Dr. Emilio Zamora is a Professor in the Department of History and is associated with the Center of Mexican American Studies and the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in Mexican American history, Texas history, U.S. working class history.
Dr. Zamora is what some may call a “person of the soil”. His family has lived in what we now know as Texas since 1749. His family moved to present-day Camargo, Tampaulilpas, during the Spanish colonial period.
Zamora developed a healthy work ethic early on, working in his parents’ grocery store after school and during the summers in the agricultural fields. He believes that understanding work experiences and related activities are essential in the study of history. His work demonstrates the importance of Mexican workers in U.S. history, particularly because they too have demonstreated the will to define their world on their own terms, that is, they have participated prominently in organizing and strike activity.
Dr. Zamora has authored and co-edited six books. In December 2009, Texas A&M University Pressed published Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II, a book about Mexican American Workers in Texas during the 1940′s. It is a home front study of Mexican workers in Texas, meaning examinations of the experiences of the people at home during a period of war. There is little to no scholarly examination of the home front experience of workers in Texas much less of Mexican workers in Texas.
What Zamora has discovered is that Mexican activists inserted themselves into the larger hemispheric arena of Mexico-U.S. relations and used the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy to claim their rights. He also shows that the expanding war-time economy provided significant but unequal opportunities, especially for women and minority workers in Texas, to recover from the hard times of the depression.
In his research, Dr. Zamora primarily used the archives of the Fair Employment Practice Committee, an agency established through executive order to implement the nation’s first non-discrimination policy in employment. He also used documentary and archive materials from sources in Mexico as well as collections from the League of United Latin American Citizens and the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers.
Professor Zamora has also joined with Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez in editing an anthology published by the Unviersity of Texas Press in November 2009 that is entitled Beyond the Latino World War II Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation. The publication includes essays by authors from throughout the country who examine the wartime experiences of Latinos and Latinas int he military and at home. All the authors use oral narratives collected by the Latino Latina World War II Oral History Project, directed by Dr. Rivas-Rodriguez at the University of Texas. Zamora’s essay in the anthology is entitled “Mexican Nationals in the U.S. Military: Diplomacy and Battlefield Sacrifice.”
He is currently working on a translation of a WWI diary by Jose de la Luz Saenz, a co-founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. The diary, Mexican Americans and the Great War, was first published in 1933 in Spanish. It is the only known written account by a Mexican soldier and one of the few diaries written by a member of the U.S. military. This book is important for other reasons as well. It analogizes the war against totalitarianism with the fight for equal rights at the home front. The book also anticipates and announces the new and regenerated Mexican cause for equal rights that emerged during the inter-war years.
Throughout his career Dr. Zamora has brought scholarly and public attention to the difficult conditions under which Mexicans have worked and the inspiring acts of self-organization. Beyond his scholarly accomplishments, Professor Zamora is active in the university and Mexican American communities. He also directs the East Austin Oral History Project in collaboration with the Clase magica, an after-school program for children from Sanchez and Zavala elementary schools established by the Texas Center for Education Policy at the University of Texas.
