Laura Hooton is an Assistant Professor in the Arnoldo de León Department of History at Angelo State University. She also taught for three years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where she founded the Black History Project. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in history with an interdisciplinary emphasis in Black Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and her B.A. in history from UC San Diego. Her teaching and research focuses on the intersection of Black studies, African American history, U.S.-Mexico borderlands history, social movements, immigration and migration, and comparative race and ethnicity in the American West. She is currently working on a monograph about Little Liberia, and African American community in Baja California, under contract with University of Oklahoma Press in the Race and Culture in the American West series. She is the co-author of the revised edition of Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity with Paul Spickard and Francisco Beltrán (Routledge, 2022). Her work also appears in Farming Across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West and California History.