MIREYALOZA

BIO

Mireya Loza is an award winning historian and curator whose areas of research include Latinx History, Labor History and Food Studies. Her book, Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom (UNC Press), examines the Bracero Program and how guest workers negotiated the intricacies of indigeneity, intimacy, and transnational organizing. She is currently carrying out research for her second book project tentatively titled, The Strangeness and Bitterness of Plenty: Making Food and Seeing Race in the Agricultural West, 1942-1965.

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Her first book won the 2017 Theodore Saloutos Book Prize awarded by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society and the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize. She was also named a Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Her research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Mexico-North Research Network, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown University she was an Assistant Professor of Food Studies at New York University and a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH). She continues to curate and collaborate on projects at the NMAH. 

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She regularly delivers lectures and keynotes on Food and Immigration, Agricultural Labor, and Latinx History. She also carries out workshops on Oral History Methods and Public History Techniques. 

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She earned her doctorate in American Studies and an M.A. in Public Humanities at Brown University. In addition, she holds an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana she designed her own major and became the first student to major in Latina/o Studies.