About Me
I am a historian of labor, migration, social movements, and political economy. My research examines class formations, labor activisms, and the dialectical relationship between economic powerbrokers, the state, and working peoples in the construction of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from the 1930s to the late 1990s. Centered in Imperial County, California, and Mexicali, Baja California Norte, Mexico, I explore the longstanding desire by agricultural and industrial interests to manufacture a borderless landscape invested in furthering the racialization of Mexican and Latina/o peoples. At the same time, I reveal the degree to which workers’ identities were in flux and how organized labor on both sides of the border struggled to negotiate what I call a "transborder imaginary” that mirrored and challenged the international growth and power of capitalism. By interpreting the borderlands as a space of movement with disparate meanings, my research shows how racial and national borders were felt, resisted, and coopted for different needs.