Coming up
Organizing in Ithaca, a conversation with students
Invited speaker
Alice Cook House invited me to talk with undergraduate residents about community and labor organizing in Ithaca and Tompkins County.
Read the story →Research Impact & Achievements
Transparent counts with conservative rounding. Updated November 2026.
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$1.5M+Research grants contributed toContributions across 8 awards including NEH, National Park Service, and Doris Duke Foundation projects.
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230+Oral history interviews conductedCommunity based interviews across Florida, the Mississippi Delta, Indigenous communities nationwide, and Tompkins County, New York.
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220+Students taught at CornellThree semesters as a graduate TA, including 45 students in African American and Latinx Histories this fall.
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40+Student volunteers coordinatedOver three years as Assistant Director at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.
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2Peer reviewed publicationsIn Aztlán (2026) and The Oral History Review (2025), plus a forthcoming Edward Elgar handbook chapter and two pieces under review.
Grant total reflects full award amounts for projects I contributed to and does not represent personal earnings.
About My Journey
Biography
I am a PhD student in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. I study how worker centers and community organizations help immigrant, low-wage, and undocumented workers build voice, leadership, and collective power—especially when traditional union protections are out of reach. Drawing on oral history, ethnography, and the Power Resource Approach, I look closely at how grassroots organizations create spaces of dignity and democratic participation within unequal labor systems.
This work is personal to me. I come from a working-class Mexican and Salvadoran family in Humboldt Park, Chicago, where I saw how hard people worked and how often their knowledge went unrecognized. Years of fieldwork—from documenting Black resistance in the Mississippi Delta to collaborating with Indigenous communities through the Doris Duke Oral History Project—have deepened that commitment. I approach labor scholarship as a form of listening: grounded in collective memory, accountable to the people who share their stories, and connected to struggles for dignity and justice.
Ethical commitment: I follow IRB-approved protocols and oral-consent practices, but ethics goes beyond compliance. It means treating participants as partners, respecting their dignity, and remaining responsible for how their stories are represented.
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