Chicano/Latino History
We understand Chicano/Latino history as the study of people of Latin American descent throughout the Americas. While “Chicano” and “Latino” are constructs born out of social and political struggle in the United States, these categories for us represent people whose lives often cross national boundaries and cultural contexts, creating complex notions of identity, belonging, labor, politics, and place. Latino experiences in the Americas are also inextricably bound to the human encounters that characterized the emergence of a new Atlantic World in the late 15th century. We are scholars whose research focuses on the Spanish colonial period, the Latin American national period, modern Latin American history, and Latino history in the United States. Chicano/Latino histories are not marginal fields. They represent the growing emphasis on a diversity of people, place, and historical imagination within the academy, and complicate older historical narratives. With several historians who specialize in Chicana/o history and others who examine the broader, global Latina/o experience, this cluster constitutes one of the few history department spaces that can offer such an ideal, comprehensive lens for studying the group fueling the present and future growth of Texas and the United States. We welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students on this important topic of study.
Undergraduate Courses
304, Mexican-American Frontier to 1848
305, Mexican-American History 1848-present
307, Latinos Communities in the U.S.
319, U.S. Immigration and Ethnicity
322, History of the Iberian World
326, History of the Caribbean to Emancipation
327, History of the Caribbean since Emancipation
341, Latin America to 1810
342, Latin America Since 1810
441, History of Mexico, 1821 to Present
481, Senior Seminars
Graduate Courses
615, Colonial Latin America
617, Latin American National Period
633, The American West
678, Comparative Border Studies: Introduction
Comparative Border Studies: Chicana/o History
Faculty Members
Armando C. Alonzo, a native of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, is a Borderlands historian who studies the 18th to the 20th century. He is a 1991 Indiana University PhD and the author of Tejano Legacy: Rancheros and Settlers in Texas, 1734-1900 (1998). He has also authored scholarly articles on social, economic, and cultural aspects of Tejanos and border society. His present projects include a transnational history of Texas and Northern Mexico, 1848-1942, and a study of Nuevo Santander. His recent book chapters have been published in the U.S., Mexico, Spain, and Canada.
Dale Baum received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1978 and began teaching at Texas A&M University that same year. He teaches courses in United States history and in the application of quantitative methods in historical research. His research focuses on nineteenth century American political, social, and legal history. He has authored several books and articles, most recently Counterfeit Justice: The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne (2009). He is currently researching what happened to Mexican Texans during the Reconstruction era in Texas.
Julia Kirk Blackwelder is an historian of work and community in the United States of the twentieth century who specializes in intersections of gender and race or ethnicity. Her publications include several book chapters and articles and three monographs: Women of the Depression, Now Hiring, and Styling Jim Crow. Two of her books examine issues of race and class in Texas cities and demonstrate ways in which minority Texans fought poverty and discrimination. Blackwelder completed graduate training at Emory University and teaches graduate classes in twentieth-century America and topical seminars for undergraduates. She currently researches community building and the construction of employee identities by the General Electric Company.
Carlos K. Blanton earned his PhD from Rice University in 1999 and arrived at Texas A&M in 2001. He teaches undergraduate surveys of Texas history and U.S. history as well as specialized courses on Latinos and education history. At the graduate level he teaches courses in U.S. history and Chicana/o History. Blanton has published articles in the Journal of Southern History, Pacific Historical Review, and Western Historical Quarterly and a monograph, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (2004). His next book is a biography of the Mexican American intellectual and civil rights activist George I. Sanchez.
Glenn A. Chambers received his Ph. D. from Howard University in 2006 and joined the Texas A&M history department that same year. He teaches courses on the histories of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. His first book Race, Nation, and West Indian Immigration to Honduras, 1890-1940 (Louisiana State University Press, 2010) focuses on the migration of West Indians to Honduras at the turn of the twentieth century to work in the American-dominated banana industry. His second book project discerns how Hondurans integrated into New Orleans and Gulf Coast life.
Felipe Hinojosa earned his Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2009 and began teaching at Texas A&M University that same year. His teaching and research interests include Latina/o history, religion, comparative race and ethnicity, gender, and social movements. He is interested in how Latina/o religious identities have operated within discourses of power and how they have helped shape cultural, political, and faith-informed activism in twentieth century America. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Louisville Institute to work on his manuscript titled Quiet Riots: Faith, Activism, and Identity Among Latina/o Mennonites, 1932-1982.
Lisa Y. Ramos received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and has been at Texas A&M-College Station since 2008. She teaches courses on Texas History, U.S. History since the Civil War, the History of Race and Racism in the U.S., and Latino Communities in the U.S. Her research interests center on the Mexican American experience in the U.S., civil rights movements, and critical race theory. She has published an article and book chapter and is completing a book manuscript on the impact of race and ethnicity constructions on the Mexican American civil rights movement of the early twentieth century.
Molly Warsh earned her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2009. Her interest in borderlands, belonging, and the interplay between individuals and empire informs her teaching and her scholarship. She has taught courses on the Iberian World, the early Caribbean, and the history of commodities and consumption in the Atlantic World. She is completing her first book entitled American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700. She has published reviews in several scholarly journals and an article on the changing labor force in the pearl fisheries in Slavery & Abolition. A second book project, a reader co-edited with Philip D. Morgan titled Early North America in Global Perspective, is under contract with Routledge.