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Research
Omar Valerio-Jiménez joined the History Department in 2006. He is currently completing his first book, Rio Grande Crossings: Identity and Nation along the Mexico-Texas Border, 1749-1890 (under contract with Duke University Press), which combines his research interests in the histories of Chicana/os, the American West, and borderlands. The book explores state formation and cultural change along the Mexico-United States border during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It traces changes in ethnicity, citizenship, and gender relations among borderland residents as jurisdiction over the area passed from native peoples to Spain, Mexico, and finally the United States. His research is based on Spanish- and English-language archives in each of these countries.
His published work has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Estudios Mexicanos/Mexican Studies, Pacific Historical Review, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, and Southwestern Historical Quarterly. He has also contributed chapters on Latinos, the American West, and the Spanish borderlands to various anthology collections including A Companion to California History, America on the World Stage, Latinas in the United States, and TheAtlas of the U.S. and Canadian Environmental History.
He has begun work on a study of Latinos in early twentieth-century Iowa that explores acculturation, labor, and gender relations. His longer-term project is a transnational study of the U.S.-Mexican War that examines memory, identity, and nationalism. His research and writing has been funded by the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, the Newberry Library, the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Valerio-Jiménez received his MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to becoming a historian, he worked as an electrical engineer for five years after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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