Micaela Larkin
Entered Notre Dame: Fall 2002
Advisor
John McGreevy
Profile
M.A., University of Notre Dame, 2005; B.A., University of Notre Dame, 2001
Interests
19th and 20th-century U. S. history, American political history, Western history, Mexican American history, American and European religious history, history of Catholicism
Dissertation
"Labor's Desert: Workers, Race and Entrepreneurial Conservatism in Arizona"
Recreating the world of Barry Goldwater’s peers and Arizona’s Mexican American population during the mid-twentieth century, I argue that historians overlook the significance of local cultures of entrepreneurship that favored cheap labor and unbounded growth to the formation and success of modern conservatism in the United States. Instead of focusing on the 1964 presidential election, grassroots suburban idealists and disenfranchised white voters, my research turns towards 1946 and examines the importance of labor issues to the formation and success of postwar conservatism in Arizona and the Southwest. In Arizona, the rise of the Goldwater and the Republican Party came in conjunction with strategic efforts by local entrepreneurial elites to control the political power of labor unions and workers in the state. I explore the importance of anti-labor belief to modern conservatism by analyzing anti-labor rhetoric in Barry Goldwater’s early political career, the significance of right to work laws to the state’s postwar conservative political culture, and the local philosophy of cheap labor and growth. Given the historical dependence in Arizona on Mexican labor, the Mexican American workers are important protagonists along with the state’s labor unions in this story. My research suggests that labor issues are central to understanding astronomical population growth in the Southwest, the political ideology of the region’s entrepreneurial elite, and the rise of conservatism in the United States.
Teaching Experience
Teaching Assistant, History Department, University of Notre Dame
"U.S. History Survey, 1877 to the present"
"American Catholic Experience"
"Latin American History"
Contact
Email: mlarkin@nd.edu