Dr. Jeffrey Bortz

At Appalachian State University, Dr. Jeffrey Bortz teaches a variety of courses on Mexican and Latin American history, as well as social theory. He is a Latin American historian with significant research on Mexican labor and economic history. He is the author of “Revolution within the Revolution: Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910-1923” (Stanford, 2008), and co-editor of “The Mexican Economy, 1870-1930: Essays on the Economic History of Institutions, Revolution, and Growth” (Stanford, 2002). In Mexico he published “Los salarios industriales en la Ciudad de México, 1939-1975” (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988). His recent research has focused on Mexican railroad workers during the revolution, from which he has published, with Marcos Aguila, “Railroad violence during the Mexican Revolution, conflict and the struggle for workers’ control, 1910-1921,” in Railroad History No. 216,  Spring-Summer 2017, 58-77; and “Command and Control at Work: The Evolution of the Rules of Work on Mexican Railroads, 1883-1923” in Labor History, vol. 56, num. 5, December 2015, 587-613.

In 2009, Bortz became the first scholar from Appalachian to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to spend a year in Mexico as a visiting professor researching the labor movement there and in other parts of Latin America. Two other times during his Appalachian career he has been a visiting professor at Mexican universities. In the 1970s and 1980s, he lived and worked in Mexico, first as a project director with Mexico’s Ministry of Labor and later in teaching positions at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Azcapotzalco (UAM), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH).

Areas of expertise

• Mexican history
• Mexican labor history
• Globalization
• U.S. - Mexico relations
• Changes in U.S. labor market
• Railroad history