Humanities Division
Social Sciences Division
Professor
Faculty
Latin American & Latino Studies
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Humanities Building 1
636
Fall 2025: on sabbatical through December; please email me
Humanities Academic Services
My broad zone of interest is the Americas, both before and after the fateful Indigenous-European contact of 1492. I study how written language conveys and confers power in the world. Sometimes that power shows up within a frame that people call “literature” (its definition is shifty); sometimes it is expressed as a recorded utterance; sometimes it sits quietly within a seemingly mundane note or glyph. The material forms by which writing is organized and distributed into things—books, newspapers, documents—often tell as much as the content. I’m especially interested in the evolutions of language, from creolization to bi- and translingualism to the theory and practice of translation. These changes have arisen, in the Americas, from the violence of colonial dispossession and the forced movement of peoples away from their homelands, justified and organized through racial and religious ideologies.
These concerns unite my two seemingly distant research and teaching fields: on the one hand, the histories of the sixteenth to nineteenth-century Americas, and on the other the present-day experiences of Latine/x/a/o people in the US. For recent examples from among my two books and 40+ articles and edited works, see the Publications list.
I'm currently engaged in two book projects. One, California Before America, centers the Pacific coast as a space of human experience prior to--and outside the lens of--the U.S. state carved out in 1850. The other is a critical edition and translation of the first Latino novel, published in Spanish in New Orleans in 1848 by the Florida-born EJ Gómez. Titled Un matrimonio como hay muchos, this book will be published by Editorial Calambur in Spain in late 2026 and made available to readers for the first time in a century.
A bit about me. I was born in California to a Mexican and German-American family, the first in my family to graduate from college. I received a BA in History from Swarthmore College and went on to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale. My first academic position was at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, and I came to UC Santa Cruz in 1996. I have taught thousands of undergraduate students since, in courses large and small that I am constantly reinventing and remixing. I have also mentored dozens of graduate students through the MA and PhD programs at UCSC and elsewhere.
Please see the "Biography" and "Publications" columns.
See "Courses Taught."
BOOKS
Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas. Harvard University Press, 2022. This book has won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award for Best Book in the history of the Americas post-1492; the Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership, and Publishing from SHARP; the Early American Literature Book Award (2020-2023); and the John Winthrop Award in Early New England History from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.
Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton University Press, Translation/Transnation series, 2002. Honorable Mention, John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book in American Studies, American Studies Association, 2002.
SELECTED ESSAYS IN REFEREED JOURNALS AND COLLECTIONS
"List, Assemblage, Interruption: Migrant Literature Against Story." History and Theory 64:3 (Sept 2025).
"AA's Alphabet: Desiring Letterforms in Alfred Arteaga's 'Sexo," Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 49:2 (Fall 2024), dossier on Arteaga edited by Richard T. Rodriguez and David Lloyd. Acccompanied by my translation of the poem "Sexo."
"California Before America: Tilting Eighteenth-Century Studies Toward the Pacific," forthcoming in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 2026
"Lanuza, Mendía, & Co. and the Unfinished Business of Spanish-Language Bibliography," Early American Literature, 2023.
“Maritime Pedagogies: Or, How Much Spanish Did Melville Know?" Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 2021.
“Before Latinx: New Orleans as a Center of Spanish-Language Literary Culture.” In New Orleans: The Literary History, ed. T.R. Johnson. Cambridge UP 2019.
“Past Americana.” ELH: English Literary History. Summer 2019, vol. 86:2.
"Transamerican New Orleans: From the Spanish Period to Post-Katrina,” Cambridge History of Latino/a Literature, eds. John Morán González and Laura Lomas, 2018.
“’Poor Eliza’ On the Border.” “Forum: Afterlives of Nineteenth-Century Racism.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 6:1 (spring 2018), 182-189.
“Unsettlers and Speculators,” PMLA 131:3 (May 2016), 743-751.
“The Errant Latino: Irisarri, Central Americanness, and Migration’s Intention,” The Latino Nineteenth Century, eds. Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán (NYU Press, 2016), 20-48.
“Alien Speech, Incorporated: On the Cultural History of Spanish in the U.S.” American Literary History 25:1 (spring 2013), 18-32.
“Authors, Readers, and the Mediations of Print Culture.” The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, eds. Suzanne Bost and Frances Aparicio (Routledge, 2012), 485-494.
“What Was Latino Literature?” PMLA 127:2 (March 2012), 335-341.
“Mexican/American: The Making of Borderlands Print Culture,” US Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920, ed. Christine Bold (Oxford UP, History of Popular Print Culture series, 2011), 457-476.
“Tracking the First Latino Novel: Un matrimonio como hay muchos (1849) and Transnational Print Culture,” in Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction, ed. Patricia Okker (Routledge, 2011), 36-63.
“Worlding America: The Hemispheric Text-Network” in Robert Levine and Caroline S. Levander, eds., The Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies (Blackwell, 2011), 228-247. Co-authored with Susan Gillman.
"The Conquest of Tenochtitlán" and "Richard Henry Dana in California," in A New Literary History of America, gen. eds. Greil Marcus, Werner Sollors, Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press (2009). I served on the Editorial Board for this volume.
“Maria Gowen Brooks, In and Out of the Poe Circle,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 54 (fall 2008), 75-109.
“Walt Whitman, Latino Poet,” in Walt Whitman: Where the Future Becomes Present, eds. David Haven Blake and Michael Robertson (University of Iowa Press - Iowa Whitman Series, 2008), 151-176.
“The Cafetal of María del Occidente and the Anglo-American Race for Cuba,” in The Traffic in Poems: Anglo-American Poetry in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace, ed. Meredith McGill (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 37-62.
“The Once and Future Latino: Notes toward a Literary History todavía por llegar,” in Contemporary Latino/a Literary Criticism, eds. Lyn DiIoria Sandín and Richard Pérez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 115-142.
“The Mercurial Space of ‘Central’ America: New Orleans, Honduras, and the Writing of the Banana Republic,” in Hemispheric American Studies, eds. Caroline Levander and Robert S. Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 140-165.
“America,” in Keywords of American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York University Press, 2007; revised for second edition, 2014 and third edition, 2020).
“The Gulf of Mexico System and the ‘Latinness’ of New Orleans,” American Literary History 18:4 (Fall 2006), 468-495.
“Other Languages, Other Americas,” in The Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865, ed. Shirley Samuels. New York: Blackwell Press, 2004.
“Translation: A Key(word) into the Language of America(nists),” American Literary History 16:1 (Winter 2004), 85-92.
“Utopía Latina: The Ordinary Seaman in Extraordinary Times.” Modern Fiction Studies 49:1 (Spring 2003), 54-83.
EDITORIAL and COLLABORATIVE WORK
Introduction: "Embodying Memory: A Dossier on the Future of Archival Research and Community Praxis with the Latinx Past Working Group," Pasados 2:2 (Fall 2025).
The Spanish Americas. Special issue of Early American Literature, co-edited with Rodrigo Lazo and with a co-written Introduction. Fall 2018, 58:3.
A New Literary History of America. Eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Editorial Board member and contributor (“1521: Mexico in America,” “1836: Richard Henry Dana, Jr."). Harvard University Press, 2009.
I am currently collaborating, with ten other feminist scholars in Black/Indigenous/Latinx history, on the writing of a textbook on speculative history titled Archival Fragments, Experimental Methods.
