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. I argue 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).