The Vital Poetics of Zora Neale Hurston and Luisa Moreno: Extractive Labor and Debt, 1921-1939

Dr. Salvador Zárate received his BA in East Asian Languages and Literature from UC Irvine, and an MA in Chicana/o Studies at CSU Los Angeles. A Ford Foundation and UC Center for Global Justice Fellow, he earned his PhD in Ethnic Studies at UCSD in 2017. He has taught classes on Asian and Latina global labor migration with a focus on domestic work, and a course where students theorized the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through Southern California domestic and gardening labor. Dr. Zárate's research focuses on Black and Latina women’s reproductive and affective labor in agriculture and extractive industries in the early twentieth century. His research argues that despite the alienation from the fruits of their labor, the life produced and social connections created by racialized women expose the fictions of U.S. citizenship and liberal free wage labor. He has helped organize domestic workers in Los Angeles and Orange County and has worked jardinería most of his life. He has a forthcoming piece in Cultural Anthropology that theorizes gardening and domestic labor as a lens by which to interrogate ethnographic and design research.