Sonia Hernandez

Dr. Sonia Hernández received the Ph.D in Latin American History from the University of Houston in 2006. She 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, OAH, 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, 2021) 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 transnational dimensions of the 1901 lynching attempt of the migrant vaquero Gregorio Cortez.

Areas of Speciality

• U.S.-Mexican Borderlands
• Chicana/o
• Gender and Labor
• Modern Mexico