Alex Rocha-Álvarez

About Alex Rocha-Álvarez

Alex Rocha-Álvarez was born to Mexican farmworkers who raised her between the strawberry fields of Watsonville, California. As a resident of Jardines del Valle, a farmworker community also known as Murphy’s Camp, Alex grew up witnessing firsthand the hardships and resilience experienced by those who feed us all. 

Miles from the nearest shopping center, out of reach of public transportation, and separated from other residential neighborhoods, growing up in the camp often felt like swimming in a fishbowl. But there was one external force that cracked Alex’s world open: bi-weekly visits from the Santa Cruz County Bookmobile, where Alex discovered the transformative power of reading and scholarship. This led Alex to her passion for researching and sharing marginalized stories, a passion that has propelled her through her educational career as a scholar of ethnic studies. 

As a first-generation college student at Yale University, Alex graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts in American studies and a focus on politics in American communities. While at Yale, Alex explored themes of labor, migration, and resilience in her coursework and independent projects. A pivotal moment came when she returned home to Watsonville during the COVID-19 pandemic, and, while doing her university coursework remotely, saw how her community of farmworkers was overlooked in national discussions. This realization drove her to study the history of Murphy’s Camp—she discovered that her home was built as a labor camp for Filipino workers in the 1920s, making it a place of deep history that has always belonged to farmworkers

As a PhD student at UC Berkeley, Alex will continue to give voice to her farmworker community. She plans to research the impact of agricultural labor and housing policies from the official dismantling of labor camps in the 1970s to the present with the hopes of uncovering hidden histories of adaptation and transformation and using her scholarship to inform equitable policies that address the needs of farmworker communities.