Rate My Professor Christian Zlolniski

Christian Zlolniski is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he also directs the Center for Mexican American Studies. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Zlolniski's research employs applied anthropology to investigate globalization's impacts, specializing in transnational migration, economic anthropology, Latinos in the U.S., and Mexico. His ethnographic studies focus on Mexican immigrants in Silicon Valley's low-wage sectors, such as janitors, street vendors, and activists. He documents how global economic forces integrate these workers through subcontracting and flexible labor practices, which shape working conditions, daily lives, and community politics, while highlighting their agency in labor organizing and civic engagement. A key publication from this research is Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley (University of California Press, 2006). Earlier work includes "The informal economy in an advanced industrialized society: Mexican immigrant labor in Silicon Valley" (Yale Law Journal, 1993).

Zlolniski has conducted over a decade of fieldwork in Baja California's San Quintín Valley, analyzing the export agricultural boom driven by growers responding to U.S. demand for fresh produce like strawberries and tomatoes. This has resulted in rapid population tripling, growth of precarious colonia communities without basic infrastructure, farmworker struggles for labor and civic rights through strikes and unions, and ecological devastation termed 'watercide' from resource overexploitation. His book Made in Baja: The Lives of Farmworkers and Growers Behind Mexico’s Transnational Agricultural Boom (University of California Press, 2019) details these dynamics. Additional publications include "De jornaleros a colonos: Residencia, trabajo e identidad en el Valle de San Quintín" (El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2014) and recent articles on agribusiness dispossession and labor precarity. Zlolniski received a $255,000 National Science Foundation grant to examine labor and environmental implications of sustainability in export agriculture. He was named editor of Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and inducted into UTA's Academy of Distinguished Service Leaders in 2023.