Mike Amezcua is the Ann Plato Fellow in History and American Studies.  His research interests include the study of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants during the post-World War II and Cold War eras, race, ethnicity and migration, and ideas of modernity, urbanity, and culture amongst racialized communities.  He will complete his dissertation, “The Second City Anew:  Race, Ethnicity, and Migration in Postwar Chicago, 1945-1965,” in 2010.

Amezcua has served as a Yale Teaching Fellow for courses in Mexican American history, African American history, and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration.  As a teacher, his goal is to help his students recognize that not all people and communities leave behind a neatly kept archive tucked away in a library but to keep in mind that all people think and therefore all people engage in some kind of intellectual work.  When his students recognize this, then their work as historians becomes much more interesting.