Miroslava Chavez-Garcia

Miroslava Chávez-García is currently working on a project exploring the intersections of population control, environmentalism, immigration restriction, eugenics, and eco-fascism, examining their impact on communities of color in the recent past and present day. Her teaching and research interests focus on race, gender, science, immigration, Latinx history, and criminal and juvenile justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special attention to the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

Chávez-García is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds affiliations in Chicana/o Studies, Feminist Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies. She holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles (PhD, MA, BA) and traces her roots to her farm worker family in California’s Imperial Valley.. She is author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona, 2004), States of Delinquency: Race and Science in California’s Early Juvenile Justice System (University of California, 2008), and Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina, 2018). She is also co-author of Is Grad School for Me? Demystifying the Application Process for First-Gen BIPOC Students (University of California, 2024).