2022 History Talks
6th Annual Conference
“Rethinking Borders: Identities, Cultures, and Ideas”
Friday, February 25, 2022
9 a.m. - noon
via Zoom
San Jacinto College North
5800 Uvalde Road
Houston, Texas 77049
Keynote Address:
Dr. Kathleen DuVal – The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
Kathleen DuVal is a Bowman & Gordon Gray Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American history. Her research focuses on how various Native American, European, and African people interacted from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Her most recent book, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, won multiple awards for its rich retelling of the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by enslaved people, Native Americans, and women living on Florida’s Gulf coast. DuVal has also won the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“Borderlands of the American Revolution”
Printable Flyer (PDF)
Invited Speakers
Dr. Jessica Ordaz – UC Boulder – Jessica.ordaz@colorado.edu - website
“Hauntings and Liminal Punishments: The Incarceration of Migrants in California’s Imperial Valley”
Jessica Ordaz is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her doctorate from the University of California Davis in American History. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Ordaz was the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, which focused on comparative racial capitalism. Her first book, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, was released in March 2021. Her second project will explore the multifaceted history of veganism and plant based foods throughout the Americas, focusing on colonization, food politics, and social justice. This research will illuminate the wider and transnational history of Latinx veganism and how communities of color have engaged with questions of animal, human, and plant relations for centuries. Ordaz is also the Veggie Mijxs Denver Metro Co-organizer. The goal of the collective is to center women, non-binary, femmes, and trans BIPOC while providing a safe place for folks to explore decolonization and plant based food justice. Expanding upon her interest in intersectional veganism, Ordaz has recently co-founded Brujeria Veganx, a podcast that de-centers whiteness in veganism and focuses on ancestral healing and the magic of plants.
Dr. Omar Valerio-Jiménez – UTSA – omar.valerio-jimenez@utsa.edu - website
“Collective Memories of the U.S.-Mexico War”
Omar Valerio-Jiménez is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, to working-class parents, and grew up in Taft, Corpus Christi, and Edinburg, Texas. After graduating from MIT, he worked as an engineer for five years before attending UCLA, where he obtained his master’s and doctorate degrees in United States history. He has taught courses on borderlands, Latinas/os, immigration, race/ethnicity, and the American West at universities in California, Iowa, New York, and Texas. His articles and essays focus on Chicana/o history, gender, comparative racializations, political economy, and Latina/o studies. In addition to publishing articles in the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, Estudios Mexicanos/Mexican Studies, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and the Annals of Iowa, he has written anthology chapters on Tejanos in the U.S. Civil War, border corridos, Spanish-Mexican women, U.S.-Mexico borderlands culture, the U.S.-Mexico War, and immigration. Valerio-Jiménez is author of River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Duke University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Major Problems in Latina/o History (Cengage, 2014) and of The Latina/o Midwest Reader (University of Illinois Press, 2017).
Dr. Alberto Rodriguez – TAMU Kingsville – alberto.rodriguez2@tamuk.edu - website
"The African Diaspora on the US/Mexican Borderlands 1860-2021"
Alberto Rodriguez currently is an Associate Professor of History, managing editor of The Journal of South Texas History and Coordinator of Publications for the Institute for Architectural Engineering at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Rodriguez has published: Mexican American Baseball in the Alamo Region (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2015), “Ponte El Guante! Baseball on the US/Mexican Border: The Game and Community Building, 1920s-1970s,” The Journal of the West (Fall 2015), “Spanish Southern States Recording Expedition,” with Rene Torres, Journal of Texas Music History (Fall 2016) “Africana Aesthetics: Creating a Critical Black Narrative from Photographs in South Texas” in Africana Theory, Policy, and Leadership: A Social Science Analysis edited by James L. Conyers, Jr. (Transaction Publishers: 2016), and “Elena of Avalor and Mama Coco: Latina Sheroes and Knowledge Keepers” in Recasting the Disney Princess in an Era of New Media and Social Movements edited Shearon Roberts, (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2020). His upcoming projects Urban Borderlands: Anglos, Mexicans, and African Americans in South Texas 1929-1964 and Rancho La Union: A Transnational History of the Borderlands are a comparative multiethnic analysis of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, focusing on race relations in American and Borderland society with a specialty in Mexican American and African American encounters.
Rodriguez holds a PhD from the University of Houston in 20th Century American History with a minor in Women Studies and teaches courses on Latin@ History, Mexican American History, Chican@ History, Texas History and African American History
