Porter teaches Mexican, Latin American, and community-engaged history. Porter’s research explores the ways work and class identities shape individual experiences and societal change. In research on telephone operators, secretaries, factory workers, and street vendors, Porter shows that at the heart of the Mexican labor movement there was also a movement for women’s social, cultural, and civil rights. These women, many of them working mothers, developed a critique of gender inequality and sexual exploitation both within and outside of the workplace. Porter has also published extensively on the history of the middle class in Mexico.