Professor Pitti, who was raised in Sacramento, California, and received his PhD from Stanford University in 1998, is the author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California (2003) and articles on Chicano history and historiography.
He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, Western History, 20th-century immigration, civil rights, and related subjects. He currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies of Yale’s American Studies Program. And he directs the Latina/o History Project, which explores ethnic Mexican, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, and other Latino histories in the United States, their links and divisions, their diversity, and their cultures and politics.