Nico Soto
Graduate Student
History
Email:
About
Nico Soto is a third-year PhD student researching Mexican settlement and life in the upper Midwest states. Working under Dr. Adam Goodman, Nico is interested in the connection between Mexican agricultural labor and the mass development of Midwest agribusiness in the late 20th century. For the 2022-2023 academic year Nico is a recipient of the Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship, a pre-doctoral research fellowship.
Nico is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and received his B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Courses Taught (TA):
Hist 101: Western Civilization Since 1648
Hist 103: Early America: From Colonization to Civil War and Reconstruction
Hist 106: The World Since 1400: Converging Worlds, New Circulations (World History)
Hist 235: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
Selected Publications
2021, “Using Imperial Language to Approach America’s Deportation Regime,” Ab Imperio, (Vol. 2021 Issue 3)
2020, Review of Somos Latinas: Voices of Wisconsin Latina Activists, by Andrea-Teresa Arenas and Eloisa Gómez, Voyageur Magazine: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review, (Winter/Spring, 2021)
Notable Honors
2022-2023, Crossing Latinidades Mellon Fellowship, University of Illinois at Chicago
2022-2023, Peer Researcher, Race Laws in the U.S. Southwest: Research Working Group to Document Laws and Their Impacts 1836-Present, Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative
Research Currently in Progress
Nico's dissertation research focuses on the history of Mexican agricultural workers in the upper Midwest states after the end of the Bracero Program in 1964. His late 20th century focus sheds light on how the end of the Bracero Program and the evolution of mechanized agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s transitioned rural Mexican laborers into a new era of agriculture diversification and mass production. This research takes the history of Mexican labor conventionally tied to the image of harvest farming and expands it to examine all the new-age complexities of modern agribusiness.
Interests: immigration, agricultural labor, guestworking, corporatized agriculture, history of small-town rural Midwest, immigration patterns in the Great Lakes region