship funds for low-income, high achieving Chicano/Latino students from Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Historically, 30% of IESF Scholarship recipients were undocumented immigrants. In 1984, he co-founded the Leticia A. Network, an organization that promotes access to higher education among California’s undocumented immigrant students. The 1985 Leticia A. decision allowed undocumented California high school graduates to be classified as state residents for tuition purposes. The Leticia A. Network referred parents of undocumented students to civil rights organizations who became plaintiffs in that litigation. The Leticia A. Network disseminated information about the court’s decision by hosting workshops at high schools, community colleges, churches and other community meetings. The Leticia A. decision was overturned by the 1991 Bradford decision against the University of California and the 1992 Association of American Women decision against the California State University.
Outside of spending time with family, teaching at Cal Poly Pomona and CSU Long Beach, he’s devoted to helping undocumented students and parents. His goal is to help address the needs of the 1.4 million undocumented immigrants that live between Ventura County and the Mexican border. Some of his activities include providing referrals to no cost or low-cost immigration attorneys and sharing other resources that serve undocumented immigrants.
Professor Dennis Lopez is a lecturer in the Department of Ethnic & Women’s Studies. He teaches Contemporary Chicano Latino Issues, The Chicano Latino Experience and Multi-Ethnic Heritage of California for EWS and History & Politics of Education for the Department of Liberal Studies.