Biography

Leslie Torres is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of History. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in History at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley in 2022 and her Master of Arts in History at Texas A&M University in 2024. Torres’s Master’s thesis, entitled, “Challenging ‘Bad Sons of Uncle Sam’: Ethnic Mexican Mobilization and Acts of Resistance in Early 20th Century Texas,” uncovered the role of ethnic Mexicans in pursuit of civil and racial justice, spanning from the 1850s to the 1920s within the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

Torres’s dissertation, tentatively titled, “‘Can’t Keep Good Girls Down’: Tejana Feminist Action in the Early 20th Century,” will continue this work by analyzing outsider-perceived and self-identified racial categorization, women’s clubs, transborder experiences, American/Mexican nationalism, and the impact of segregation and racial violence on community mobilization.

Torres is also a Crossing Latinidades pre-doctoral fellow with the University of Illinois Chicago and the graduate student convener for the Glasscock Center-sponsored Immigration, Migration, and Ethnicity Working Group.