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Sonia Hernandez

Sonia Hernandez headshot
Graduate Placement Director
Professor
Areas of Speciality
  • U.S.-Mexican Borderlands
  • Chicana/o
  • Gender and Labor
  • Modern Mexico
Contact
  • (979) 845-7151
  • soniah@tamu.edu
  • Melbern G. Glasscock Building, 303B
Professional Links
Education
Ph.D., University of Houston 2006

Research Interests

Sonia Hernandez, a native of the Rio Grande Valley, received the Ph.D from the University of Houston in 2006. Dr. Hernandez specializes in the intersections of gender and labor in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, Chicana/o history, and Modern Mexico. She is co-founder of the AHA and WHA award-winning public history project, Refusing to Forget (refusingtoforget.org). She has published in Spanish and English; her first book, Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2014), earned three book prizes and was translated and published by the INHERM (Mexico City) and ITCA (Tamaulipas) in 2017. Her book “For a Just and Better World”: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938 (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming) recovers the history of an anarcho-syndicalist network anchored in the Gulf of Mexico region with links to other parts of the globe; promoting ideas about worker dignity, communities without national borders, and revolutionary motherhood, women and their male colleagues forged a strong transnational alliance that left an indelible mark on the US-Mexican borderlands, notwithstanding gender inequalities.  Funded by a Fulbright García-Robles Fellowship and more recently, a Chancellor’s EDGES Fellowship, Hernandez is at work on a book project recovering the gendered, racial, and norteño historical dimensions of the 1901 near-lynching attempt of the vaquero Gregorio Cortez.

Publications

  • For a Just and Better World: Engendering Anarchism in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900-1938 (University of Illinois Press, 2021)
  • Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border; Sonia Hernández and John Morán González, eds. (University of Texas Press, 2021)
  • Working Women into the Borderlands (Texas A&M University Press, 2014)