Leisy Abrego receives 2026 Gold Shield Faculty Prize

Leisy Abrego was just a small child when her family fled El Salvador's brutal civil war in 1980. Born in San Martín, San Salvador, Abrego - with her mother and baby sister - arrived in Los Angeles, where her father later joined them and found work as a busser. Her mother took care of the family, which later expanded to four daughters.

Abrego attended public schools in the Pico-Union area and in East Hollywood through the ninth grade, after which two caring teachers got her enrolled in a private prep school. It was the start of Abrego's path to higher education, where she became the first person in her extended family in the United States to attend college. Two of her three degrees - a master's and a Ph.D. in sociology - were earned at UCLA.

Now a professor in the UCLA Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and associate director of the UCLA Barbra Streisand Center, Abrego is considered by many of her peers to be a leading expert on immigration policy and experience. Her research in the fields of Central American studies, law and society, Latino families, gender inequalities and the lived experiences of U.S. foreign and immigration policies has been widely used in classrooms all over the country.

For this reason and many others, Abrego was named the recipient of the 2026 Gold Shield Faculty Prize, sponsored by Gold Shield, Alumnae of UCLA. One of UCLA's oldest affinity organizations, Gold Shield has been awarding the faculty prize since 1986 to mid-career faculty with extraordinary accomplishments in teaching, research and service. The prize comes with an unrestricted $35,000 award.

"The Gold Shield Faculty Prize recognizes faculty who excel across teaching, research and service, and Dr. Abrego is the person you picture when you describe it," said Michellene DeBonis, chair of the Gold Shield Faculty Prize Committee. "Her scholarship on immigration and family separation speaks directly to the moment we're living in. Her students credit her with changing the direction of their lives, and the scholars she's mentored are now building the field of Central American studies at universities across the country."

In her letter of nomination, Jessica Cattelino, UCLA professor of anthropology and American Indian studies and director of the UCLA Barbra Streisand Center, said that Abrego is a key figure in the development of Central American studies.

"Abrego taught UCLA students who never saw in the curriculum their families' histories and the important geopolitical, economic and sociological issues raised by examining Central America," Cattelino said. "This eventually led to the renaming of her UCLA academic department, with the addition to its name of 'and Central American Studies.' It also led to national and international research recognition and to helping people think differently about our shared world."

Important - and timely - strategies

Abrego has a gift for welcoming students and fostering diversity, said Charlene Villaseñor Black, professor emerita in UCLA's department of Chicana/o and Central American studies and currently professor in the University of Oxford Department of the History of Art.

"Abrego consciously creates a space of care in the classroom because she deems it necessary to address difficult subjects," said Villaseñor Black. "She teaches about immigration, racism, family separation, child detention, gangs and ongoing sociopolitical crises. She is skilled at fostering dialogue, modeling techniques such as deep listening and respectful disagreement, and she does so impressively in small graduate seminars as well as in large undergraduate lectures. These strategies could not be more important or timely."

A recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Teaching Award with Distinction in Undergraduate Research Mentorship, Abrego is also a sought-after advisor for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. A number of her former students have held prestigious postdoctoral fellowships and gone on to become assistant professors at Yale University, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, University of Florida and Dominican University. One student wrote, "What is most astonishing about Professor Abrego is her immense dedication to her students despite the heavy load she carries, as seen through her consistent responses and ability to meet with students regularly."

Abrego's award-winning book, "Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love Across Borders," is an ethnographic study of Salvadoran migrant parents and their children. Gaye Theresa Johnson, director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality and Democracy and associate professor of Black studies at UC Santa Barbara, is one of many peers throughout the country who regularly use the book as a resource in their classes.

Johnson calls it "a devastating book, because of the stark and tragic distance between migrant dreams and the eventual realities they face, especially around family separation. … But the book is also rooted in love, and it lends dignity and purpose to the sacrifices that parents make for the children they leave behind."

With immigration continuing to be a hot-button topic, Abrego strives to maintain a calm environment for the students in her classes, many of whom are from immigrant families.

"I am an immigrant. I am deeply embedded in immigrant communities," Abrego said. "Most of my students are themselves immigrants or children of immigrants. I have dedicated my career to studying and teaching immigration, so I bring that kind of expertise into the classroom, but I also have the kind of lived expertise that allows me to notice their body language - slumped over, blank looks, general distraction - whenever the news is bad for immigrants.

Making 'space for emotions'

"When new laws propose to treat immigrants like criminals, to take away their rights - all of that impacts students directly, and I do make space for emotions in the classroom because I understand that as human beings, the news affects our ability to learn," she added.

In addition to her teaching and research duties, Abrego is a former director of graduate studies and former chair of the department of Chicana/o and Central American studies. She is in demand as a public speaker, often focusing on the rights of marginalized immigrant communities such as undocumented and documented students, migrant women, and mixed-status families and their transnational lives. Abrego travels frequently across Latin America to share her work with both academic and other public institutions, such as the Museo Nacional de Antropología in San Salvador. She has also provided pro bono expert witness services for dozens of asylum cases.

Upon learning she had received the 2026 Gold Shield Faculty Prize, Abrego admitted feeling very emotional.

"My goodness, it was so wonderful!" she said. The first in at least four generations of women in her family to not have a child by the age of 15, Abrego was the first to finish high school, then college, and then a Ph.D. She was also the first of her mother's lineage to learn to drive a car and to have a job outside of the service sector.

"My first thought was that this award means something to all of us, to all the women in my mother's lineage who never even had a chance to go to school," Abrego said. "I'm proud and honored and so humbled by it all."