Pronounsshe, her, her, hers, herself

Department/College/UnitHumanities Division

TitleAssociate Professor

AffiliationFaculty

Other UCSC Campus AffiliationDolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Kresge College
Merrill College
Stevenson College

Primary Office LocationHumanities Building 1
542

Office HoursSpring 2024--Weds. By appointment via Zoom; email in advance to set up Zoom meeting at your convenience.

Mail StopHumanities Academic Services

Biography, Education and Training

Grace Peña Delgado is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a historian of borderlands and migration in nineteenth and twentieth-century North American. She is the author of Making the Chinese American: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the US-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: 2012), distinguished as a CHOICE Academic Title. Delgado is also co-author of Latino Immigrants in the United States (Polity: 2011) Professor Delgado has also published numerous articles in the Journal of Social History, Journal of American History, and Western Historical Quarterly, where her piece, “Border Control and Sexual Policing” received numerous best article awards. She is currently completing two books: States Against Sex: Morality and Migration in the Policing of America's Borderlands; and To Open Our Borders: America's New Conversation About Immigration.

Delgado participates on the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (UK) Project on Trafficking, Smuggling and Illicit Migration in Historical and Gendered Perspective at Cambridge University and also collaborates with Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition working group on Modern Day Slavery. In addition to her research, Delgado has received an Excellence in Teaching Award from UCSC’s Academic Senate and is co-lead administrator of UCSC’s Dissertation Proposal Development Program with the Mellon-SSRC Foundation. Delgado received her Ph.D. from UCLA in American History. 

Summary of Expertise

North American Borderlands (Canada-U.S.-Mexico)

Immigration--Mexican, Asian

Gender and Sexuality 

Race and Nationalism

Chinese in Mexico

Research Interests

North American border-making processes
Chinese in the Americas
Sexuality and Morals Policing
Diasporas and Transnationalism
Nationalism

Teaching Interests

U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Chicano/a History
Latino American History
Nationalism
Asian and Latino Immigration

Awards, Honors and Grants

UCSC, Academic Senate, recipient, Excellence in Teaching Award

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Exclusion, and Localism in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford University Press: 2012) was distinguished as a CHOICE Academic Title.

"Border Control and Sexual Policing: White Slavery and Prostitution along the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1903-1910," Western Historical Quarterly (Summer 2012): 157-178, has won four awards for outstanding scholarly article:

Oscar O. Winther Award (2012) -- best article published in the Western Historical Quarterly in that year
Judith Lee Ridge Award (2012) -- best article in history published by a member of the Western Association of Women Historians
Jensen-Miller Award (2013) -- best article in the field of women and gender in the North American West
Bolton-Cutter Award (2013) -- best article on Spanish Borderlands history

Selected Publications

• 2012 - Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford University Press)
• 2012 - Latino Immigrants in the United States (Polity Press, Cambridge, England)
• 2011 - “Neighbors by Nature: Relationships, Border Crossings, and Transnational Communities in the Chinese Exclusion Era,” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 3: 401 - 429.
• 2004 - “At Exclusion’s Southern Gate: Changing Categories of Race and Class among Chinese Fronterizos, 1882 - 1904” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping the History of the U.S.-Mexico Border, eds. Samuel J. Truett and Elliot Young, Duke University Press, 183-208.