Rosa is the 2025-2026 Democratic Resilience Fellow funded by the Freedom Together Foundation.

Rosa Navarro (she/her) is a first-generation college student and the proud daughter and granddaughter of Mexican Immigrant farmworkers from the Pacific Northwest. She is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Santa Cruz with a designated emphasis in Latin American and Latinx Studies.

Rosa’s dissertation project is a transnational community-engaged research project in collaboration with Familias Unidas Por La Justicia (FUJ), an independent Indigenous Farmworker Union in Washington. Her project tracks the rise of the H-2A guest worker Program in the state and its long-term implications for local farmworker communities as the temporary guest worker program displaces and replaces local farmworkers from the agricultural labor market. She is also shadowing a transnational labor recruiter who recruits mostly rural Mexican men to work as temporary guest workers in the US to understand the role of labor recruiters in the fast expansion of the H-2A guest worker program.

Rosa was a community organizer for over a decade before returning to academia. She worked mostly in Immigrant rights work, deportation defense campaigns, and organized alongside domestic workers in Chicago for several years. She has an MA in Sociology from the University of Albany, SUNY, an MA in Sociology from UC Santa Cruz, and an MA in International Human Rights Law from the American University in Cairo. She holds a BA in History from Portland State University. Her public work has been published in Open Democracy.