Nahomi Esquivel
Assistant Professor of History
Nahomi Linda Esquivel is a historian of labor, law, and Latinidad. Her work reveals how informal governance and administrative discretion in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands reshaped the modern American state. Her first book, The Informal State, uncovers how immigration officials used legal fictions to construct a racially stratified labor regime that divided Mexican Americans from Mexican migrants and redefined the boundaries of political inclusion. By tracing how these administrative practices shaped intra-racial conflict, grassroots restrictionism, and Cold War development policy, she shows that today's migrant carceral state and neoliberal border economy emerged from the contradictions of mid-century liberalism. Esquivel’s work has been supported by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, the Business History Association, the Pozen Center for Human Rights, and the Mellon Mays Foundation. A former labor and community organizer, she writes at the intersection of administrative power, racial capitalism, and Latinx political life.
Recent Courses Taught
U.S. Borderlands
U.S. Labor History
Research Interests
Modern United States history, modern Latin American history, modern Mexico history, immigration law and policy, labor and working-class history, human rights
Distinctions
- Law and Society Association Early Career Scholar Workshop, 2025
- Doctoral Fellow, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago, 2024
- Jeffersonian Scholars National Fellowship, 2024
Appointed to the Faculty
2026Educational Background
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Human Rights Certificate, University of Chicago
M.A., University of Chicago
B.A., University of California Los Angeles
A.A., Bakersfield College
