He studied in hallowed halls of academia. His highly respected research takes him halfway around the globe into societies both foreign and familiar. In his newest role, he leads the largest school of a research university less than two decades old but soaring in reputation and influence.
Yet if you ask Leo Arriola about his journey, he uses a surprising word.
“I’m accidental in every possible way,” he said. “Professor. Administrator. Statistically, I shouldn’t be in this position.”
As he said this, Arriola smiled — something he does a lot. It’s a welcoming smile, an invitation to appreciate, as he certainly does, the remarkable trajectory of his life.
“He’s very charismatic, very motivating,” said a longtime colleague. “He’s someone you want to be around.”
Today, Arriola is the new dean of UC Merced’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. He came to the Central Valley from UC Berkeley, where he was a senior associate dean in the Social Sciences Division. He is a respected political scientist and a world authority on African governments, the churn of power in multiethnic societies and the struggle for women’s rights. For eight years he served as director of Berkeley’s Center for African Studies.
But to understand the word Arriola uses to describe himself — to sense the profound gratitude he holds for people who stepped up and helped him arrive at where he is today — we need to go back three decades.
A Child of South Gate
In the early 1990s, Arriola was a high school kid in South Gate, a city in southeast Los Angeles tucked between Downey and Huntington Park. The region, called the Gateway Cities, is among the most densely populated in the United States. His school, South Gate High, was forced into a year-round schedule to bear enrollment twice that of its original capacity.
About three-quarters of South Gate’s residents are Hispanic. In the early 1990s the poverty rate was three times higher than the U.S. average. Median household income hovered around $20,000.
In April of 1992, the year Arriola graduated from high school, the riots triggered by the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King erupted across south central and southeast Los Angeles. He remembers skies black with smoke and armored National Guard vehicles on the streets.
“It felt like my community was tearing itself apart,” he said. The lessons of a diverse democracy’s fragility resonated in his research decades later.
Even for a bright student, life in the Gateway offered a narrow path to a successful college education. Only about one in 10 adult residents of South Gate achieved a bachelor’s degree, according to U.S. Census data. Young people with potential needed a supportive gesture or a challenge to act.
Arriola said that’s exactly what happened.
When he was the editor of the high school newspaper, his adviser, Marilyn Lund, let him take home one of the paper’s Mac laptops on weekends. In his senior year, a counselor, Shirley Shelly, urged him to aim high with his college applications. He was accepted to Claremont McKenna College, a nationally respected private liberal arts institution.
(Side note: Claremont McKenna ranked fifth in this year’s Wall Street Journal latest college rankings, the same list that placed UC Merced 18th overall and first in social mobility.)
His senior thesis at Claremont McKenna attracted the attention of Professor Phillip Koldewyn, who urged him to pursue graduate studies. Soon after that, with a bachelor’s degree in history and international relations in hand along with magna cum laude honors, he was bound for Princeton University.
Love and Support From a Single Parent
Arriola earned a master’s degree in international relations from Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs.
“All along, people planted ideas in my head that I never would have come up with myself,” Arriola said. “So those are all accidental kinds of things. I have such gratitude because someone always gave me a helping hand at critical moments in my trajectory.”
All along the way, Arriola had the love and support of his mother, Silvia, who raised Arriola as a single parent. At age 13, she came to the United States from Mexico. At first, she made money by cleaning homes and restaurants. A few years later, she attended night school to learn English and attain the skills to use a computer and work as a secretary. Arriola was born when she was 18.
