Vicky L. Ruiz is Dean of the School of Humanities and Professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She attended Gulf Coast Community College and Florida State University and went on to pursue a PhD in History at Stanford University. After teaching at UC Davis, the Claremont Colleges, and Arizona State, she has been a faculty member at UCI since 2001. An award-winning historian, she has published seventeen books including From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America. Her recent work Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia received the 2007 Best in Reference by the New York Public Library. She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association. Married and the mother of two adult sons, Ruiz is a member of the national advisory board for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.