Led by: Prof. Sonia Hernández (Texas A&M University)
Course Number: AMHI 683
Semesters: Fall 2025
Image: Warren K. Leffler, US immigration officer watches as car enters El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juárez, November 13, 1964 (Library of Congress)
The History of the US-Mexican Borderlands, 1848–2000
The History of the US-Mexican Borderlands, 1848–2000
Course Description
In many ways, the US-Mexican borderlands exemplify how the nation-state can both be transgressed and upheld with complex daily negotiations in between. Since the drawing of this geopolitical border in 1848, the US-Mexican border has been the site of rich life, diverse flora and fauna, military encounters, and cultural encounters and clashes. Students will learn about the role and process of border-making; the emergence of the nation-state through studying its periphery; border identities; state-sanctioned and non-state-sanctioned violence; the way gender, labor, race, ethnicity, and space have been defined and contested in the borderlands; and other themes associated with the US-Mexican borderlands.
Please note that the required books listed under course readings are finalized, but other aspects of the course syllabus are subject to change. We receive an affiliate commission from every purchase made through the Bookshop.org links provided. Thank you for supporting our programs!
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About the Scholar
Sonia Hernández, George T. & Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts II and Professor of History, Texas A&M University
Sonia Hernández is the George T. & Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts II and professor of history at Texas A&M University. She specializes in the intersections of gender and labor in the US-Mexican borderlands, Chicana/o history, and modern Mexico. She is co-founder of the award-winning public history project Refusing to Forget (refusingtoforget.org). Hernández’s first book, Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2014), earned three book prizes and For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1938 (University of Illinois Press, 2021) earned the Philip Taft Book Prize. Funded by a Fulbright García-Robles Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Hernández is at work on a book project recovering the gendered, racial, and transnational dimensions of the 1901 lynching attempt of the migrant cowboy Gregorio Cortez.
The views expressed in the course descriptions and lectures are those of the lead scholars.