Mireya Loza (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Mireya Loza is an associate professor in the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her areas of research include Latinx history, social movements, labor history, and food studies. Her first book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), examines the Bracero Program and how guest workers negotiated the intricacies of indigeneity, intimacy, and transnational organizing. Defiant Braceros was awarded the Theodore Saloutos Book Prize by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. In addition to her research and publications, she also serves as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

During her year at the National Humanities Center, Loza will be working on her second book project, tentatively titled A Century of Guest Workers, Exploitation, and Inequality on American Farms. The manuscript builds on her expertise in the systems of contracting foreign workers in US agriculture and explores its broader implications for immigration policy, labor rights, and human rights.

Selected Publications

• Rosas, Gilberto and Mireya Loza, eds. The Border Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.
• Loza, Mireya. “‘Let Them Bring Their Families’: The Experiences of the First Mexican Guest Workers, 1917–1922.” Journal of American History 109, no. 2 (2022): 310–23. 
• Loza, Mireya. “The Japanese Agricultural Workers’ Program.” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2017): 661–90.
• Loza, Mireya. “From Ephemeral To Enduring: The Politics Of Recording And Exhibiting Bracero Memory.” The Public Historian 38, no. 2 (2016): 23–41.
• Loza, Mireya. How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual, and Political Freedom. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.