Joaquín Lara Midkiff, whose family includes working-class folks from Oklahoma and northern California and Nahua migrant farmworkers from Guerrero’s cohuixca, is a writer and public servant based in the Pacific Northwest.

Joaquín serves Oregon communities on multiple boards and commissions at the local and state levels. Twice appointed by Governor Kotek, he serves on the Oregon Disabilities Commission and represents West Salem and Downtown on the Board of Directors for Salem Area Mass Transit (Cherriots). He has served on the City of Salem’s Planning Commission, chaired the Human Rights Commission, and sat on the educational equity advisory committee for Salem-Keizer Public Schools. With nearly a decade in the farmworker justice movement, he has worked as a community organizer with Causa Oregon, non-profit administrator at the Capaces Leadership Institute, and on the Board of Directors for PCUN, Oregon’s farmworker union.

His award-winning scholarship, while a fellow with the MacMillan Center’s Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies, has focused on social histories of Oregon’s Indigenous migrant communities in the post-IRCA period. He has contributed essays on houselessness, disability justice, and immigration that have appeared in the Oregonian, Truthout, Statesman Journal, New Haven Register and Yale Review of International Studies, among others. His poetry was included in The Future Lives in our Bodies (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).

Now a Dean's Fellow at Stanford University, Joaquín is working on a Ph.D. in history focused on the role of indígena communities from Mexico and Central America in social and labor movements in the Pacific Northwest during the twentieth century. He earned his B.A. from Yale University.