Mirella Deniz-Zaragoza is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz and a fellow at the Latina Futures 2050 Lab. She is the daughter of immigrant and farmworking parents in the Eastern Coachella Valley. She is a community based researcher who examines the intersections of labor, immigration, environmental justice, race/ethnicity, gender, rurality, farmworker health, and organizing. She currently works in partnership with Lideres Campesinas, a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to organizing women leaders and their families to organize and advocate for healthier and safer working conditions.

Deniz-Zaragoza’s work focuses on the gendered experiences of pesticide exposure and its impacts on Latinx farmworkers’ health and their families, as well as collective organizing for safer working conditions in the Eastern Coachella Valley. In prior work and research, she focused on the warehouse and logistic sector in the Inland Empire Region, where she worked as a Research and Policy Coordinator at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a nonprofit worker center dedicated to improving the working conditions of warehouse workers in Inland Empire Region and throughout California. Through strategic research and policy, she helped build local campaigns to improve warehouse workers’ and families’ living and working conditions in the Inland Empire Region.

Deniz-Zaragoza holds a Masters of Public Policy (MPP) with a concentration in Race and Immigration from the University of California, Riverside.