Michael completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2019. His research examines class formations, labor activisms, and the dialectical relationship between economic powerbrokers, the state, and working peoples in the construction of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands from the 1930s to the late 1970s. Centered in Imperial County, California, and Mexicali, Baja California Norte, Mexico, Michael explores the longstanding desire by agricultural and industrial interests to manufacture a borderless landscape invested in furthering the racialization of Mexican and Latina/o peoples. At the same time, he reveals the degree to which workers’ identities were in flux and how organized labor on both sides of the border struggled to negotiate what he calls an “emancipatory imaginary of transborder politics” that mirrored and challenged the international growth and power of capitalism. By interpreting the borderlands as a space of movement with disparate meanings, Michael shows how racial and national borders were felt, resisted, and coopted for different needs. Driving his analysis is an engagement with labor, migration, border, and Chicana/o studies.