Professor Vasquez-Tokos received her B.A. in English from Princeton University (1998) and her PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley (2007). She was a faculty member at the University of Kansas beginning in 2007 until joining the University of Oregon faculty in 2012. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research and teaching areas include: race/ethnicity, Mexican Americans/Latinos/as/xs, social inequalities, gender, family, and intermarriage.

Professor Vasquez-Tokos’s most recent book, Burdens of Belonging:  Race in an Unequal Nation (New York University Press, 2025) picks up a theme from W.E.B. Du Bois to examine how racial status matters to sense of belonging and experience in the nation.  Prior books include Mexican Americans Across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Realities (New York University Press, 2011, published as Jessica M. Vasquez) which concerns the racial/ethnic identity formation of Mexican Americans and Marriage Vows and Racial Choices (Russell Sage Foundation, 2017) that explores how race, gender, class, and nation of origin matter in family formation involving Latinos/as. 

Professor Vasquez-Tokos’s coauthored article on “the racialization of privacy” won the “Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Article Award” from the Race, Gender, and Class Section of the American Sociological Association (2021). Her coauthored article on racial authenticity work won the “Best Article Award” from the Latino/a Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association (2010).  Recent articles concern the Latino middle class (coauthored, Annual Review of Sociology, 2024); gender inequality, power dynamics, and couple identity work in families (coauthored, Gender & Society, 2024); Latinos/as/xs in society (Sociological Perspectives 2020); how race, gender, and age affect the interview dynamic (Symbolic Interaction, 2017); Latinos’ responses to race-based “controlling images” over their lifetime (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2017); and how racist mechanisms lead to Latino-Latino same-race intimacy (Social Problems, 2015).