Camille Guerin-Gonzales obtained her Ph.D. in History from the University of California Riverside in 1985, and taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Oberlin College, and University of California Los Angeles before arriving at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. Her first book "Mexican Workers, American Dreams" was published in 1994.
Professor Guerin-Gonzales became the director of the Chicana/o Studies program at UW-Madison in 2003, and under her direction the name was changed to Chican@ and Latin@ Studies, the program gained 15 new faculty affiliates and greatly increased the number of students seeking the Certificate in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies. Professor Guerin-Gonzales had been active in Chican@ Studies in her earlier positions as well, serving as the Faculty Advisor to "El Movimento Estudantil Chicano de Atztlan" (MEChA) at Colorado-Boulder and in the same capacity to La Union de Estudiantes Latinos at Oberlin. In addition, Guerin-Gonzales was one of six founding faculty of the Cesar Chavez Center for Interdisciplinary Chicana and Chicano Studies at UCLA.
Professor Guerin-Gonzales's research centered on labor history and working class identity in the United States and beyond. Her earlier work examined migrant labor, particularly Mexican laborers in California, and its position within the formation of the American Dream.
Her unfinished book project "Mapping Working-Class Struggle in Appalachia, South Wales, and the American Southwest" sought to connect and analyze the experience and identity formation of working class communities in the aforementioned three coal mining regions. The work tracks the development of coal mining communities through both space and time, interrogating the ways that violent struggle forms lasting connections between individuals and labor movements, the complex encounter between racial and ethnic background and working class culture, and the ways in which labor struggles enter popular culture through films and amusement parks. Her research included documents from various archives in all three geographic regions and other large archival institutions and relied heavily on an enormous corpus of oral histories conducted in many different places and times between the 1970s and the early 2000s.
Before her retirement, she taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level on U.S. labor and working-class history, on social movements, on comparative race and nationalisms, on Chicana/o and Latina/o history, on immigration history, and on the history of the U.S. Southwest. She spoke to community audiences gathered by humanities councils, labor unions, student organizations, and Latina/o advocacy groups. In addition to her many professional affiliations, she was a founding member of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), and of the Labor and Working-Class History Association (LAWCHA).
