Campus Directory

Division Graduate Studies Division

Department/College/Unit History Department

Title Ph.D. Candidate

Affiliation Graduate

Primary Office Location Humanities Building 1
Room 150

Mail Stop History Department

Biography, Education and Training

My dissertation rethinks the category of the Indigenous proletariat through histories of land, autonomy, and resistance in postrevolutionary Mexico. I trace how P'urhépecha agrarian movements and Magonista networks pursued Indigenous autonomy, and how the postrevolutionary state answered them on two tracks at once: assassination and armed raids, and the conversion of radical demands into bureaucratic procedure, a process I call administrative domestication. I show that anti-anarchism and anti-Indigenism worked as distinct grammars of governance across a transnational and carceral field linking Mexico and the United States.

• A.A., Sociology, Los Angeles Pierce College, 2012
• B.A., Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2014
• M.A., History, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2021
• Ph.D., History, University of California, in progress, expected 2027

Summary of Expertise

Modern Mexico, with specialization in Indigenous history, agrarian and labor history, and the history of anarchism and radical political thought. My reseach also engages transnational and carceral histories linking Mexico and the United States, Indigenous autonomy, comunalidad, and the P'urhépecha and magonista movements of the postrevolutionary period.

Research Interests

• Mexican Revolution and Postrevolutionary History
• Indigenous History and Epistemologies
• Labor and Agrarian Histories
• Anarchism and Radical Political Thought
• Transnational and Carceral Histories
• Environmental and Spatial Histories

Teaching Interests

• Mexican and Latin American History
• Histories of Indigenous Peoples and Epistemologies
• Social Movements and Revolutionary History
• U-S - Mexico Borderlands History
• Carceral Studies and Prison Education

Awards, Honors and Grants

• University of California President's Dissertation-Year Fellowship, 2026–27
• University of California President's Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, 2025–26
• UCSC History Department's Graduate Summer Dissertation Writing Fellowship, Summer 2026
• STARRS Re-entry Scholarship, Summer 2026
• UCSC The Humanities Institute Graduate Summer Dissertation Fellowship, Summer 2025
• UCSC Department of History One-Quarter Fellowship, Spring 2025
• UCSC History Summer Research Grant, 2024
• UCSB Global Latinidades Research Grant, 2024
• UCSC History Summer Research Grant, 2023
• UCSB Global Latinidades Convivial Research Workshop Grant (Oaxaca), 2023
• UCSB Global Latinidades Convivial Research Workshop Grant (Oaxaca), 2022

Selected Presentations

Cruz, Carlos H. "Differentiated Rule and the Architecture of Anti-Anarchism: Governing Autonomy in Postrevolutionary Mexico." The First "Intergalactic" Conference on Resistance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, June 19, 2026.

Cruz, Carlos H. "Enclosure, Indigenous Refusal, and the War on Communal Life in Postrevolutionary Zacapu, 1856–1926." Modern Latin American History Working Group, Central New York Humanities Corridor, Cornell University, Spring 2026.

Cruz, Carlos H. "Comunalidad Rooted in Indigenous Autonomy." 118th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, panel on Indigeneity and Radical Political Thought, Santa Clara University, July 30–August 1, 2025.

Cruz, Carlos H. "Comunalidad Rooted in Indigenous Autonomy." AIIC Symposium: Indigenous Futures in Higher Education, panel "Indigeneity and Ideology," University of California, Santa Barbara, February 21–23, 2025.

Student Phone Number 818/780-4216