Rosa joined our Undergraduate Studies (UGS) Program in 2000 as a regular guest speaker. Served as Co-Director of the Teaching-Learning Collaborative in 2005 for the MAE program. Was appointed UGS Affiliate Faculty and Internship Program Faculty Coordinator in 2007. As Director of External Partnerships since 2011, she provides leadership to the academic collaborations of the program with public and private organizations locally and nationwide, created the Ambassador’s plan to disseminate UGS activities and opportunities among local organizations, and also serves as UGS faculty articulation officer with two year colleges in the larger Los Angeles region.

Among her program and campus citizenship contributions, Rosa created the BA Media Project to document the academic activities of the program; has coordinated the Student Showcase since 2007, served as Chair of the Administrator’s Assembly 2015-1016, and is an active member of the Diversity Committee.

Rosa teaches interdisciplinary courses that critically address the intersections of urban culture, zeitgeist, identity, and sense of community using multimedia teaching methods. She also teaches in the Bridge Program, where she designed BSL, an optional class for students that gets them out of the classroom and into the streets of Los Angeles. Part service learning, part ethnographic fieldwork training, offers students the opportunity to design and implement community-building projects while fostering hands-on applications of the humanities. Read an article on the BSL here.

An immigrant born, raised, and educated in Mexico City, Rosa specifically chose to live and work in Los Angeles because she considers it the ultimate urban challenge for community building. She sees L.A. as the precocious offspring of an accelerated, incremental, and relentless influx of differing cultural, economic, political, and environmental agendas intersecting in the region since the late 1700s. Whether in the classroom or in the field, she prompts her students to consider this city as an apt Petri dish where phenomena such as dislocation, hybridization, cultural change, and subversion typically may come into sharp focus.

Her academic interests draw from the most current theoretical, methodological, and analytic frameworks of cultural studies as informed by anthropology, film/media studies, sociology, and urban studies. Rosa’s thesis on public urban setting interaction was an interdisciplinary participant observation study conducted in a low-income neighborhood of Mexico City. The study considered possible applications of communication and urban theory to the recording and analysis of transient ownership and domestication of public settings. Her documentary TV script based on this study received a national TV script award in 1985 by the Mexican government.

She has worked as a Communications advisor as well as Community Engagement, Diversity, and Urban Ethnography research consultant for a range of think-tank organizations both in Mexico City and Los Angeles.

Her volunteer work includes being a Docent at the Los Angeles Public Central Library and teaching Taichi. Rosa lives in Long Beach with Argentinean born craftsman Jaime Sabatté and their canine companions.