Research
U.S. Army Map of Northeastern Mexico, C. 1847. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC; RG 94; E. 133, Army of Mexico Miscellaneous Papers; Box 7.
My research explores the entanglement of nation-state formation, colonialism, gender, and kinship in the nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I have peer-reviewed articles published and forthcoming in the Western Historical Quarterly and the Pacific Historical Review, and I have presented at conferences, symposia, and invited talks in the U.S., United Kingdom, and Mexico. A full list of publications and presentations can be found at the bottom of this page.
At the Archivo General del Estado de Nuevo León
Book Project:
The Broken Edge: Violence, Kinship, and Nation in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Presentation at Race, Gender, and War: A Symposium on Military Service in 19th and 20th Century America, University of Alabama, March 26, 2019
My current book manuscript examines the relationship between organized violence and nationalism in the border region from Mexican independence through the overlapping national civil wars of the 1850s-60s and their aftermath. I utilize a wide array of sources, including official political and military records, court documents, pension applications, and newspapers, as well as previously overlooked northern Mexican diaries, memoirs, and local histories. By analyzing local experiences of violent conflict alongside the gendered and familial nationalist ideologies that gave those experiences meaning, I show how Anglo and Hispanic borderlanders constructed national institutions and ideologies at the grassroots level for their own ends. Even as such localized meanings of nationalism multiplied and scattered, experiences of violence made the abstractions of the nation-state intimately real. By joining local kinship networks and longstanding practices of organized violence with evolving national institutions and ideologies that portrayed the nation as a fictive family under threat, people on both sides of the emerging international boundary imprinted state institutions and national meanings onto the relationships that defined their everyday lives. Nationalism and state power took root because they enabled local people to organize power in increasingly significant ways, while providing useful tools to navigate the growing impacts of chaotic and de-centered national and international politics.
“‘Blood Talk’: Military Operations as Instruments of Policy in the Gray Zone between War and Peace,” virtual roundtable session at the Society for Military History Annual Meeting, May 23, 2021
The project joins a growing body of scholarship working to reframe nineteenth-century United States nation-building and imperialism within their broader hemispheric and global contexts. While most previous such works have analyzed these processes and their trans-national ties through high-level analysis of political, diplomatic, or constitutional history, my research provides a grassroots view from the shared borderlands of North America’s two largest republics. By examining local experiences of violence in the border region, I show how both colonialism and nationalism across North America built on pre-existing local frameworks of gender, kinship, and honor. These concepts and their underlying logic reached far beyond mere rhetoric, fundamentally shaping the actions and experiences of borderlands people, while joining the intimate realms of family and community to sweeping national and international changes.
Presentation at the Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting
San Marcos, TX, March, 2018
The study begins by examining the parallel histories of colonial violence against independent Native peoples along the imperial frontiers of New Spain and Anglo North America, illustrating how both societies used the local organization of violence and similar ideals of gender, kinship, and honor to articulate emerging notions of national citizenship and identity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapters two and three examine the Texas Rebellion (1835-36) and the Northern Federalist Rebellion (1837-40). In both these conflicts, borderlands participants articulated common national interests by invoking gendered and racialized threats from outsiders, using these discourses to drum up decisive political and military support from both local populations and allies beyond the region. Chapter four frames the 1846-48 US-Mexico War as a massive, multi-sided project of nation-building, analyzing the ways in which both national governments relied on grassroots political and social networks to project their power as well as the ways in which borderlands people experienced and understood the war’s violence within intimate frameworks of kinship. Chapter five examines how northern Mexican elites used the heavily gendered and familial ideology of a fronterizo national mission to mobilize thousands of troops to fight in central Mexico during the War of the Reform (1857-60) and the French Intervention (1861-67). This unprecedented popular involvement and the new mechanisms of coercion and support that made it possible redefined the relationship between families and state power in the north. The sixth and final chapter (in progress) will examine the experiences of Anglo-Texans, Tejanos, and Mexican Fronterizos in the lower Rio Grande/Rio Bravo valley during the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. It will show how the complex waves of violence that swept this region represented the convergence of mid-century crises of national sovereignty in Mexico and the United States. An epilogue examines the memory and commemoration of the borderlands’ mid-century conflicts during the 1870s and 1880s, showing how borderlanders took part in the parallel consolidations of national sovereignty under Greater Reconstruction the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship, while still retaining their own highly regionalized visions of nationalism.
Publications
Journal Articles
Book Reviews
“Peter Guardino, The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War”The Future of the Past (blog) October 19, 2017, http://blog.smu.edu/gradhist/2017/10/19/dead
Presentations
Invited Talks
2021 “Guerra, género, y nacionalismo en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, siglo XIX,” Retos históricos y actuales del norte de México y el suroeste de Estados Unidos: Frontera, migración y economía (virtual symposium series), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila, May 7, 2021
2019 “Gender, Kinship, and Colonial Violence in Texas, 1820-1880,” Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, April 3, 2019
2019 “Expansionist Domesticity and Colonial Violence in Anglo-Texas, 1820-1880,” Race, Gender, and War: A Symposium on Military Service in 19th & 20th Century America, The University of Alabama, March 22, 2019
2018 “Examining Violence in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and its Impact on Nation-Building,” Center of Southwest Studies, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado, November 28, 2018
2016 “‘As It Is Waged by Savage Tribes Between One Another’: Rendering Violence, Race, and Nation in the U.S.-Mexican War,” Dallas Area Society of Historians Monthly Meeting, November 2016
Conference Presentations
2021 “’Every Tie Which Binds Blood to Blood’: Kinship and Nationalism in the Texas Borderlands, 1821-1841,” Western History Association Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon, October 30, 2021
2021 “Looking like the State: Local Military Mobilization and Nation-States in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.-Mexico Borderlands” part of “‘Blood Talk’: Military Operations as Instruments of Policy in the Gray Zone between War and Peace,” Roundtable Panel, Society for Military History Annual Meeting, Norfolk, Virginia, May 23, 2021 (Delayed from 2020 and conducted remotely due to COVID-19)
2019 “Expansionist Domesticity and Colonial Violence in Texas, 1820-1880,” Part of “An Unholy Union of West and South: A Pre-Circulated Papers Workshop,” Western History Association Annual Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada, October 19, 2019
2019 “Tejano Volunteer Military Service and Nation-State Formation in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands, 1836-1877,” Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians Annual Conference, University of Edinburgh, UK, October 13, 2019
2019 “Gendered Violence and the Nation-as-Family in the U.S.-Mexico War,” Society for Military History Annual Meeting, Columbus, Ohio, May 10, 2019
2018 “Spies, Seducers, and Shifting Lines: National Loyalties in the Occupied U.S.-Mexican Borderlands,” Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting, San Marcos, Texas, March 2018
2017 “‘As It Is Waged by Savage Tribes Between One Another’: Rendering Violence, Race, and Nation in the U.S.-Mexican War,” American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Denver, Colorado, January 2016
2014 “‘Direful Vengeance’: A U.S.-Mexican War Massacre and the Culture of Collective Violence in Nineteenth-Century North America,” The Violence of War: Experiences and Images of Conflict, University College, London, June 2014
2013 “The Agua Nueva Massacre: Violence, Race, and the Power of Collective Memory,” Northern Illinois University History Graduate Student Association Conference, DeKalb, Illinois, November 2013