Skip to main content
Professor Emeritus
CB #3195
zvargas@email.unc.edu




Education

MA University of Michigan, 1976
PhD University of Michigan, 1984

Research Interests

Zaragosa Vargas conducts research in nineteenth-century, twentieth-century, and recent Latino history and American labor history. It includes the fields of working class history; work, race, gender, and class; the history of working women; transnational labor migration; comparative race relations; radical and social movements; and social and political history. Vargas is currently working on a history of Mexican Americans in the early civil rights movement, with an emphasis on labor rights.


Some Notable Publications

  • “A Primer on Immigrant Rights,” Against the Current, No. 150, January/February 2011
  • Crucible of Struggle: A History of Mexican America from Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2010)
  • “Challenges to Solidarity: The Mexican American Struggle for Social and Economic Justice during the Cold War Years, 1946–1963” in Robbie Lieberman and Clarence Lang, eds., Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009)
  • Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2007)