For some twenty years, the Asian American Studies Center and the other ethnic studies centers were administratively housed and flourished under the Graduate Division and Vice Chancellor Claudia Mitchell Kernan. With Mitchell Kernan's departure in 2010, an opportunity emerged to restructure the Institute of American Cultures (IAC) to study an emerging America and the dramatic transformations of our sociocultural landscape through remarkable changes in racial/ethnic distributions and characteristics of local, national, and transnational populations.

The core of the reconstituted IAC is the four ethnic studies research centers: the American Indian Studies Center (AISC), the Asian American Studies Center (AASC), the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies (Bunche), and the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) under the leadership of Vice Provost and Professor M. Belinda Tucker. The new IAC will also initiate campus-wide programs and collaborations that support a wide range of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of diverse American cultures at UCLA.