The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

Migrant sugar beet workers are at the heart of my current work. In my manuscript, I follow corporate sugar into southeastern Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century and trace its efforts to hold diverse working communities within a highly unequal and hierarchical land and labor regime for the better part of a century. In doing so, I unearth the long and entangled histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and white peoples in a space structured by U.S. expansion, Indian removal, and anti-Blackness. My book reveals the fundamental role that occupying, transforming, and controlling the land played in the evolution of the American state and racial capitalism in the post-Civil War period.

Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, I was the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2017-2020, where I taught courses in History and American Studies. I have received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Organization of American Historians, and the Western History Association. In 2018, my dissertation won the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

More information:
https://history.berkeley.edu/bernadette-perez