Our Team
Santa Cruz in Color is made possible thanks to a collaborative effort between contributors, community members, and interns, past and present.
Project Leadership
Professor Christine Hong
Professor Hong directs the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz, where she is Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), a department she helped to create, and Literature. She organized alongside students for ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz and served as the founding chair of CRES. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and sits on the UC Ethnic Studies Council. She is a core and founding member of both the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. In greater Santa Cruz, she organizes with Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice and serves on the board of Santa Cruz Black. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, was published by Stanford University Press in 2020.
Community Archivist, Researcher & Designer
Yitong Lei
Yitong Lei is a writer and ar(t)chivist whose work focuses primarily on Chinatowns and Chinatown history. Having graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, as well as East Asian Studies, she now works as an independent scholar, contributing to community-driven research and projects such as Santa Cruz in Color. She also works as an independent journalist, contributing to publications like the Bay Area Current, The Objective, and more. Her debut poetry book, I Had a Hungry Dream, was published in December 2025 by Sleeping Dragons Press.
Interns & Collaborators
Current (2025-2026)
Lucy Liu | Undergraduate Intern | 2024 – Winter 2026
Lucy Liu is an undergraduate pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz. With a background in student organizing related to anti-imperialist national liberation, Lucy is passionate about education as a means of advancing justice, improving people’s lives, and transforming society into an equal one for all oppressed people. Lucy conducts community-centered research and documents local community organizing with the Center for Racial Justice.
Rafael Revolorio | Undergraduate Intern | 2024 – Summer 2026
Rafael Revolorio is a third-year double major in Latin American & Latino Studies (LALS) and Global & Community Health (GCH). He also plans to minor in Science & Justice. He grew up in the East Bay and has worked at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation on projects involving harm reduction related to substance use, aimed at Latino and Maya communities in the Mission district. His goal is to work on increasing access to culturally concordant public health resources for underserved and marginalized ethnic communities. Currently he works for the Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz as he completes his bachelor’s degree.
Former
Boyeong Kim | Graduate Student Coordinator | Fall 2024 – Summer 2025
Boyeong Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American and Latino Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES). Her research examines how economic imaginaries around development and commemorative politics of neoliberal modernization projects have shaped citizen-making in the transpacific world, contextualizing Asia and Latin America within an organic world system. As a graduate student researcher at the Center for Racial Justice, Boyeong has contributed to the Santa Cruz in Color project, where she conducts research, mentors undergraduate interns, facilitates interviews, secures funding and assists with documentation and archiving practices.
Jared Michael Semana | Project Consultant | Summer 2024 – Summer 2025
Jared Michael Semana is an advocate and researcher focused on the intersection of community empowerment, organizational strategy, and sustainability. They are currently a Masters in Business Administration candidate at the Asian Institute of Management and a graduate of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program at UC Santa Cruz.
Riley Alinsug | Undergraduate Intern | Fall 2024 – Summer 2025
Riley Alinsug is currently enrolled at UC Santa Cruz as an undergraduate student, double majoring in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and Education. They bring experience organizing with Pilipinx diaspora communities of Santa Cruz as a member of Anakbayan and Co-Coordinator of UC Santa Cruz’s longest-running peer-led ethnic studies course, Pilipinx Historical Dialogue. As a Pilipinx youth who understands the need for Third World youth to be critically conscious of systems of oppression which uphold ideological whiteness, they are inspired by their studies and the communities of color residing in Santa Cruz County to advocate for ethnic studies and accessible political education for all.
Keiko Utsumi | Undergraduate Intern | Fall 2024 – Summer 2025
With experience working as a harm reduction peer educator and a researcher for the Humanities Institute of Japanese American Postwar Resettlement, Keiko now conducts community-based research and curation for the Center for Racial Justice. Interrogating their position as a UC Santa Cruz student, an educational consumer in an institution that has gentrified the local area, has motivated Keiko’s contribution to the CRJ’s Santa Cruz in Color archive. They aim to return the education to their community through various means of expression.