Miroslava Chávez-García is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of Chicana/o Studies and Feminist Studies.^[1] Chávez-García's research focuses on Chicana/o history, eugenics, gender, and juvenile justice.^[2] Chávez-García has authored three books: Negotiating Conquest (Tucson, 2004),^[3] States of Delinquency (Berkeley, 2012),^[4] and Migrant Longing (Chapel Hill, 2018).^[5] Her second work, States of Delinquency, was considered a groundbreaking text, describing California's eugenic program, which targeted young Mexican American and African American boys for irreversible sterilizations.^[6]

Chávez-García was born in Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico to farm worker parents. They moved to San Jose, California when she was an infant.^[7] She graduated from Notre Dame High School in 1986 and then received her B.A. (1991), M.A. (1993), and Ph.D. (1998), from the University of California, Los Angeles.^[2]

Books

• Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
• States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
• Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to the 1880s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).