"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 a number of Mexican universities, including the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH), the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP) and the Universidad de las Américas (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, a former visiting scholar at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Chicago, and currently a Guggenheim Fellow. He has collaborated on research projects with the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht.
His teaching includes Mexican and Latin American history as well as courses on labor and revolution. He was elected to the College of Arts and Sciences Academy of Outstanding Teachers in 2004 and in 2009 received the Appalachian State University Excellence in Teaching Award. He is proud of his former students who went on to graduate work at the University of Chicago, Stanford, New Mexico, the University of Illinois-Chicago, Rutgers, Texas and Oxford.

His most recent book is Revolution within the Revolution: Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910-1923 (Stanford, 2008). He previously published a number of books and articles on wage and labor issues in modern Mexico. His most complete study of wages 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 on Mexican labor in the principal journals in the field, including The Americas, the International Review of Social History, the Journal of Latin American Studies, Labor History, and the Latin American Research Review. He is currently engaged in a study of the Mexican labor regime between 1923 and 1959, as well as coordinating a volume on Mexican labor in the 1920s.

He has received enough teaching and research honors to agree 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.”