Omar González is a Ph.D. candidate in Princeton University’s History department. The son of Mexican immigrants, he was the first in his family to attend college and graduated from the University of California, Merced with two B.A.s in History and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies.
As a transnational scholar, he studies regional identity formation, otherization, labor, and transnational networks within the context of rural Mexican migration to the US and Mexican urban centers from the early-twentieth century to the present. He is particularly interested in the image of the migrant as constructed by communities in the Los Altos de Jalisco region of México, a region unique for its long history of northward migration. Furthermore, the otherization of migrants within rural Mexican hometowns amplifies the identity struggles migrants face in claiming belonging to two distinct communities, which is another key issue Omar hopes to explore. In centering Mexican hometowns in a history of migration, Omar aims to complicate the assumption that Mexican migrants have a place they can return to once removed from the US.