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Jeffrey Bortz
"Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
Mahatma Gandhi
Jeffrey Bortz earned a Ph.D. in Latin American History at UCLA in 1984 and has taught at Appalachian State University since 1989. A former Fulbright research scholar, Bortz has taught at several Mexican universities, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH), and the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla (UDLA). He is a former fellow of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, a former coordinator of the UCLA Program on Mexico, and a former visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago.
His teaching includes Mexican and Latin American history as well as courses on labor and revolution. He is proud of his former students who went on to graduate work at the University of Chicago, Stanford, University of New Mexico, University of Illinois-Chicago, Rutgers and Oxford.
He has published extensively in his major field, Mexican labor history. On wages, his most complete study is Los Salarios Industriales en la Ciudad de Mexico, 1939-1975 (Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988), and his most recent (with Marcos Aguila) is “Earning a Living” in the Latin American Research Review (2006). He has published a series of articles on industrial workers during the Mexican revolution in The Americas (1995), the International Review of Social History (1997), the Journal of Latin American Studies (2000), and Labor History (2003). His forthcoming volume at Stanford University Press, Revolution within the Revolution: Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910-1923, contains the full argument. He is currently working on industrial workers and the labor regime in Mexico after the revolution.
Despite having received a bundle of awards from ASU - the College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Scholar in 2000, the Academy of Outstanding Teachers in 2004, and the 100 Scholars Award in 2007 - he agrees with Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose): “But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.”
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