Joaquín Lara Midkiff (Chilapantec) is a writer and public servant based in the Pacific Northwest.

In Oregon, Joaquín serves on multiple boards and commissions at the local and state levels, advising diverse areas of public policy. Twice appointed by Governor Kotek, he serves on the Oregon Disabilities Commission and represents Subdistrict 1 on the Board of Directors for the Salem Area Mass Transit District (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. He has spent nearly a decade in the farmworker justice movement, including as a community organizer with Causa Oregon and non-profit administrator at the Capaces Leadership Institute.

A former fellow with the Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies at the MacMillan Center studying Indigenous diaspora and migration, Joaquín’s thesis, a social history of Oregon’s Indigenous migrant communities in the post-IRCA period, won the Andrew D. White Prize in American history. His essays on housing and houselessness, immigration, and disability justice 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).

Joaquín studied history and evolutionary biology at Yale University, where he was awarded the John C. Schroeder Award and Adrian Van Sinderen Prize.

  • “[Lara Midkiff] does an excellent, excellent job describing and analyzing the organizations and people at the center of this study, offering a contemporary history of Indigenous migrant communities and politics in Oregon, and addressing topics of much broader (i.e. non-regional) interest including mestizaje, pan-Indigenous coalition building, labor organizing, policing and the deportation state, and more. The result is the best study of Oregon’s rural, Indigenous communities I’ve encountered, one that builds upon and significantly updates [Lynn] Stephens’ efforts and that makes clear how important these developments are for hemispheric developments since (roughly) the 1980s.”

    — Stephen Pitti, author of The Devil in Silicon Valley: Race, Mexican Americans, and Northern California