About

B.A., UCLA
Ph.D., UC Santa Cruz

I am a historian of the twentieth century United States specializing in Latinx, immigration, and borderlands histories. I am particularly interested in the intersection of immigration policy and labor migrations at the turn of the twentieth century.

I am currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Labor’s Morality: The Hidden Ties Between Sexual Labor, Agricultural Work, and Justice at the California Borderlands, 1875–1937 (partial manuscript under review with UT Press). Labor’s Morality argues that people have historically moralized labor to create boundaries between “legitimate” workers and “immoral and how the border made such distinctions visible. Focusing on sex and agricultural workers, I show how as both groups crossed and recrossed the California-Mexico border, they revealed and contested the conflicting definitions of morality and work between the Mexico and the United States.

Publications

“Between the Homing Pigeon and the Vagrant: The Contract Labor System and the Creation of the Immoral Mexican Migrant, 1910-1929” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 21 no. 4

“How the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Became Spaces of Crime and Violence” The American Historian (Winter 2025).