Jessica López-Espino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. López-Espino’s research areas include language ideologies, racialization, courts, interpreting, and ethnography.  She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively titled, Hearing Child Welfare: Ideologies of Latinx Parenthood in a California Juvenile Dependency Court. In this book, she examines the role of language, racialization, and socioeconomic status in legal determinations of parental fitness to regain or maintain custody of their children following Child Protective Services investigations of Mexican, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Honduran and Salvadoran families. Her research has been published in American Anthropologist, Law and Social Inquiry, and the edited volume Metalinguistic Communities: Case Studies of Agency, Ideology, and Symbolic Uses of Language.