About My History Work

I am an Assistant Professor of History and the Cairns K. Smith Faculty Scholar at Oregon State University. My research focuses on the long-term history of the greater U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the U.S. West, the U.S. South, and the lands where these regions meet, the Southern Great Plains. My book manuscript, The Erased Homeland: Mexicans’ Long Past, the Southern Great Plains, and America’s Future, engages several fields of history, including Chicana/o, Native American, North American West, Great Plains, Nuevo South, borderlands, migration, labor, civil rights, and colonialism. Overall, my book project counters the depiction of ethnic Mexicans as recent immigrants to the United States, making clear their long-term presence in the nation beyond the Southwest and placing them as an integral part of American history.

My scholarship has also concentrated on women’s labor and organizing on the U.S.-Mexico border, Latinxs in Oregon, African American and Mexican American social justice movements and their coalescing, historical memory, along with cultural ecology. Through the historical connections that a longue dureé approach reveals, I have brought, and continue bring, these various interests together.

My public history experience includes working and volunteering within publicly accessible oral history projects as well as preservation projects focused on harnessing historical assets for community-oriented development. My research has also been included within publications for the wider public and historical agencies.