Professor Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and a faculty member in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, is being recognized for excellence in community service by MALDEF, the nation’s leading Latino legal civil rights organization.
MALDEF will honor Noriega during its 2014 Los Angeles Gala on Nov. 5 at the Westin Bonaventure in downtown L.A. Also being recognized are Gloria Molina, a member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors; and Lois Thompson, a partner in the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP.
Noriega is active in media policy and professional development, for which Hispanic Business named him as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Hispanics. He is co-founder of the 500-member National Association of Latino Independent Producers, and he served two terms on the board of directors of the Independent Television Service, the largest source of independent project funding within public television. Noriega has made presentations to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the U.S. Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the U.S. Congressional Entertainment Caucus. He recently completed a pilot study to develop quantitative methodologies for the study of hate speech on commercial media.
He is the author of “Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema” (Minnesota, 2000) and the editor of nine books dealing with Latino media, performance and visual art. Since 1996, he has been editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, the flagship journal for the field since its founding in 1970.
