Join the California History Section for a webinar on De Colores: California's Migrant Farm Workers on Thursday, March 26 at 4PM! 

While the discovery of gold is what caused many to rush into California, farming is what encouraged people to stay. Much of the state’s agriculture relied and continues to rely on migrant labor. Most people may be familiar with Mexican migrant workers and the United Farm Workers organization. This panel will highlight some of the less-discussed migrant farm worker communities like the Punjabi, Yemeni, and Filipino as well as explore the multi-racial coalitions and relations that developed from the farmworker movement.

• Towards a More Inclusive History of South Asian Americans with Dr. Nicole Ranganath, Professor of Middle East/South Asia Studies at UC Davis
• Yemeni Farm Workers: Arab Nationalism and Union Activism in 1970s California with Dr. Akram Khater, Professor of History at North Carolina State University
• “May I Let You Know That It Was Our People Who Started The Strike:” Filipinos in the California Farm Labor Struggle with Dr. Adrian Cruz, Professor of Sociology at Temple University, Japan campus. 
• Moderated by Dr. Oliver Rosales, Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at Bakersfield College and author of Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley.

Meet our panel

Dr. Oliver A. Rosales is a Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at Bakersfield College, where he previously served as Faculty Coordinator of the Social Justice Institute. His teaching and research focus on Chicano/a, California, United States, and World history. Dr. Rosales has held appointments as a Visiting Faculty member at Bard College and as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies. He is the author of Civil Rights in Bakersfield: Segregation and Multiracial Activism in the Central Valley (University of Texas Press, 2024), which received the Outstanding Book & Media Award from the Association of Ethnic Studies, the 2025 Ambassador Julian Nava Best Ethnic Studies Book award, and an Honorable Mention for the Norris Hundley Book Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association. A former Board Chair for California Humanities (2022–2024), he is a recipient of the Whiting Foundation’s Public Engagement Fellowship and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Dr. Nicole Ranganath is the Associate Director and Associate Professor in Middle East/South Asia Studies at the University of California, Davis. She has authored articles, book chapters and a book specializing on the history of gender, faith, and music in the South Asian diaspora. She participates in international collaborations centering on digital and oceanic humanities, with fieldwork in California, India, Pakistan, and Fiji. 

Her recent book, Women and the Sikh Diaspora in California: Singing the Seven Seas (Routledge, 2024), traces the transoceanic history of the first generation of South Asian women in California through their speech and songs throughout the twentieth century. Her current book project focuses on the relationship between gender, music, and historical trauma in Punjab and its global diaspora. 

Her other creative work includes a 2018 PBS documentary, “Jutti Kasoori,” that documents the history of women in California’s Punjabi community. She is also the founding curator of the UC Davis Punjabi and Sikh Digital Archive that was launched in 2016. With a generous grant from the University of California, she helped establish the UC Punjabi Without Walls online curriculum as well as the Punjabi program at UC Davis, which is now among the largest in North America. Her research is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, California Humanities, and the University of California.

Dr. Akram Khater is University Faculty Scholar, Professor of History, and holds the Khayrallah Chair in Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University where he also serves as the Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.

A native of Lebanon, he holds a Ph.D. degree in History from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and University of California, Berkeley, respectively. His books include Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861-1921, and A History of the Middle East: A Sourcebook for the History of the Middle East and North Africa, and Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East. He has produced multiple documentaries on Lebanese American history, including the award-winning film titled The Romey Lynchings, that narrates the history of racial violence against early Arab immigrants, and The People’s Doctor: Herbert Nassour, the story of the struggle against a racialized and unequal medical system in the US. In addition, he served as the senior curator for multiple exhibits about the Lebanese in America, including Turath: An Exhibit of Early Lebanese American Culture, Texas Bound: Syrian Lebanese Immigrants in the Lone Star State, and Arab American Labor. Most recently, he has received a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) to develop Arabic handwriting text recognition.

He is past editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, and current editor of Mashriq&Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migrations, and sits on the editorial board of a book series on immigration studies.

Adrian Cruz is a sociologist, who currently teaches classes on race, ethnicity and immigration at Temple University Japan Campus in Tokyo. Prior to his work in Japan, he was a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Tufts University. Cruz completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he wrote a dissertation titled Racialized Fields: Asians, Mexicans, and the Farm Labor Struggle in California. He has also authored articles on farm labor mobilization in California, which are published in Cultural Dynamics,  Race & Class, and Social Movement Studies. 

His current research (with Matthew Blomberg) is an interview-based research project on the booming Mexican food movement in the Tokyo metropolis.