Méndez specializes in Mexican American history with a focus on migration, labor, and relational racial formation. Her dissertation, titled “Cheap for Whom? Migration, Farm Labor, and Social Reproduction in the Imperial Valley-Mexicali Borderlands, 1942-1969,” argued that the agriculture industry in California’s Imperial Valley has enjoyed ample access to cheap labor since the mid-twentieth century because Mexicali, Baja California Norte, its Mexican neighbor, has subsidized the reproduction of a transborder labor force employed in agriculture but otherwise denied social membership in the United States. This project was awarded the Labor and Working Class History Association’s Gutman Prize for outstanding dissertation in 2019. As an educator in the Department of American Ethnic studies she teaches many classes on labor history which can be taken as part of the labor studies minor, such as CHSTU 498 A: Special Topics in Chicano Studies: Latinas and Labor in the Neoliberal Age and CHSTU 354 A: Unions, Labor, and Civil Rights in California and Pacific Northwest Agriculture.
