Mariana Katz

I am most excited by the powerful combination UC San Diego offers: a cutting-edge research institution that is also a public university filled with students from diverse backgrounds. Moving to San Diego is also particularly stimulating for me as someone who works on Latin American history, considering how present Latin America is here, culturally and politically.

What drew you to your field? Why should students consider studying the arts and humanities?

When I began to read history books, I was fascinated by how they could transport me to different universes governed by unknown logics, while also somehow explain the world that surrounded me. The arts and the humanities have a capacity to unsettle certainties and provide new insights, which gives great pleasure. They also enhance a series of skills and sensibilities that will be valuable to students in all sorts of future professional endeavors, including communicating with others, grappling with complexity, developing a sense of empathy and producing thoughtful and nuanced arguments.

What research or creative project are you working on currently?

I’m currently working on my first book, tentatively titled “The Labor of the State: Unfree Workers and the Making of Paraguay’s First Republic (1811-1864).” The book analyzes the connection between two spheres that we usually don’t think about in tandem: labor coercion and the emergence of new republics after colonialism. I focus on a fascinating and understudied case, Paraguay, and show how, after independence from Spain, the new governments required the labor of an array of unfree workers—including state-held enslaved people, indigenous tributaries, and convicts—to establish the new state. I encountered many instances in which these workers denounced overseers for corruption, accused slaveholders of treason, spread rumors, and even claimed a right to the state’s cattle and horses. I’m particularly interested in these original forms of political action that workers envisioned in the context of an authoritarian republic, where most forms of politics were banned.

In parallel to this book, I’m also working on a separate research project on the history of political movements led by indigenous Guaraní people in the borderlands of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

I’m very excited to teach a new course this spring titled “Latin American Labor History: from Colonial Miners to Deliveristas.” The class surveys five centuries of history of work in Latin America, a continent with a distinctively strong tradition of labor organizing. We will move chronologically and thematically, covering the development of racialized labor regimes in the colonial world, the rise of chattel slavery, the commodity export boom, the emergence of mass worker parties and the current landscapes of informality and precarity. We will also talk about Latin American migrants’ labor organizing here in California. The students will learn a lot—and so will I!

What is something about yourself that is not typically included in your bio?

I will travel great lengths for a good pastry! Send me your recommendations.

Mariana Katz is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in 19th century Paraguay and the broader Río de la Plata region. Her research and teaching interests include the histories of labor, slavery, indigeneity and popular politics in Latin America.

A native of Argentina, she began her academic journey at the University of Buenos Aires and received a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 2025. Her research has been made possible by generous support from the Social Science Research Council, the New York Public Library, and Yale University’s Beinecke Library, among others.

She is currently working on her first book, tentatively titled “The Labor of the State: Unfree Workers and the Making of Paraguay’s First Republic (1811-1864).” The book examines the role of labor coercion in the formation of new republics through the understudied, yet fascinating case of Paraguay—a state that mobilized unfree work to an extent unparalleled in Latin America.

Blending social and political history, “The Labor of the State” examines the lives, labor and actions of the thousands of state-held enslaved people, tributaries, convicts, soldiers and drafted peasants who forged the Paraguayan republic. The book reveals the original strategies that these workers developed against the backdrop of an authoritarian republic—how they leveraged their positions in the state’s labor force to challenge authorities, secure resources and privileges, and advance their own visions of a fair administration of the state and its resources.

Overall, “The Labor of the State” argues that labor coercion was more than a relic from the colonial past or a tool for capital accumulation: it was also central to the establishment of sovereign polities in post-independence Latin America.