Department Faculty

I earned my doctoral degree in history at UCLA under the tutelage of Dr. Juan Gómez-Quiñones.  I trained as an American historian, but I also have expertise in the histories of northern Mexico, Mexican America, transnational and diaspora studies, and Latina Studies.  I am currently completing a book about transnational Chinese communities along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that is sure to challenge the ways scholars think about nationhood, identity, and citizenship (Making the Chinese Mexican:  Race and Transnationalism at the US-Mexico Border, 1882-1935, under active review at Stanford University Press).  Using primary sources in Chinese, Spanish, and English, I trace the movements of Chinese Mexicans into southern Arizona in the time of legal exclusion in the United States, their complex Mexican-Chinese identities, and the ways chino-fronterizos confronted racism and campaigns to oust them from Sonora, Mexico.  I have also presented my work at national and international conferences and have published articles on the subject:  “At Exclusion’s Southern Gate: Changing Categories of Race and Class among Chinese
Fronterizos, 1882-1904” in Continental Crossroads:  Remapping the History of the U.S.-Mexico Border, eds. Samuel J. Truett and Elliot Young, Duke University Press; and “Of Kith and Kin: Land, Leases and Guanxi in Tucson’s Chinese and Mexican Communities 1882-1920s” The Journal of Arizona History.  I am also interested in information competency and have recently co-authored an article with Susan Luévano, “Semillas de Cambio:  The Teaching of Information Competency in Chicano and Latino Studies,” in Information Collaborations that Work, eds. Trudi E. Jacobson, and Thomas P. Mackey, Neal Schulman Publishers, 2007.”