Brizeida Cruz Hernandez is a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in Sociology and Legal Studies. She transferred to UC Berkeley from Hartnell College, a public community college in Salinas, California.
Hernandez’s first independent research project, supported by the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at UC Berkeley, was motivated by questions rooted in her personal experiences, including her upbringing in a small, Latino farmworker community in rural Greenfield, California. Under the guidance of Professor Christian Paiz, Hernandez examined the educational experiences of Mexican Indigenous farmworker students.
Hernandez has worked as an undergraduate research assistant for several UC Berkeley scholars. She worked with Alina Zarate, a PhD student in the Energy and Resources Group, on research exploring farmworkers’ perspectives on climate change. For this project, Hernandez conducted interview transcription, qualitative coding, and community-based research. Hernandez also supported UC Berkeley Sociology PhD student Kelly Quin in interviewing Spanish-speaking service workers about their experiences with unions and outsourcing. Hernandez has worked with Professor Diana S. Reddy on research related to work law and social movements, qualitatively coding historical articles to analyze how work is framed, including its economic and legal dimensions.
Hernandez will soon begin her senior thesis, “Labor Law in the Fields: Legal Consciousness among Mexican Indigenous Farmworkers in Rural Central California,” which examines the gap between formal labor legal protections and how those laws are experienced in everyday agricultural work. After graduating, she plans to pursue both a PhD and a JD, and to continue advocating for her farmworker community through research and law.
This summer, Hernandez will work with Laura Beth Nielsen, ABF Research Professor and Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair and Professor of Sociology at Northwestern, on two projects. One project, Representations of Vengeance, Justice, Expertise, and Emotion in True Crime Podcasts, examines true crime stories through legal consciousness. The other, Consent to Sex on Campus: How Undergraduates Understand and Enact Sexual Consent in the Title IX Era, studies the impact of the Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letter on undergraduate experiences related to drinking, drug use, and sexual activity.