Student Historian

Albert Rodriguez is a doctoral candidate in U.S. history from the 1850s to 1965 at the University of Houston.  His specific area of study is Black/Brown relations on the South Texas Borderlands and the West with an emphasis on gender and identity formation. Simply put he seeks to understand how Blacks and ethnic Mexicans got along or did not. His research interests include Chicana, Latino, African American, BlacXican history, race/ethnicity, Gender, and Queer Theory. His dissertation “The Making of the Modern Lower Rio Grande Valley: Situating and Reframing Race, Class and Ethnicity in Urbanizing South Texas, 1928-1965” use hybridity and transculturation to analyze Blacks and ethnic Mexicans on the border and try to understand the divisions between both ethnic groups. The purpose of the project is to Blacken the Borderlands and move South Texas into the West. By Blacken the Borderlands he means that most of the scholarship based in the South Texas Borderlands and even throughout the Borderlands are essentially Anglo/Mexican/Mexican American discourses. Rodriquez received a BA and MA in History from the University of Texas Pan American in Edinburg, Texas.

Border Love on the Rio Grande: African American Men and Latinas in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas (1850-1940)

The area of South Texas known as the Lower Rio Grande Valley became in the period between the U.S. Civil War and World War I one of the few regions south of the Mason-Dixon Line where racial miscegenation laws were frequently challenged.  As a consequence … Read MoreBorder Love on the Rio Grande: African American Men and Latinas in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas (1850-1940)