The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

Broadly speaking, I am a twentieth-century U.S. labor historian with interests in transnational migration, social movements, and history methods. In my first book, titled The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (UNC Press, 2023), I studied 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. I draw, from Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies and the historiography on US labor and social movements. I also pair archival research with 200 hours of original oral history interviews and 100 oral histories from existing collections. The Strikers of Coachella narrates a UFW history that transcends its famous leadership and argues that everyday people and their aspirations were of utmost historical significance: they initiated and propelled forward the UFW and they helped determine our contemporary fortunes. History often sits among forgotten peoples.

Articles:

1. “Essential Only as Labor: Coachella Valley Farmworkers Under COVID-19,”  Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, spring & fall 2021: 31-50.
2. “Soldiers of the Soil: On the First Year of the Filipino United Farm Worker Movement,” submitted for review February 2022.
3. “Farmworker Feminism: Gender, Labor and Migration in the United Farm Worker Movement,” estimated submission, December 2022.

Courses Taught

ES10AC: History of Race & Ethnicity in Western North America

ES190:   Before Trump, There Was California: A Research Seminar on Proposition 187

ES190:   The Politics and Narratives of American Social Movements Since World War II

ES190:   The Roots of California: A History of Social Inequality and its Discontents, 1970 to present.

ES250:   Inter-Racial Histories of the United States: Methods and Approaches

ES250:   New Scholarship on the US/MX Division: From Borderlands History to a History of Borders

ES375:   Critical Pedagogy

Media Coverage

Public Broadcast Service, KQED: The Other Side of Coachella, Nov. 2018

• This docu-special highlights the Coachella Valley community, and how with support from the organization Building Healthy Communities, community members and local groups have formed an alliance to tackle issues of Health, Education and Environment.

OC World: To Live for the Harvest, Feb. 2022

• Dr. Manuel Gomez investigates the plight of California farmworkers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank and File History of the UFW Movement

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