About

Jose Moya, Professor Emeritus at UCLA, was raised in socialist Cuba and experienced life in Franco’s Spain at the age of fourteen, gaining an informal education on the three main political systems of the 20th century through his personal experiences and a decade of working in various jobs. His research and teaching focus on understanding how people respond and adapt to large historical forces and shifts, with a particular interest in veiled realities beneath official discourses and structures. A sociocultural historian, he remains unaligned with the political and elite intellectual history trends, emphasizing a broader cultural and social perspective. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988 and has since taught at UCLA, offering courses on Latin American history, U.S. immigration, family history, cities in the Americas, and anarchism in the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Moya has directed nine Ph.D. dissertations and is mentoring twelve more. His notable publication, 'Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930,' has been widely acclaimed, winning five awards and sparking scholarly discussion on migration studies. Currently, he is working on a social, cultural, and intellectual history of anarchism in belle époque Buenos Aires, a project supported by multiple grants. Additionally, he is developing a sociocultural history of May Day in several major cities. Outside academia, he enjoys classical European music, modern art, artsy films, chess, fine wines, salsa dancing, baseball, and beer.

Research topics

• History
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Ancient history
• Economic history
• Ethnology
• Law

Selected publications

• Abstract PS3-02-24: Completion Rates of Risk Counseling Consultations For Women at High-Risk for Breast Cancer within the WISDOM 1.0 Pragmatic Screening Trial

  Clinical Cancer Research · 2026-02-17

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract BACKGROUND: The WISDOM study is innovative in that it is the first, prospective large-scale trial of assessing risk-based mammographic screening recommendations versus annual screening. Women identified as high-risk were invited to complete a Breast Health Specialist consultation, which included use of an automated educational tool, Breast Health Decisions (BHD) tool, identifying their specific breast cancer risk factors, and how to promote uptake of risk-reducing options. During initial rollout, the preliminary data obtained demonstrated that racial and ethnic minority populations were underrepresented in the study demographics, thus, we created a program to incorporate a more diverse participant pool. We sought to understand whether completion rates of consultations with trained breast health specialist (BHS) varied among race/ethnicity, geography, and age. METHODS: We analyzed data from WISDOM 1.0 participants that completed the BHD tool from 2015-2023 that were considered being in the highest 2.5% breast cancer risk based on the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium. Of those participants, we compared completion of BHS consultations by comparing them by age (40-49, 50-59, 60-69, 70-79), race/ethnicity (White, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Other/Mixed Race), and geography (Northeast, Midwest, South, West). We compared each category by proportions of total completed versus not completed and obtained percentages of each. RESULTS: There were a total of 2883 participants identified as high-risk and offered a BHS consultation. Most of all participants were White (84%) and from the West region of the United States (66%). Completion rates were similar across age groups (52-71%), but lower for women ages 70-79 (52%). Within the race/ethnicity category, the proportions that completed consultations were: Other/Mixed Race 105/137 (77%); White 1666/2434 (68%); Hispanic 76/122 (62%); Asian 42/78 (54%); and Black 46/112 (41%). Lastly, the geographic region with the highest completion rate was the Midwest at 521/623 (84%) and the lowest in the South at 157/306 (51%). CONCLUSION: WISDOM identified women at high risk and provided virtual clinical consultations with breast health specialists to review their personalized risk and discuss breast cancer prevention strategies. There were notable differences in completion of clinician consultations rates seen across categories of age, geography, and race/ethnicity. Further assessment of scheduling availability, structural barriers, participant preferences, clinician contact methods, and other contributing factors is required to understand why completion rates differed so much across demographic groups. Based on these results and participant feedback, the WISDOM 2.0 study has changed consultation workflows, improved clinician availability and scheduling methods. We also plan to increase community engagement, tailor outreach methods based on community member feedback, and offer more options for participants to receive the personalized risk information than were offered in WISDOM 1.0. As a pragmatic and iteratively improving study, WISDOM 2.0 has been funded to create and implement these changes with the goal of providing a more equitable method of providing specialty consultations to high-risk participants. Citation Format: J. Moya, K. Ross, D. Goodman-Gruen, L. Madlensky, A. Blanco, B. Tong, H. Harvey, A. S. Fiscalini, A. Kaster, M. Scheuner, L. Sabacan, J. Atamer, L. van 't Veer, O. I. Olopade, J. Tice, E. Ziv, S. Kapoor, Y. Shieh, A. D. Borowsky, A. Naeim, H. L. Park, A. LaCroix, WISDOM Investigators and Advocate Partners, L. J. Esserman. Completion Rates of Risk Counseling Consultations For Women at High-Risk for Breast Cancer within the WISDOM 1.0 Pragmatic Screening Trial [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2025; 2025 Dec 9-12; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2026;32(4 Suppl):Abstract nr PS3-02-24.

  PublisherDOI

• What Made the Americas Different

  Current History · 2026-02-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The new nations that emerged in the Western Hemisphere had much in common, including republican ideals and mass immigration.

  PublisherDOI

• Abstract PD12-02: Eligibility for CDK4/6 inhibitor treatment in 861 patients with invasive lobular carcinoma of the breast: the importance of nodal staging for adjuvant therapy decisions

  Clinical Cancer Research · 2026-02-17 · 1 citations

  article

  Abstract Background: The monarchE and NATALEE trials demonstrated significant improvement in invasive disease-free survival with the combination of adjuvant endocrine therapy and a cyclin-dependent kinase 4 and 6 inhibitor (CDK4/6i). Namely, abemaciclib and ribociclib have been used in hormone receptor (HR)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative early breast cancer. By inhibiting cell cycle progression, both abemaciclib and ribociclib can significantly improve invasive disease-free survival in selected patients. Standard indications for adjuvant CDK4/6i therapy include larger tumor size, nodal involvement, or high-risk features such as high grade, high proliferation, or high-risk genomic assay score. However, limited data exist on the indications for and use of CDK4/6i in invasive lobular carcinoma (ILC). ILC is the second most common subtype of breast cancer, comprising up to 15% of all breast malignancies. Nearly 90% of these tumors exhibit HR-positive and HER2-negative status, and they frequently present at a later stage with more indolent features such as lower grade, lower Ki-67, and less lymphovascular invasion than invasive ductal carcinoma. We hypothesized that given these features, a majority of patients with ILC only become eligible for CDK4/6i treatment because of their nodal status. If true, this has implications for the role of surgical staging of the axilla in patients with ILC. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a prospectively maintained institutional ILC database to identify patients with stage I-III, HR-positive, HER2-negative ILC. Patients were considered eligible for adjuvant CDK4/6i treatment if they met any of the following criteria: nodal positivity, tumor size ≥ 5 cm, or tumor size 2-5 cm with either tumor grade 3, Ki-67 ≥ 20%, or high-risk genomic assay score (MammaPrint high risk or Oncotype Dx score ≥ 26). We determined the proportion of patients with ILC who were eligible for CDK4/6i therapy overall; among those, we evaluated which eligibility criteria were met and what proportion of patients would be considered ineligible in the absence of nodal staging data. Results: From 1,027 ILC cases, we included 861 patients with stage I-III, HR-positive, HER2-negative tumors. Overall, 390 (45.3%) met at least one eligibility criteria for treatment with a CDK4/6 inhibitor. Of those, the most common indication for CDK4/6 inhibitor treatment was nodal positivity, present in 255 (65.4%) patients; the mean number of positive nodes was 4.0 (range= 1-46). The next most common criteria was tumor size ≥ 5 cm (n= 201, 51.5%), followed by Ki67 >20% (n= 23, 5.9%), high-risk genomic assay (n= 11, 2.8%), or tumor grade 3 (n= 8, 2.1%). Of the 255 patients with nodal positivity, 121 (47.5%) met no other eligibility criteria for CDK4/6i treatment, whereas 107 (42.0%) also had a tumor size ≥ 5 cm and 27 (10.6%) also had other high-risk features. In total, 31.0% (121/390) of patients eligible for CDK4/6i therapy met criteria for treatment based on nodal status alone. Conclusion: In patients with early stage ILC, nodal positivity is the most common indication for treatment with CDK4/6 inhibitor, consistent with our hypothesis. These data suggest that implementation of surgical de-escalation strategies, namely the omission of sentinel lymph node surgery, should be applied with caution in patients with ILC. Nearly one third of ILC patients eligible for CDK4/6i therapy may no longer meet treatment criteria in the absence of confirmed nodal positivity, which is often difficult to detect based on imaging alone. Citation Format: N. S. Kim, A. Vertido, A. Quirarte, H. Batra-Sharma, E. Abeles, J. Moya, J. Chien, J. Mouabbi, R. Mukhtar. Eligibility for CDK4/6 inhibitor treatment in 861 patients with invasive lobular carcinoma of the breast: the importance of nodal staging for adjuvant therapy decisions [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium 2025; 2025 Dec 9-12; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2026;32(4 Suppl):Abstract nr PD12-02.

  PublisherDOI

• African-American Perceptions on the Importance of Racially-Concordant Care

  2025-01-01

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  Racial concordance is defined as a relationship in which a healthcare provider and patient share the same race. Racially concordant care has been, in previous research, associated with improved health outcomes, particularly in minority populations such as African-Americans Despite this, little is known about how African-American patients perceive racial concordance, and how important it is to their care. The focus of this research proposal is to determine the perceptions of African-American patients on racial concordance and racially concordant care, and how important they deem it to be to their care. The literature review delves into racial concordance and its presence in healthcare, as well as how racially concordant and culturally competent care appears in surgical contexts. This research proposal will employ a survey method in which 100 African-American patients up to one month post-operation will be questioned and interviewed on their level of satisfaction with their care whether or not they considered racial concordance impactful in their care. The survey will be administered through various formats in order to increase its accessibility, including paper questionnaires, phone interviews, and digital forms. Data will be divided into two categories: consideration of racial concordance and racially concordant care as important or unimportant, and descriptive statistics will be used to determine if African-American patients believe that racial concordance is necessary in their postoperative care.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1 The Historical Emergence and Massification of International Families in Europe and Its Diaspora

  Berghahn Books · 2022-10-11 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Jews and New Christians in the Iberian Empires in a Global Context, 1492–1800

  University of Florida Press eBooks · 2022-06-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The making and remaking of the Atlantic World, 1400–2020

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Ancient history

  The Atlantic is a newish world. Although named after one of the old pre-Olympian deities, its ocean is 30 million years younger than the Pacific. The oldest hominids sites in Africa run along its eastern rather than Atlantic side. The lack of such opportunities spurred Western Europe, and particularly its westernmost polities. The complacency of the contented and drive of the dissatisfied may represent a prologue to a process by which the Atlantic came to catch up and eventually replace the Indian Ocean as the center of global trade, free and forced migrations, cultural crossings and technological innovation. Several factors rendered Portugal the pioneer in the fifteenth-century Atlantic explorations that morphed into the first stage of European overseas expansion. Portugal’s Atlantic expansion ensued not only from internal conditions but also from external pressures, specifically the monopolistic practices of other trading powers. The Portuguese expansion continued with impressive force beyond the Atlantic islands.

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• Anarchists of the Caribbean: Countercultural Politics and Transnational Networks in the Age of US Expansion

  Hispanic American Historical Review · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Political Science

  This book follows a laudable research trajectory. Kirwin Shaffer published excellent monographs, in 2013 and 2019, respectively, on the anarchist movement in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Unavoidably, the present volume overlaps much with the previous two. We find the same places, issues, networks, and characters. Yet even someone familiar with Shaffer's corpus will find here plenty that is new, eye-opening, and intellectually rewarding.The most noticeable and important new contribution is the circum-Caribbean scope. Panama is the most salient addition. Shaffer traces the anarchist presence there to 1905, almost a quarter century before the first Marxist party appeared on the isthmus, and to the arrival of militants seeking work in the canal's construction. Most were Spaniards, mainly from Galicia, whom Shaffer claims were fundamental in the rise of Caribbean anarchism. Others came from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Italy, despite US authorities banning anarchists from the Canal Zone. Taking its cue from Washington, the Panamanian government also banned anarchists from entering their country. Ironically, anarchism in Panama was an overwhelmingly Hispanic immigrant movement, lacking the participation of the native-born and of the country's largest immigrant group, Black West Indians. Shaffer ascribes this less to racism on the part of the Spanish-speaking anarchists than to language differences and the gravitation of West Indians to Protestant churches and Garveyism.By contrast, for the volume's other new case study, Mexico, the vast majority of activists were native-born. This section is particularly novel because it focuses not on the anarchist movement in Mexico per se but on its less known Caribbean connections. These went back to the 1890s and the historical links between Cuba and Yucatán. In the early 1900s, Cuban and Spanish anarchists began settling in Mérida and engaging in labor organization with their Yucatecan coreligionists. Alarmed Mexican authorities requested assistance and repressive measures from the US occupying forces in Cuba and later from the Cuban government, with mixed results. Soon after, Caribbean anarchists began collaborating with the Magonista movement in the United States and flocked to Mexico in the 1910s to join what would become the twentieth century's first social revolution, a process that would engender as much solidarity as sectarianism within the Left.The fourth chapter, delightfully titled “The Caribbean Red during the Red Scare,” turns to the century's second social revolution. Anarchists celebrated, almost unanimously, the October Revolution of 1917. Most even embraced the ensuing ascendancy of the Bolsheviks, which was, after all, a revolutionary movement rather than the type of socialist reformist party that anarchists had always opposed. The soviets were popular, local, nonhierarchical, and autonomous organizations that anarchists idealized as the building blocks for the future society free from coercion and full of solidarity. This relative consensus and effervescence, however, did not last. As reports of the Soviet Union's increasing repression of non-Bolshevik leftists accumulated, so did debate within anarchist circles, and Shaffer detects emerging dilemmas. Would anarchist opposition to the Soviet Union help end a tyranny or lead to anarchists finding themselves “further from Anarchy rather than closer to her,” as one anarchist cited by Shaffer puts it (p. 155)? The smaller anarchist movements in Puerto Rico, Panama, and Tampa tended to coalesce with emerging Communist parties and organizations. Cuba, with its larger and older anarchist and leftist movement, saw a greater variety of responses. Many anarcho-syndicalists continued to support the Soviet Union and collaborated with what soon became the region's largest Communist party. Anarcho-communists and individualists condemned the Soviet regime as more tyrannical than the liberal democracies they disdained. This positive correlation between the Left's magnitude and sectarianism surfaced in other parts of Latin America and beyond.Anarchists of the Caribbean advances our understanding of radical transnational movements in three other main ways. The first is its integration with migration studies. Anarchism was particularly diasporic even compared to other radical working-class movements. Shaffer traces the circulation of activists, resources, and culture across the Atlantic and particularly within the greater Caribbean. He reveals a network in which Havana, rather than any city in Spain, acted as the central node but in which the other nodes (including Colón, Panama City, Mérida, Bayamón, and New York) also interacted. The second relates to the book's attention to national political control apparatuses. This formed part of the context of repression that conditioned anarchists' transnational lives: escape, exile, expulsion. But as Shaffer shows, this could unwittingly serve to spread the ideology.The third is an exploration of anarchists' responses to colonialism. Although anarchists opposed imperialism as part of their rejection of the state and any other form of coercion and imposition, they rarely had to confront colonial situations directly in Europe or the Americas' northern and southern regions—the movement's geographic hubs. In the Caribbean they did, becoming involved first in the anticolonial movements against Spain in Puerto Rico and particularly Cuba and then in those against US neocolonialism throughout the Caribbean.In sum, this a deeply researched, conceptually sophisticated, and insightful book: a continuation, and a culmination, of a trajectory of scholarly excellence.

  PublisherDOI

• La inmigración y la formación histórica de Iberoamérica

  Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Acknowledgments

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ramón Torrecillas

  18 shared

• Leticia Esteban‐Tejeda

  Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid

  16 shared

• Belén Cabal

  Universidad de Oviedo

  12 shared

• Pierre‐Yves Saunier

  Rockefeller Foundation

  12 shared

• Adolfo Fernández

  Universidad de Oviedo

  8 shared

• Roberto López‐Píriz

  8 shared

• F. J. Palomares

  Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid

  8 shared

• Ellen Carol DuBois

  6 shared

Education

• B.A., History

  University of Havana

  1976

• M.A., History

  University of Havana

  1978

• Ph.D., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1985

Awards & honors

• five prestigious awards for his book Cousins and Strangers
• the journal Historical Methods (Winter, 2001) published a fo…
• the American Council of Learned Societies’s Burkhardt fellow…