Gabriel Panuco-Mercado

Gabriel Panuco-Mercado was born and raised in California’s San Gabriel Valley (SGV) and holds a BSFS from Georgetown University in International History. As a Ph.D. student in history, he is interested in the gender, food, and labor history of rural Mexico and its migrant communities. His research asks how Mexican women nourished and sustained translocal communities in rural Mexico and the United States through their quehaceres (household work), wage work, and economic ventures. In exploring these trajectories, he draws extensively from oral history methods while being compelled by the task of merging Mexican and Mexican American history.

Gabriel’s work is also guided by his experiences in community and labor organizing. In the SGV, he has contributed to community and tenant organizing and as a student in Washington, DC, he organized with local domestic workers for two years. Through such spaces, he learned to center “work that makes all other work possible”—household work, excluded wage work, and other invisibilized community work—in his analysis. Now, as a RAISE fellow, he intends to take on public history efforts to make those histories visible.

He is a proud first-generation, working class college graduate.