Nahomi Linda Esquivel

Nahomi Linda Esquivel is a historian of labor, law, and Latinidad. Her research traces the roots of today’s migrant carceral state and neoliberal economic model to the discretionary legal and labor practices of the 1960s borderlands, challenging liberal narratives of civil rights inclusion and exposing the limits of postwar reform. Drawing on administrative records, classified documents, legal cases, union spy reports, gossip, and oral histories, she examines how informalized governance structured racialized labor regimes and fractured Latinx political solidarities. Her work foregrounds intra-racial tensions shaped by class, gender, and legal status rethinking Latinx political life beyond partisan binaries. Outside academia, Esquivel has worked as a labor organizer and as program coordinator for the Chicago Sanctuary Working Group, a solidarity organization supporting migrant communities.