- Assistant Professor
Biography
Education
- PhD, University of California Merced, 2024
- MA, University of California Merced, 2022
- BA, Humboldt State University, 2016
- AA, Imperial Valley College, 2014
About
Ivan González-Soto is an Assistant Professor of Latinx History with research and teaching interests in labor studies, social history, US-Mexico borderlands, the U.S. American West, and critical histories of race, ethnicity, and agriculture. He specializes in Mexican American history, farmworkers, and the relationship between labor, leisure, and built environments. His interdisciplinary scholarship is inspired by publicly accessible, community-engaged research in the form of comic books and graphic novels.
His current book project highlights the ways in which ethnic Mexican farmworkers and their allies contested and negotiated space and power relations in Southern California’s Imperial Valley during the late twentieth century. Through this work, he examines the intersections between agricultural labor, land disputes, and environmental justice and demonstrates that everyday, working-class people in rural California’s Imperial Valley were not passive historical actors in the context of monopolistic, speculative financing on rural lands, but active members of society who contested their surroundings.
Prior to joining the faculty at Washington State University, González-Soto was Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Selected Honors and Awards:
- Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2021-2024
- California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program Fellowship, 2023
- Applied History Scholarship, Applied History Initiative, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2023
- Building Future Faculty Program, North Carolina State University, Office for Institutional Equity and Diversity, 2023
- Rosenbloom Scholarship, Center of the American West, University of Colorado, Boulder, 2021
- Digital Humanities Mentorship Grant, University of California Humanities Research Institute, 2019
- James and Sylvia Thayer Short-Term Research Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles, 2019
- Luce Foundation Fellowship in Community-Engaged Research, University of California, Merced, 2019