I am Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and research/teach modern United States, Latino/x, labor, migration, and food history, as well as the craft of oral history.
My most recent book Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (UNC Press, 2025) traces how the United States’ tandem 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 revised edition 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 at Yale, and the Ford Foundation.
In my free time I enjoy traveling, kayaking, running, and photography.
Contact Me
My Columbia contact information can be found here.
Photo: Ananda Shorey