I am currently Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University and research/teach modern American, US Latinx, labor, immigration, borderlands, oral history, and food history. I also direct Stony Brook's Latin/x American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program.
I grew up in a small town in south Texas, and never traveled far from home until I decided to attend Yale University against my parents’ wishes. During my sophomore year I took my first class in Mexican American history, and fell in love with the subject. After earning my degree at Yale, I pursued my PhD in History at Stanford University, and taught at Bowdoin College before moving to New York.
I am the author of Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (UNC Press, 2025), which traces how the United States’ dual appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor evolved from World War II to COVID. My award-winning first book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2016), analyzed the historical relationships between Mexican Americans, braceros, and undocumented immigrants in their struggles for civil and labor rights in California’s Salinas Valley. I am also co-editor of The Academic’s Handbook (Duke University Press, 2020).
I have received fellowships for my research and writing from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library, and the Ford Foundation. In my free time I enjoy traveling, running, kayaking, and photography.
Contact Me
Email me! I have just been named an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-2026, and can be booked for a talk or event through the OAH.
You can download my most recent CV here.
Photo: Ananda Shorey