Allison Varzally is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University, Fullerton. A specialist in the histories of immigration, comparative race relations and the American West,  her first book, Making a Non-White America: Californians Coloring Outside Ethnic Lines, 1925-1955, was published by the University of California Press in April 2008. It explores a question that has profound relevance for the nation as a whole. The study looks closely at eclectic neighborhoods in California where multiple minorities constituted the majority during formative years of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the voices of individual Californians, it examines the everyday interactions among the Asian, Mexican, African, Native, and Jewish Americans, and others who lived side by side. What I find is that in shared city spaces across California, these diverse groups mixed and mingled as students, lovers, worshippers, workers, and family members and, along the way, expanded and reconfigured ethnic and racial categories in new directions. Inspired by related questions about how intimate interracial relations reflect and remake notions of national identity, my current book project titled, Children of Atonement: Vietnamese Adoptions, Wartime Memories, and the Politics of Interracial Families, explores the practices and meanings of Vietnamese adoptions during the Cold War. How did the creation of transnational families revise definitions of U.S. citizenship?   To what extent did these adoptions inform Civil Rights struggles, the political participation of Vietnamese immigrants, the racial construction of Asian Americans, U.S. foreign policy, and the remembrance of the Vietnam War? Although respective studies of the Vietnam War and immigration abound, none treats Vietnamese adoptees as immigrants whose incorporation into specific American families changed general ideas about national belonging and responsibility.

My teaching reflects my scholarly interests. At CSUF, in addition to surveys of U.S history that emphasize the experience of ethno-racial minorities, I teach courses about Immigration and Labor, Mixed Race People, and California.  Whenever possible, I encourage our diverse students to draw upon their own experiences to inform their historical interpretations.