Co-Organizers


Co-Organizer: Sonia Hernández

Sonia Hernández, a native of Hidalgo, Texas, received the Ph.D in Latin American History from the University of Houston in 2006. A Chancellor EDGES Fellow at Texas A&M University and former UT Board of Regents Scholar, Dr. Hernández specializes in the intersections of gender and labor in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, Chicana/o history, and Modern Mexico; she worked as an assistant and associate professor of History at the University of Texas-Pan American before moving to College Station. She is currently an Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She has published in Spanish and English; her book, Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2014) received the Sara A. Whaley Book Prize (National Women’s Studies Association and the Liz Carpenter Award (Texas State Historical Association), among others awards.  A Spanish translation of this book was published as Mujeres, tabajo y región fronteriza (Tamaulipas: ITCA; Mexico City: INEHRM, 2017). Dr. Hernández’s book (University of Illinois Press, Fall 2021), For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938 examines a transnational network of labor activists comprised of women such as Caritina Piña from the port of Tampico who used the language of anarcho-syndicalism to promote women’s rights. Her article based on this book, “Revisiting Mexican(a) Labor History through Feminismo Transfronterista: From Tampico to Texas and Beyond, 1910-1940” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Transnational Feminism Special Issue, vol. 36, no. 3 (2015), earned the Outstanding Article Award from the LASA (Latin American Studies Association) Latino/a Section. Funded by a  Fulbright Garcia-Robles grant, Hernández is working on her current book project, “Por un compatriota: Transnational Networks, State Violence, and the Case of Gregorio Cortez, 1900-1920″ which re-visits the near-lynching attempt of Cortez in 1901 from a gendered, transnational, and multi-national archival perspective. She is a founding member of Refusing To Forget and collaborated with this team on the award-winning museum exhibit “Life & Death on the Border, 1910-1920.”  soniah@tamu.edu


Co-Organizer: John González

From the border town of Brownsville, Texas, John Morán González attended Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude with an A.B. in English literature in 1988. At Stanford University, he earned an M.A. degree in 1991, and a Ph.D. in 1998, both in English and American literature. He teaches as a Professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently serves as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and on the Advisory Board of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project. He has published in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Aztlán, Western American Literature, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. He is the author of two books: Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican-American Literature (2009), and The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels (2010). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature (2016). He is co-editor (with Laura Lomas) of The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature (2018). In addition, he is a founding member of Refusing to Forget, a public history project dedicated to critically memorializing state violence in the South Texas borderlands, 1910-1920. jmgonzal@utexas.edu