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James Diego Vigil

James Diego Vigil is professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, at University of California, Irvine. His education includes Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has also taught at UCLA for six years and at USC for fourteen years in the Anthropology Department. At UCLA he was the director of the Center for the Study of Urban Poverty whose primary mission was to link university resources and expertise with those of federal, state, and local and community-based agencies and organizations concerned with issues related to urban poverty and social service delivery.

His is expertise is in urban, psychology, socialization and educational anthropology, Mexico and U.S. Southwest ethnohistory. Some of his books include From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican American Culture, Personas Mexicanas: Chicano High Schoolers in a Changing Los Angeles, Barrio Gangs: Street Life and Identity in Southern California(1988), and A Rainbow of Gangs: A Cross-Cultural Study of Street Youth in Los Angeles (2002).