Award recognizes Bortz’s distinguished career and supports his research of Mexican and Latin American labor movement

BOONE—Jeffrey Bortz, a professor of history at Appalachian State University, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his research of the labor movement in Mexico and Latin America.

The Guggenheim Fellowship is the leading scholarly award in the United States that is made to all fields of creative endeavors.  Bortz is one of 180 scholars, scientists and artists from the United States and Canada to receive a 2009 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. There were more than 3,000 applicants for this year’s awards.

“It is a great honor to be the first scholar from Appalachian to receive a Guggenheim,” Bortz said. “I immediately thanked my wife, Josie, who is from Mexico City and who is responsible for so much of what I have learned about Mexico.”

The fellowship will support a full year of research in Mexico during 2010, during which time Bortz will consult national, state, municipal and private labor archives, as well as cultural repositories as he explores how the labor regime functioned after the revolution of 1910.  The research will support his proposed book “From Victory to Defeat: Gangsters, Workers, and Citizens in Mexico’s Labor Regime, 1923-1959.”

While in Mexico, Bortz will analyze how the rise of the market economy, increasing urbanization and the emergence of popular culture re-shaped ideas of gender, class, nation and authority and behaviors predicated on those ideas which led to the defeat of great railroad strikes of 1948 and 1959 and the end of workers power in Mexico.

“The goal of scholarly research is to have an impact on one’s field, and the Guggenheim will provide me the resources to carry out significant research in a field that I love greatly, Latin American history,” Bortz said. He said the fellowship also will benefit his work in the classroom.

“I have always believed that the secret to good teaching was good research, and that in the long run, the best teachers were the faculty who loved their fields and endeavored to carry out high-level scholarship, a belief confirmed by these rewards,” Bortz said. “So in a way, I have to thank my many students at Appalachian, graduate and undergraduate, whose critical questioning pushed me to be a better scholar and teacher than I would have been otherwise.”

Last year, Bortz published “Revolution within the Revolution: Cotton Textile Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910-1923” (Stanford, 2008). His research in that volume discovered a workers revolution within the broader Mexican revolution, creating a pro-worker labor regime by 1923.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. One of the hallmarks of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is the diversity of its fellows. The ages of this year’s fellows range from 29 to 70; their residences span the world, from Waipahu, Hawaii, to New York City and from Toronto to Glasgow; and their fellowship projects will carry them to every continent.

In all, 62 disciplines and 68 different academic institutions are represented by this year’s fellows.

Since its establishment in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $273 million in fellowships to nearly 16,700 individuals.

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