Organization of American Historians Bestows Award on Cornell University’s Verónica Martínez-Matsuda

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda, an assistant professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has been recognized for research detailed in her upcoming book about a little-known New Deal program that benefitted migrant laborers.

Dr. Martínez-Matsuda has received the 2020 Binkley-Stephenson Award from the Organization of American Historians. The award is presented for the best research paper to have appeared in the last 12 months in the Journal of American History, published by the OAH. Her research, “For Labor and Democracy: The Farm Security Administration’s Competing Visions for Farm Workers’ Socioeconomic Reform and Civil Rights in the 1940s,” was published in the September 2019 issue of the journal.

From 1935 to 1946, the Farm Security Administration’s Migratory Labor Camp Program built and managed labor camps that gave Mexican, Asian, and African American farmworker families access to civil and labor rights, as well as a healthy living environment. The revolutionary program lasted 11 years, then disappeared.

Dr. Martínez-Matsuda joined the faculty at Cornell University in 2012. She is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, where she majored in Latin American and U.S. history. Dr. Martínez-Matsuda earned her Ph.D. in U.S. history at the University of Texas at Austin.