Professor Arreola received his doctorate in cultural geography from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and he has lived and taught in three of the four American states that line the U.S.-Mexico border. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and in book chapters on topics relating to the cultural geography of the Mexican-American borderlands. He is the author of The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (University of Arizona Press, 1993), Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province (University of Texas Press, 2002) and Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: A Geography of Regional and Cultural Diversity (forthcoming, University of Texas Press). He is also a Senior Consultant for World Geography, a new high school textbook (McDougal Littell, 2003).

Professor Arreola serves on the editorial boards for several leading geography journals and an international cross-cultural architecture journal.  He is a contributing editor to the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and a past president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. Presently, he is a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and an affiliate faculty with the Center for Latin American Studies at Arizona State University.