School of American and Canadian Studies

Role(s): Lecturer, Academic

Biography

I have recently completed a monograph entitled Race, Place, and Reform in Mexican Los Angeles: A Transnational Perspective, 1890-1940 (University of Arizona Press, 2009). This project examines the impact of reform policy on Mexican immigrant and second-generation Mexican American communities in Greater Los Angeles. The book highlights the shifting boundaries of race and citizenship in the Progressive and New Deal eras. In particular, it assesses the significance of reform for shaping processes of acculturation and racialisation. It also explores the impact of reform in generating new patterns of cross-border and second-generation activism.

My new research project is a book-length study entitled Mediating Art Worlds: Cross-Cultural Encounters and Hispano Modernism, 1930-1960, which will be supported by a fellowship at SMU, Dallas, in Spring 2010. The project explores the role of Spanish-speaking Hispano artists in shaping modernist culture in New Mexico between 1930 and 1960. I examine a generation of Hispano artists (sculptors, mixed media artists, and photographers) who became culture brokers, and in turn, agents of aesthetic experimentation. In particular, I explore the nexus between primitivism, modernism, and transcultural relations, and the ways in which this created opportunities for ethnic agency and artistic innovation.

I would be happy to support students working in these general areas: race, ethnicity, and immigration in the Southwest; the history of people of Mexican descent in the United States, and Latino/a history and culture more generally; early twentieth-century social reform programmes, particularly educational and social settlement work with immigrant communities; the representation and uses of Latino/a and Mexican American art and culture for shaping ethnic, regional and (trans)national identities. My research has relevance for students working on borderlands history and culture, and for those taking a transnational approach to American Studies.

Lay summary

My main interests concern the history of race and ethnicity in the United States, with an emphasis on the history of immigrant and US-born people of Mexican descent in the American Southwest. Past research has focused on the impact of reform policy on the Mexican population of Los Angeles during the first half of the twentieth century. My current research focuses on the relationship between art and ethnicity in relation to the Spanish-speaking population of New Mexico in the first part of the twentieth century.

Media summary

My main areas of expertise lie in the history of race, ethnicity and immigration in the United States during the twentieth century. I am interested in relations between Anglo Americans and people of Mexican descent in the Southwest, and the majority of my research addresses the making of racial, ethnic, and cultural identity in this particular region. Past research has examined the role that social reform programmes played in shaping racial identities and ethnic relations during the Progressive and New Deal eras.  My current research examines the relationship between art, ethnicity, and modernity in relation to the Spanish-speaking Hispano population of New Mexico between 1930 and 1960.