Before joining the faculty of Portland State University, Rodriguez taught at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, and Indiana University South Bend. His first book, The Tejano Diaspora: Mexican Americanism and Ethnic Politics in Texas and Wisconsin (2011), won the National Association of Chicano and Chicana Studies' Texas Nonfiction Book Award. He is also the editor of Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship, and Community (2004) and a coeditor, with Anthony Grafton, of Migration in History: Human Migration in Comparative Perspective (2007). His newest book is Rethinking the Chicano Movement (2014).