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Miroslava Chavez-Garcia
Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
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Miroslava Chavez-Garcia
Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Immigration During the 20th Century, Latin American Migration, Nativism and Xenophobia, Race and Ethnicity
AREAS OF TEACHING
US History, immigration, Chicana/o history, race and juvenile justice
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
BIO
Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds affiliations in the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and Feminist Studies as well as Iberian and Latin American Studies. She also currently serves as the Faculty Director of the McNair Scholars Program.
EXTENDED PROFILE
Author of Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (University of Arizona Press, 2004) and States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System(University of California Press, 2012), her most recent book, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), is a history of transnational migration, gender, courtship, and identity as told through more than 300 personal letters exchanged among family members and friends across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In 2020, Migrant Longing was named a 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and in 2019 it received the Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award from Western Association of Women’s Historians (WAWH). In 2017, “Migrant Longing, Courtship, and Gendered Identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” published by the Western History Quarterly in Summer 2016, received the Judith Lee Ridge from the WAWH. In the same year, that essay was also awarded the Bolton-Cutter Award from the Western History Association for the best article on Spanish Borderlands history. She is also author of numerous journal articles and book chapters as well as reviews and commentaries.
She is currently at work on a new research project focused on the intersection of population control, environmentalism, and anti-immigration restriction in the 1960s to the early 2000s. “‘The Architects of Hate’: The Environmental Movement, Population Control, and the Mainstreaming of Immigration Restriction,” focuses on how a small yet politically and economically powerful group of people influenced mainstream environmental organizations to spread anti-immigrant sentiment and pass increasingly draconian immigration policies and practices aimed at closing the door to people of color from around the world.
Miroslava has also received awards and fellowships from the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, Ford Foundation for Diversity, and Organization of American History (OAH) and the Committee for the Germany Residency Program, which awarded her a residency at the University of Tübingen in 2016. Miroslava has also mentored many students and colleagues through the academic pipeline and beyond. She has served on numerous boards and committees.
A first-generation, immigrant, Chicana of farm worker origins, Miroslava was born on the U.S.-Mexico border, in Mexicali, Baja California, and was raised in San Jose, California, where she attended K-12, graduating from Notre Dame, San Jose, in 1986. She received her B.A. (1991), M.A. (1993), and Ph.D. (1998), from UCLA. She still has family in San Jose and visits as often as possible.
“‘The Architects of Hate’: The Environmental Movement, Population Control, and the Mainstreaming of Immigration Restriction and Exclusion”
My latest project, “The Architects of Hate,” examines and analyzes how advocates for the environment used growing fears over expanding global populations and depletion of the natural world’s resources in the 1960s to popularize and institutionalize immigration exclusion in the United States. The focus is on how a small yet politically and economically powerful group of people influenced mainstream environmental organizations to spread anti-immigrant sentiment and to pass increasingly draconian immigration policies and practices aimed at closing the door to people of color from around the world. Through a close analysis of thousands of pages of personal correspondence, internal memos, scholarly and popular writings, reports, and pamphlets, court cases and legislation, and oral interviews, among other sources, “The ‘Greening of Hate’” argues that immigration restrictionists have been effective in capturing and reframing environmental arguments to advance their agenda of immigration control and containment. My work shows that they not only infiltrated environmentalist spaces but also established a number of extremist, race-based, anti-immigrant organizations that continue to have power and influence in Washington today.
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