Christian Paiz
Assistant Professor
Comparative Ethnic Studies
Comparative historical studies of race, gender and class and their intersections in relation to immigration, labor markets, and citizenship, Comparative Latino Studies, Historical Methods, Immigration, Labor, Philippine and Filipino American Studies, Social Movement History, United States History
Bio & Research Interests
Broadly speaking, I am a twentieth-century United States labor historian with interests in transnational migration, social movements, and theoretically-creative histories. Specifically, I study how farmworkers in Southern California’s Coachella Valley (men, women, migrants, residents, Filipino and Mexican) envisioned their future through their involvement in the United Farm Worker (UFW) Movement in the 1960s to 1980s. Tentatively titled, “A Feast of Brief Hopes: On the United Farm Worker Movement in California’s Coachella Valley,” (under contract, UNC Press) the book draws from Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies and Labor History and pairs archival research with approximately 200 hours of original oral history interviews. It narrates a UFW history that transcends its more famous leadership and argues that everyday people and their aspirations were of utmost historical significance: they initiated and propelled forward the UFW, and helped determine our contemporary fortunes. History, in short, often sits among forgotten peoples.
Upcoming and In-progress publications:
- “Essential Only as Labor: Coachella Valley Farmworkers Under COVID-19,” forthcoming, Kalfou, fall 2021.
- “Soldiers of the Soil: On the First Year of the Filipino United Farm Worker Movement,” under R&R review.
- “Farmworker Feminism: Gender, Labor and Migration in the United Farm Worker Movement,” estimated submission, October 2021.
- “On the Tenacity of Divisions: Mexican and Filipino Strikers during the UFW’s Coachella Grape Strike of 1968-69,” estimated submission, November 2021.
Courses Taught
ES10AC: History of Race & Ethnicity in Western North America
ES180: Before Trump, There Was California: A Research Seminar on Proposition 187
ES190: The Politics and Narratives of American Social Movements Since WWII
ES190: The Roots of California Today: A History of Social Inequality and its Discontents
ES250: Methods and Approaches to Inter-Racial Histories of the United States
ES250: From Borderlands History to a History of Borders – New Scholarship on the US/MX Division
ES375: Critical Pedagogy
Media Coverage
PBS: The Other Side of Coachella: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-other-side-of-coachella-ocxp6r/