My research and teaching focus primarily on the history of the US-Mexico borderlands and race and ethnicity in North America. I teach lecture and seminar courses on a variety of topics related to these fields, including research seminars on North American borderlands at the graduate and undergraduate levels. I eared my Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. My first book, Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (University of Texas Press, 2007), examines how racial classifications and identities of the diverse indigenous, mestizo, and Euro-American residents of Arizona’s borderlands evolved as the region was politically and economically incorporated into the United States. I have published essays in journals such as The Western Historical Quarterly and The Latin American Research Review. I am currently working on a book on the history of the US-Mexico borderlands from the late eighteenth century to the present, which is under contract with Yale University Press and is to be published in cooperation with the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, where I was senior fellow in 2016–2017.

Books: 

Border Citizens: The Making of Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos in Arizona (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007)

* Research Award as the Most Significant Scholarly Work at Northern Arizona University, fall 2010

* Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Libraries Association, 2008

* Finalist, Public History Award from the National Council on Public History, 2008

The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Transnational History (In progress; under contract with Yale University Press)

Journal Articles:

“Race and Identity Across American Borders,” Latin American Research Review, 53,3 (2018): 679-688.

“Protecting the White Citizen Worker: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in South-Central Arizona, 1929-1945,” The Journal of the Southwest 48, 1 (spring 2006): 91-113.

“The Tohono O’odham, Wage Labor, and Resistant Adaptation, 1900-1930,” The Western Historical Quarterly 34, 4 (winter 2003): 468-489.

* Bolton-Kinnaird Award for the best article on the Spanish Borderlands published in an academic journal in 2003, Western History Association

* Oscar O. Winther Award for the best article appearing in The Western Historical Quarterly in 2003.

“Cross-Ethnic Political Mobilization and Yaqui Identity Formation in Guadalupe, Arizona,” Reflexiones: New Directions in Mexican American Studies, 1997, ed. Neil Foley (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1998): 77-108.

23 Book Reviews in 13 academic journals (2004-2018)