Emiliano Aguilar

Emiliano Aguilar is a political and labor historian of the United States, specifically the Latina/o Midwest, and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His manuscript-in-progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Good Government Reform and Corrupt Political Machines, explores how the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community of East Chicago, Indiana, navigated machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics. The project further outlines the costs (and paradoxes) of this inclusion for generations of residents and reformers. In grappling for political power and claiming rights to their community, these Latino residents renegotiated their place within the city, particularly under the threat of urban renewal and later deindustrialization. Currently, he is researching and writing his second project, which is tentatively titled Absentee: A History of the Ballot Changing our Democracy.

 

His work has appeared in The Metropole, Belt Magazine, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, NACLA, among others. He has chatted about his research with a variety of regional venues, such as Chicago Tribune, Midwest Newsroom, The Times of Northwest Indiana, In These Times, Block Club Chicago, and Latino Media Collective, among others.

 

Additionally, he has contributed to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Indiana Magazine of History, Latinx Talk, and edited volumes like Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, July 2022), The Liberal Heartland: A Political History of the Postwar American Midwest (University of Kansas Press, April 2025), and the forthcoming Teaching the Rust Belt (Rutgers University Press) and America Politicia (University of Pennsylvania Press).