Welcome to my personal website!

My first book project, Serving the Valley: Migrant Labor and the Neoliberal Restructuring of Suburban America, is a narrative history of California’s San Fernando Valley from the early 1980s to the 2006 Immigrant Marches. It examines how migrant workers became central to the consolidation—and dismantling—of neoliberalism in late twentieth-century America. Drawing on over 150 original oral histories, multi-sited archival research, and spatial analysis, the book offers a grassroots perspective of neoliberalism, not as an exclusively top-down project but as a process driven by those navigating its everyday pressures and constraints. The manuscript focuses especially on Latinx immigrants whose economic and civic adaptations extended neoliberal logics into daily life, even as they also challenged its ideals through informal care networks and alternative modes of mutual aid. 

Serving the Valley  makes three key contributions to modern U.S. History. First, it challenges the dominant narrative that neoliberalism was an elite project foisted upon working people, who abdicated their own material interests in favor of an economic order designed to leave them behind. Instead, I show how migrant laborers incorporated neoliberal tenets, not so much out of ideological alignment but out of necessity, creativity, and survival. By running businesses, engaging in informal labor, and operating largely without state services, migrants became models of self-responsibility, even as they were marginalized for their very success. Second, the manuscript introduces the term “refracted neoliberalism” to describe how individuals conditioned by neoliberal restructuring migrated to the United States, carrying with them tested strategies for confronting economic volatility and precarity. Through their entrepreneurship, transnational kin, care, and commercial networks, migrants established lives in the Valley that simultaneously consolidated neoliberalism and opened avenues for its undoing. Third, by adopting a relational approach, Serving the Valley reveals how migrant adaptations to neoliberalism reverberated across the Valley’s broader ethno-racial and ideological spectrum. For the Valley’s middle-class liberals, migrant workers extended neoliberalism into daily life in ways that subtly challenged their own commitments to state regulation and social provisions. Middle-class conservatives, meanwhile, imagined themselves as the ideal neoliberal subjects—self-sufficient, industrious, and anti-statist. Yet migrant workers frequently embodied these values more visibly and consistently, despite their marginalization. By tracing these dynamics, the book reveals how migrant workers—while navigating marginality and precarity—also made visible the contradictions at the heart of liberal and conservative identities under the neoliberal order.  

In 2021, I published an article based on the dissertation, “Under the Canopy: Finding Belonging at the San Fernando Swap Meet, 1976-2019,” in the Journal of American Ethnic History. In this article, I argue that the swap meet industry has served an unparalleled economic, social, and cultural function for immigrant populations in Greater Los Angeles. By centering the experiences of vendors, staff members, and musical performers, I point to the ways an semi-formal commercial space like the outdoor swap meet allows individuals to experience a sense of “withness” – connection, solidarity, and company—in a climate of social alienation and anomie. 

My article, “Bringing ‘The Plant’ to Life: Imagining Community Revitalization in the Neoliberal Era,” which was recently awarded the inaugural Brooke L. Blower and Sarah T. Phillips Essay Prize from Modern American History through Cambridge University Press, was published in the April 2024 issue.  This article studies the closure of the General Motors auto plant in Van Nuys and aftermath. Carefully mediated through the accounts of former workers, developers, and city officials, I reveal how a private-public partnership born in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising sought to revitalize the area surrounding the former auto plant through the creation of the shopping center “The Plant.” In the article, I spotlight how, by supplying non-unionized, low wage jobs to the area, The Plant symbolized the entwinement of community revitalization and neoliberal ideology in the 1990s. 

Teaching, pedagogy, and curriculum design have been the throughlines of my entire professional career. As a Fulbright scholar in Chile, I studied how secondary educators incorporated the Pinochet dictatorship into their national history classes. Working with teachers and students in Santiago to envision how high school curricula could present multiple perspectives of a deeply contested historical period—without compromising historical accuracy and a commitment to human rights—inspired me to pursue a Master’s in Education. In UCLA’s Teacher Education Program, I found a cohort of aspiring teachers, who, like myself, were committed to teaching Los Angeles’ public school students and grounding our praxis in community- and culturally-relevant pedagogy. I subsequently taught U.S. history for six years at a public charter school in California’s San Fernando Valley. I left the secondary classroom in 2018 with the singular hope of combining my commitment to education with my historical research and scholarship.

My graduate training and undergraduate teaching at the University of Southern California, my mentoring at Yale, as well as my research agenda, have reinforced this professional goal. As  a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, I advise seniors writing their theses, and I will teach an upper-level undergraduate course in Spring 2026. As an educator, I  draw on my experiences in Chile, Los Angeles, and New Haven to create a classroom culture in which all students feel their perspectives, lived experiences, and knowledge are valued.  Integral to my educational philosophy is the belief that the classroom be a space in which all students can take risks, ask questions, and engage in meaningful dialogue with one another and myself. I see my role as a teacher to model the habits of mind—including critical thinking, self-reflection, and humility—that support students as they realize their own potential as individuals and learners. I aspire to learn about the learning profiles, intellectual interests, and socio-cultural contexts of all my students. 

In my research and teaching, I am committed to advancing racial, gender, and economic justice in educational institutions and society at large. I believe teaching possesses the power to disrupt entrenched systems of inequality, including hierarchies of knowledge production, that have historically rendered classrooms exclusionary. My goal as an educator is to create spaces where diverse ways of knowing are not only welcomed but central to learning.