Mike Amezcua
Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University
Fellow 2026–27
- Current Project
- Dinero: A History of Latino Capitalism in America
- Project Discipline
- History
- Fellowship Title
- Trustees’ Fellowship
About Fellow
Mike Amezcua is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University where he teaches United States urban and political history with an emphasis on race, immigration, and inequality. He is the author of Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which won the C.L.R. James Award, the Lewis Mumford Prize, and the First Book Award. He is currently writing the first economic history of Latinos in the United States, entitled Dinero: A History of Latino Capitalism in America to be published by W.W. Norton. Dinero traces how Latinos reshaped US capitalism from the New Deal to the present—revealing how struggles for economic justice both democratized finance and fueled inequality.
Amezcua has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and, in 2024, he was elected as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He has served on a variety of national boards, program committees, and advisory councils including the Organization of American Historians, Urban History Association, Immigration and Ethnic History Society, the Newberry Library, and the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute. Amezcua has written for The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, Chicago Sun-Times, and Zócalo, and has discussed his work on NPR, PBS, ABC, Univision, and other platforms. He earned his PhD from Yale University and his B.A. from UCLA.
Selected Publications
- Amezcua, Mike. “The Reach of Latino Capitalism: Business, Free Trade, and Economic Development in U.S. Metropoles and Across Borders.” History of the Present 16, no. 2 (forthcoming October 2026).
- Amezcua, Mike. Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- Amezcua, Mike. “A Machine in the Barrio: Chicago’s Conservative Colonia and the Remaking of Latino Politics in the 1960s and 1970s.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 12, no. 1 (2019): 95–120.
- Amezcua, Mike. “Beautiful Urbanism: Gender, Landscape, and Contestation in Latino Chicago’s Age of Urban Renewal.” The Journal of American History 104, no. 1 (2017): 97–119.