Faculty

Research Overview

I am an interdisciplinary historian of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality with a focus on Native American
and Chicanx history in the American West and U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

I am currently working on a book titled Traces of Intimacy: Native Americans and Mexican Americans in the
Sierra Borderlands that provides a relational examination of Native American and Mexican American
racialization in 19th and 20th century California and Nevada. Rather than focus on the history of one group
or the other, this book asks what we might learn if we examine moments of connection between these
groups, moments that include both connections in literature and other forms of cultural expression as well
as the everyday reality of Native Americans and Mexican Americans living side-by-side as friends,
neighbors, lovers, and rivals. It reveals that members of both groups have had to continually negotiate their
perceived racial relationship to the other in order to gain political rights and hold onto land and other
resources. Ultimately, it tells a new story about how both groups have had to navigate larger structures of
race to carve out livable lives.

I like to take an interdisciplinary approach to history in both my research and teaching by using literature,
film, music, and popular culture as historical documents that reveal aspects of American cultural thought.
My areas of interest include Native American and Indigenous history; Mexican American, Chicanx, and
Latinx history; American studies; LGBTQ history; women of color feminisms and queer of color critique; and
critical race and ethnic studies.

Selected Publications

• "Dividing the Indian Race: Manhood and Native-Mexican Relationality in the Works of John Rollin Ridge,"
  Ethnic Studies Review 47.1 (Spring 2024).
• "A (Mexican) Native American Rock Band: Redbone, Racial Legibility, and Native-Chicanx Intimacy,"
  American Studies 61.1 (April 2022).